The theoretical and practical advantages of the VAT have led to its adoption in some form or another by most countries and by many hundreds of subnational administrations worldwide. However, nowhere is VAT found without exemptions. Exemptions are arguably the most controversial feature of VAT...

The service provided by financial institutions such as banks is described as an "intermediary service", linking depositors with money to lend and borrowers seeking loan funds. Banks collect a fee for these services through the spread on interest they pay to depositors and charge to borrowers. At...

This paper proposes a multi-objective dynamic scheduling approach that combines three attributes based on a hybrid multiple attribute decision making (MADM) technique. With consideration of two kinds of uncertainties, three advanced attributes are specifically designed to optimize four key...

Based on the investigation into the rural labor brokers in Chongqing Municipality, the developmental momentum of rural labor brokers in Chongqing Municipality is introduced. The valid questionnaires show that the main factors which limit the development of rural labor brokers in Chongqing...

Residential energy consumption (REC) is the second largest energy use category (10%) in China and urban residents account for most of the REC. Understanding the underlying drivers of variations of urban REC thus helps to identify challenges and opportunities and provide advices for future policy...

We develop a political economy model of trade agreements following along the line of Grossman and Helpman (1995a) yet incorporating contracting costs, uncertainty and multiple policy instruments. We show that rent-seeking efforts do not affect tariff rates as they are offset by the substitution...

Semiconductor test scheduling problem is a variation of reentrant unrelated parallel machine problems considering multiple resource constraints, intricate {product, tester, kit, enabler assembly} eligibility constraints, sequence-dependant setup times, etc. A multi-step reinforcement learning...

This paper characterizes the solar energy literature from 1992 to 2011 using bibliometric techniques based on databases of the Science Citation Index and the Social Science Citation Index. Journal articles were the most frequently used document type representing 86.4% (6670) of the records. The...

Pan-Turkism is the nationalism political trend of thought in recent years, meanwhile, it also a kind of extreme nationalism movement related close with Turkey. In the long period of historical evolution, Pan-Turkism, Pan-Islamism, ultranationalism, and East-Turkistan interweave together with...