Major Revenues Research Articles

The Nature of Cross-Border Contraband Trade across the Main Route of Moyale - Hawassa

Globally and specifically in Africa, governments' major revenues, and the countries' peace and security, are being highly challenged by the very increasing nature of illegal and informal cross border trade. As a result, the issue of contraband is attracting both the academics and practitioners. It is with this reality that this study stood with the general objective of assessing the nature of cross-border contraband trade across the main route from Moyale (border town between Ethiopia and Kenya) to Hawassa (the capital of Ethiopian Southern region). To this end, the study has utilized exploratory and descriptive designs utilizing both primary and secondary data sources. As instruments of data collection Observation, Key informant interviews and review of organizational documents were utilized to feed the paper. In addition a total of 55 key informants were purposively targeted except contrabandists who were selected through snowball sampling. Moreover, in line with the design, a descriptive method of analyses has been utilized. Finally, the study indicated that contraband trade being carried out across the main route from Moyale to Hawasa takes different forms, and techniques of passing check points like bribing customs and security personnel, building extra hiding place (shag) in vehicles, passing stations via journeys in jungle and informal roads are most widely utilized. Moreover the dominant commodities smuggled are textile and foot wares and electronics. Hence, the authors recommend that synergy approach must be best utilized by multiple actors and concerned bodies to assess the causes and consequences of contraband trading and broader and comprehensive policy framework ought to be developed towards overcoming the problem.

Making data visualization more efficient and effective: a survey

Data visualization is crucial in today’s data-driven business world, which has been widely used for helping decision making that is closely related to major revenues of many industrial companies. However, due to the high demand of data processing w.r.t. the volume, velocity, and veracity of data, there is an emerging need for database experts to help for efficient and effective data visualization. In response to this demand, this article surveys techniques that make data visualization more efficient and effective. (1) Visualization specifications define how the users can specify their requirements for generating visualizations. (2) Efficient approaches for data visualization process the data and a given visualization specification, which then produce visualizations with the primary target to be efficient and scalable at an interactive speed. (3) Data visualization recommendation is to auto-complete an incomplete specification, or to discover more interesting visualizations based on a reference visualization.

Government and Nonprofits

Federal, state, and local governments are similar to nonprofits in that their labor inputs pay taxes, but they are otherwise tax exempt. Governments are involved in some activities special to them, for example, defense, police, and court systems, but many government activities overlap with those of nonprofits, for example, education, healthcare, research, and programs for the poor. Nonprofits sell some goods and services, for example, education, and health services, but many also get revenues from donations. Governments also sell some goods and services, but their major revenues are from taxes. Many citizens value government activities. Republicans like defense; democrats like social services. It is, however, puzzling that republicans and democrats alike typically go to great lengths to minimize their taxes. Donations to governments are rare. I offer an explanation.

Differentiated Government Control: Political Connections and Revenues to NGOs in China

This dissertation hypothesized a theory of differentiated government control that posits the strength of NGOs’ political connections is positively associated with their major revenues in authoritarian China. This dissertation quantitatively tested this theory using a sample of 2,021 foundations in China. The main findings are as follows. First, organizational legitimacy, i.e., nonprofit evaluation, tax exemption qualification, and pretax deduction qualification are positively associated with foundations’ donation income; higher degrees of political connections count only partially the more charitable donations; political connections potentially leverage the association between pretax deduction qualification and charitable donations in favor of politically connected foundations. Second, foundations’ political connections are partially positively associated with their income from government grants; issue area (meaning what foundation work on) is not significantly associated with government grants; among organizational legitimacy measures only nonprofit evaluation shows a positive relationship with government grants; however, nonprofit evaluation matters only for foundations with strong political connections. Third, different levels of political connections show different levels of association with both charitable donations and government grants that foundations received. Specifically, individual political connections are associated with neither source of revenues; organizational political connections remain associated with charitable donations and government grants as discussed above; the two levels of political connections do not interact; the insignificance of individual political connections may indicate the government’s retreat from despotic intervention of foundation operations. The findings in this dissertation suggest that the Chinese government has adapted its strategies to control the nonprofit sector through the use of more sophisticated measures than are generally acknowledged. To some extent, differentiated government control consolidates the recent research on the multidimensions of government-nonprofit relations in China.

