Proposal for a Tax Rate Swap to Shield Against the Gap Between Statutory and Effective Tax Rates-A Boost for Entrepreneurship and a Motive for New Investments

This paper focuses on a common problem for entrepreneurs and investors:the uncertainty around the actual tax rate,which is the percent of net income that a corporation pays in taxes.This uncertainty results from a difference(i.e.,a gap)between the statutory and the effective tax rate,which is the actual tax rate.This gap results from the legal framework which provides that certain types of incomes and expenses are not considered income.This gap causes significant uncertainty and may hinder entrepreneurship.This paper studies this gap in seven OECD countries(Austria,Canada,France,Germany,Italy,UK,and USA)and Brazil.We selected the 10 top-listed companies of each country and calculated the gaps for the period 2016-2019.Our findings proved that these gaps are unstable and may differ between companies of the same country and between countries.In addition,gaps of specific companies may change over time.The key outcome of this paper is the proposal of a new derivative tax rate swap.Using this derivative,governments will be able to eliminate the gap of specific companies,attract new investment,and increase entrepreneurship.

Assessing the Relationship of Corporate Integrity Practices With Accountability of Malaysian Statutory Bodies

Accountability is seen as an organisational performance across private and public sector,including statutory bodies.Yet,does accountability prove instilled in part of integrity practices,especially in less mentioned sector-statutory bodies?This study aims to evaluate the relationship of corporate integrity practices on accountability of Malaysian statutory bodies through questionnaire survey distribution.Based on 194 responses received from top management of Malaysian statutory bodies,it is proven that corporate integrity practices have a positive and significant relationship with accountability.Therefore,statutory bodies are recommended to exercise and implement corporate integrity practices by setting up integrity department and appointing corporate integrity officers.Hence,by upholding corporate integrity practices,it leads to the achievement of accountability of statutory bodies organisations.

China's Statutory Provisions on Ensuring Human Rights

China has since 1978 promulgated more than 440 laws and regulations and more than 40 of them contain clear-cut provisions on human rights. Political right Political right is the most important human rights. China’s Constitution provides that the Chinese citizens enjoy freedom of speech, press, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.

Acquisition of hyponymy relations for agricultural terms from a Japanese statutory corpus

This paper,which aims to increment the vocabulary of an existing thesaurus using hyponymy relations,focuses on an agricultural thesaurus called AGROVOC.Our main goal is to acquire AGROVOC-qualified candidates from the hyponymy relations of legal texts and tables.We propose a pattern-based approach to hyponymy relation acquisition.Our experimental result showed that 222 and 868 candidates are extracted from statutory sentences with 67.1%precision and tables with 37.0%precision,respectively.

Survival and comorbidities in lung cancer patients:Evidence from administrative claims data in Germany

Lung cancer is the most common cancer type worldwide and has the highest and second highest mortality rate for men and women respectively in Germany.Yet,the role of comorbid illnesses in lung cancer patient prognosis is still debated.We analyzed administrative claims data from one of the largest statutory health insurance(SHI)funds in Germany,covering close to 9 million people(11%of the national population);observation period was from 2005 to 2019.Lung cancer patients and their concomitant diseases were identified by ICD-10-GM codes.Comorbidities were classified according to the Charlson Comorbidity Index(CCI).Incidence,comorbidity prevalence and survival are estimated considering sex,age at diagnosis,and place of residence.Kaplan Meier curves with 95%confidence intervals were built in relation to common comorbidities.We identified 70,698 lung cancer incident cases in the sample.Incidence and survival figures are comparable to official statistics in Germany.Most prevalent comorbidities are chronic obstructive pulmonary disease(COPD)(36.7%),followed by peripheral vascular disease(PVD)(18.7%),diabetes without chronic complications(17.4%),congestive heart failure(CHF)(16.5%)and renal disease(14.7%).Relative to overall survival,lung cancer patients with CHF,cerebrovascular disease(CEVD)and renal disease are associated with largest drops in survival probabilities(9%or higher),while those with PVD and diabetes without chronic complications with moderate drops(7%or lower).The study showed a negative association between survival and most common comorbidities among lung cancer patients,based on a large sample for Germany.Further research needs to explore the individual effect of comorbidities disentangled from that of other patient characteristics such as cancer stage and histology.

