minimum wage, maximum unemployment

The Minimum Wage is now a controversial part of the political debate in the run-up to the General Election. Martin Summers, a research associate of the Institute of Economic Affairs, reviews the evidence of how the minimum wage has worked in other countries and concludes that the creation of unemployment is almost the least of the evils it causes.     

An Examination of Ethical Influences on the Work of Tax Practitioners

As a contribution to the continuing debate about tax practitioner ethics, this paper explores the main streams of Western ethical thought that are relevant to tax practitioners’ work, most typically deontology and consequentialism (although virtue ethics and distributive justice are also considered). It then goes on to consider the impact of such ethical influences on the professional ethical codes of conduct that govern tax practitioners’ work (with specific reference to the UK and Ireland), and attempts to unravel the complex work and ethical environment of the practice of tax in terms of tax compliance and tax avoidance. The paper then examines the prior studies on tax practitioners and ethics and the type of dilemmas that practitioners face in the context of their work. The paper proceeds to examine empirically the extent to which tax practitioners take a consequentialist versus a deontological approach in their reasoning about moral dilemmas. This is carried out by an innovative use of the Defining Issues Test.     

Fear and Loathing (of others): Race,Class and Contestation of Space in Washington,DC

Our article explores the cultural politics of public space and the placemaking politics of urban redevelopment in the Atlas District of Washington, DC, a popular commercial district undergoing rapid gentrification. The major questions we address are, how do race and class impact the ways public space is controlled and/or managed in the context of rapid changes in the built, economic and social environments of the neighborhood? What role do those narratives play in justifying changes in and management of public space? We focus on uses of public space and describe how various forms of power are linked to the control of space in the context of gentrification. Our analysis focuses on designated public space in the Atlas District—the Starburst Plaza. By analyzing everyday practices around community control at the Starburst Plaza, this case study focuses on the discrete methods by which the symbolic and material inequities promulgated by the neoliberal state are reconfigured through struggles to define and manage contested public spaces.     

Predicting total health care costs of medicaid recipients: An artificial neural systems approach

Although medical treatment costs have escalated beyond the reach of many Americans, a thorough total cost model is essential before implementing cost containment strategies. This study offers a prediction model of the total treatment cost for a Mississippi Medicaid patient. Artificial neural systems (ANS) are proposed as a methodology for the prediction of health care costs of postmenopausal women who are Medicaid recipients. The results of the neural networks along with traditional regression analysis are presented. Artificial neural systems overcome many of the problems associated with the estimation of this model, such as the identification of the appropriate functional form and dealing with both qualitative and quantitative aspects of these large claims databases. Neural networks are shown to provide superior forecasts. In addition preliminary results for the presentation of significance tests of individual causal variables using neural networks is presented.     

Using Payment Behaviour Data for Credit Risk Modelling

In this paper we evaluate payment scores in two contexts; that of predicting future payment behaviour and that of corporate failure prediction. The assessment of the ability and willingness of a firm to pay its creditors, and the likely timeliness of payments, are a major focus of both credit risk analysis (from the trade credit perspective) and government policy, although the latter issues have not been much studied in the academic literature. While failure prediction models are traditionally used as indicators of payment behaviour in the UK, payment behaviour prediction models are estimated and made available in the USA by the leading credit reporting agencies and the predictive abilities of such scores in the UK context are, therefore, worthy of consideration.We also consider the contribution that payment behaviour scores can make to predicting corporate failure. An important question is whether the availability of payment behaviour scores increases the overall information content of the credit report or merely re-packages information represented elsewhere. We find that payment behaviour data can be used to predict successfully future payment behaviour in a trade credit context, and can add incrementally to the predictivity of corporate failure models.     

A destination VAT for CIS trade

This paper was originally produced as a co-operative study between the Fiscal Affairs Department and the European II Department of the International Monetary Fund. It is intended for inclusion in a special issue on fiscal policy of the journal MOCT-MOST, Economic Policy in Transitional Economies (Kluwer Academic Publishers). The authors would like to thank Henri Lorie, of the European II Department, and John Crotty and James Walsh, of the Fiscal Affairs Department, for their extensive contributions to the analysis. They also wish to thank the numerous staff members of the two departments who made factual contributions to this effort.