Metropolitan optical packet bus-based networks: Packet bursting and emulation of TDM services

The volume of network traffic, notably of data traffic, grows continuously and tremendously during recent years with the appearance of new value-added services such as video on demand, interactive video conferencing, peer to peer data sharing, etc. Faced with this challenge, traditional circuit-switched networks become inappropriate and costly. On the other side, optical packet-switched networks, which support best data traffic thanks to their high flexibility, capacity, and cost-efficiency, appear the most appropriate candidate. To optimise the transmission efficiency of packets in optical networks, a new technology, Modified Packet Bursting (MPB), has been studied in the framework of a metropolitan optical packet bus-based network. Also, in order not to degrade the quality of classical circuit-switched Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) services, which still stay the major revenues of telecom operators today, Circuit Emulation Service (CES) on packet-switched networks has been investigated by main standard organizations. This paper presents the performance analysis of the above two technologies applied to a metropolitan optical packet bus-based network. It specially demonstrates the improvement of CES performance thanks to MPB features.

Longitudinal Effects of Impact Fees and Special Assessments on the Level of Capital Spending, Taxes, and Long-Term Debt in American Cities

This article examines whether the use of impact fees and special assessments affect the level of capital spending and two major own source revenues of local capital spending (taxes and long-term debt) by analyzing a panel of 695 American cities with populations over 20,000 during the time period of 1980—2000. Since impact fees and special assessments are heavily used in a growing community and because it covers less than half the costs of new development, the findings demonstrate that the private financing of public infrastructure (impact fees and special assessments) increases the level of local capital spending. It also leads to an increase in the level of long-term debt use. Although it provides partial tax relief, it is not a strong substitute for taxes. Thus, impact fees and special assessments are not a substitute for local capital spending. It is rather a supplemental revenue source to fund local capital infrastructure.

Rough set-based approach to rule generation and rule induction

During the last decade, databases have been growing rapidly in size and number as a result of rapid advances in database capacity and management techniques. This expansive growth in data and databases has caused a pressing need for the development of more powerful techniques to convert the vast pool of data into valuable information. For the purpose of strategic and decision-making, many companies and researchers have recognized mining useful information and knowledge from large databases as a key research topic and as an opportunity for major revenues and improving competitiveness. In this paper, we will explore a new rule generation algorithm (based on rough sets theory) that can generate a minimal set of rule reducts, and a rule generation and rule induction program (RGRIP) which can efficiently induce decision rules from conflicting information systems. All the methods will also be illustrated with numerical examples.

Standards media and methods

The global marketplace and advances in information technologies are leading to great changes in standards. These include growing reliance on international standards, new standards-development techniques, and new media and environments in which standards are expressed. Both general and project-specific information are being stored in and accessed from distributed, electronic, object-oriented databases. Standards available from general-purpose information systems will be capable of accessing and processing data to evaluate compliance with their provisions. Such standards will be convenient and efficient: input data will be accessed automatically from pertinent fields of the general and project-specific databases; results of evaluations will be recorded automatically in the project-specific database and used in decisions affecting design, construction or operation of constructed facilities. Major uses of standards will be associated with computer-aided systems and major revenues from uses of standards will accrue to systems developers and users. Standards-developing organizations should respond to this marketplace by themselves producing standards in the form of executable objects. Computer aids can assist in the formulation and expression of standards that are complete in coverage of the intended scope, consistent and unambiguous in their logic, and correct in reproducing the intent of the formulators.

Data mining: an overview from a database perspective

Mining information and knowledge from large databases has been recognized by many researchers as a key research topic in database systems and machine learning, and by many industrial companies as an important area with an opportunity of major revenues. Researchers in many different fields have shown great interest in data mining. Several emerging applications in information-providing services, such as data warehousing and online services over the Internet, also call for various data mining techniques to better understand user behavior, to improve the service provided and to increase business opportunities. In response to such a demand, this article provides a survey, from a database researcher's point of view, on the data mining techniques developed recently. A classification of the available data mining techniques is provided and a comparative study of such techniques is presented.