Institutions and water governance in the Okavango Delta, Botswana

The goals of Integrated Water Resources Management (IWRM) can be achieved by embracing the principles of distributive governance, which places both customary and statutory water institutions on the same pedestal in the governance of water resources. As culture and traditions constitute intangible aspects of water resources management in rural Africa, the recognition of water governance systems grounded in local norms, which correspond better with the aspirations of local water users as against the expert-knowledge systems is desirable. Following the introduction of the statutory institutions in postcolonial Africa, customary institutions, which were once effective in regulating water resources became relegated to the background in those countries, including Botswana . Adopting a critical literature review approach, this article employs the concept of legal pluralism to analyze the institutional factors that create the disharmony between cultural and statutory water governance and management institutions. Findings indicate that water has been abstracted from its social nature and transformed into a tradable economic good. Ultimately, the local meanings and images encoded in water as a nature-given resource are overlooked, thus generating conflicts in water governance. The paper recommends the adoptions of legal pluralism under which water institutions need to embrace both customary and statutory institutions.

Correlates of Anogenital Injuries in Adolescent Females

Objective: We sought to investigate correlates of anogenital injuries (AGIs) in adolescents. Methods: Our retrospective study included sexually assaulted female patients aged 12 to 17 reporting attempted or completed vaginal or anal penetration between 2002 and 2011. Forensic nurses performed anogenital examinations using colposcopy, digital macrovisualization, and toluidine blue dye application. We reviewed case files for AGIs and demographic and sexual assault characteristics. Results: Of the 1961 sexual assault examinations that met our inclusion criteria, 59.6% displayed AGIs. Our logistic regression model using 1752 examinations found the following variables associated with less injury: intercourse within 5 days prior to assault (OR 0.72, 95% CI = 0.55 to 0.95);post-coital interval of 49-72 (OR 0.50, 95% CI = 0.36 to 0.71), 73-96 (OR 0.41, 95% CI = 0.25 to 0.68), and 97-120 hours (OR 0.26, 95% CI = 0.13 to 0.51). Only lack of prior sexual experience was associated with increased injury (OR 2.01, 95% CI = 1.58 to 2.55). Conclusions: In our adolescent patient population, examination findings of AGIs correlate with variables related to time from assault and prior sexual experience.

Enhancing Public Confidence in Audit Reports of Listed Insurance Companies in Nigeria:Forensic Audit Perspective

The auditor’s report is the end-product of an audit;its importance to the business community cannot be overemphasized.It is the statutory confirmation that the accounts prepared by Management may be relied upon as true and fair.Public confidence in or lack thereof in auditor’s report is very critical to the very relevance of the audit practice.The purpose of this study is to examine how public confidence in auditor’s report may be enhanced with particular reference to audit report of listed insurance companies in Nigeria.Primary source of data was appropriately used.132 questionnaires were administered to Financial Advisers of 21 selected Stock Brokers and Accounting Firms operating at the floor of Nigeria Stock Exchange,Abuja,out of which 124 were filled and returned.Descriptive statistics of frequencies and percentages was used to analyse the responses from the respondents,while Pearson Product Moment Correlation was used to test hypotheses one and two while hypothesis three was examined using paired sampled t-test.The result of the study indicates that there is an inverse relationship between statutory audit and public confidence in audit report.It was found that forensic audits practice has a significant relationship with public confidence in audit report of listed insurance firms in Nigeria.The third hypothesis of the study shows that there is a significant difference between statutory audit practice and forensic audit practice in enhancing public confidence in audit report of listed insurance firms in Nigeria.It was concluded that public confidence in statutory audit report is on the decline following sudden collapse of firms that had unqualified audit report.It was recommended among others that the government should enact an act establishing forensic and investigative auditors in Nigeria separate from the existing accounting professional bodies since there is no public confidence on the audit report prepared by the existing accounting professional bodies again.By so doing,the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria will make forensic audit report mandatory for all organisations and in particular for the listed insurance firms in Nigeria,which will in turn restore the public confidence in audit report.

On the Criminal Responsibility of Buying Abducted Women or Children: The Human Dignity Perspective

Buying and selling abducted women or children are symmetrical crimes, but the “the same punishment for the same crime” is not applied. The focus of the criminal punishment for buying abducted women or children is not about increasing the statutory sentence, but strengthening judicial and law enforcement, to increase the prosecution rate and impose combined punishment for several crimes including the buying of abducted women or children and other subsequent crimes, so as to demonstrate the inevitability of criminal punishment. Human dignity is the core legal interest violated by the crime of buying abducted women or children. The specific legal interest is that humans are not for sale, which should be valued and protected independently in criminal law. This crime is a type of behavioral offense rather than a crime of circumstances. Under normal circumstances,neither the consent of the victim nor the goodwill of the purchaser excludes conviction of the crime. Compared with the crime of abducting and trafficking women or children, buying abducted women or children is not necessarily a serious crime, and the basic statutory punishment of less than three years is reasonable. However, it is possible to appropriately raise the sentence to less than five years in legislation.Where subsequent behaviors do not constitute a crime, they can be used as aggravating circumstances for the crime, and an aggravated statutory sentence can be configured to connect with the statutory punishments for the crime of abducting and trafficking women or children.

“法定代表人”等相似词语译法辨析

"法定代表人"在各种法律文本中几乎无一例外被译为legal representative,虽然在法律条文中可以通过定义做到自洽,但为企业提供法律服务的人同样叫作legal representative,两个职能完全不同的人使用同一名称,必然引起混淆。经过反复查证,笔者认为可以把"法定代表人"译为statutory representative,必要时解释为the sole corporate representative designated by law。同时,建议把"法人代表"译为corporate representative,把另一语境中的"法定代理人"译为statutory agent。

How to Implement Urban Design in China?

With the focus on urban design projects for key urban areas, this paper reviews the evolution and practice of urban design in the United States, and analyzes two different development paths of urban design in China. By comparing specific urban design projects, it expounds similarities and differences between detailed control planning and urban design, hence putting forward recommendations for urban design implementation in terms of statutory status, implementation rules, and team building. The paper intends to clarify the stratified relationship between urban and rural planning and urban design, so as to avoid needless repetition and overlap of design, thereby enhancing the healthy development of the urban design discipline in China.

Re-understanding the Role of City Master Planning in the Spatial Planning System

Holding a dominant position in the spatial planning system at the city level, a city master plan should be able to guide both long-term strategies and short-term planning implementation, while taking into account both resource conservation and urban-rural development and coordinating multi-government power and interests of various stakeholders. In the future, city master planning should keep its advanced nature and must follow the principles of being people-oriented, paying equal attention to both development quality and quantity, promoting diversified development, and containing multiple driving forces for development.

RETHINKING CHINESE EVIDENCE THEORIES AND RECONSTRUCTING SYSTEM OF EVIDENCE： ＂A THREAD FOR THE PEARLS OF CHINESE EVIDENCE＂

This article analyses Chinese traditional evidence theories that have evolved over a long period of time, to explore which theory, between objectivity and relevancy, best represents the basic attribute and logical thread of evidence. These theories are considered in the context of issues arising in evidential adjudication, including： the ＂Mirror of Evidence,＂ truth, the probability of proof standard, the choice between a notion of pursuing 100-percent certainty in adjudication and that wrongful acquittals are better than wrongful convictions, and the statutory proof doctrine comparedwith the system of free proof. Finally, the article presents the framework of and methods for drafting provisions of procedural evidence of the People＇s Court.

Reflections on variability in the blood-breath ratio of ethanol and its importance when evidential breath-alcohol instruments are used in law enforcement

Variability in the blood-breath ratio(BBR)of alcohol is important,because it relates a mea-surement of the blood-alcohol concentration(BAC)with the co-existing breath-alcohol con-centration(BrAC).The BBR is also used to establish the statutory BrAC limit for driving from the existing statutory BAC limits in different countries.The in-vivo BBR depends on a host of analytical,sampling and physiological factors,including subject demographics,time after end of drinking(rising or falling BAC),the nature of the blood draw(whether venous or arterial)and the subject's breathing pattern prior to exhalation into the breath analyzer.The results from a controlled drinking study involving healthy volunteers(85 men and 15 women)from three ethnic groups(Caucasians,Hispanics and African Americans)were used to evaluate various factors influencing the BBR.Ethanol in breath was determined with a quantitative infrared analyzer(Intoxilyzer 8000)and BAC was determined by headspace gas chromatography(HS-GC).The BAC and BrAC were highly correlated(r = 0.948)and the BBR in the post-absorptive state was 2 382±119(mean ± SD).The BBR did not depend on gen-der(female:2 396±101 and male:2 380±123,P>0.05)nor on racial group(Caucasians 2 398±124,African Americans 2 344±119 and Hispanics 2 364±104,P>0.05).The BBR was lower in subjects with higher breath-and body-temperatures(P<0.05)and it also decreased with longer exhalation times into the breath-analyzer(P<0.001).In the post-absorptive state,none of the 100 subjects had a BBR of less than 2 100∶1.