Suchergebnisse

peer-reviewed ; This article aims to present and discuss a set of technical matters affecting the maintenance and sustainment cost of military transport aircraft (airlifters). An overview of the military aviation technical support system is provided,in conjunction with a high level discussion on the life cycle cost. Four technical support pillars are defined as part of this analysis: supply, restoration and upgrade, engineering and regulatory compliance. A focused discussion on airlift sustainment factors,based on past experience,is used to identify technical considerations that can be used for the evaluation of new aircraft. A number of technical considerations which are key for cost purposes are identified and mapped against the defined technical support pillars, related to engineering and technical support and airworthiness management aspects. Important practical technical considerations are identified, discussed and critiqued under an independent lens. This article can stimulate discussion of the maintenance and sustainment costs of airlifters, both within military aviation operators and the defence industry community but also within the civil aircraft maintenance industry

AbstractResearch universities rely heavily on external funding to advance knowledge and generate economic growth. In the USA, tens of billions of dollars are spent each year on research and development with the federal government contributing over half of these funds. Yet a decline in relative federal funding highlights the role of other funders and their varying contractual terms. Specifically, nonfederal funders provide lower recovery of indirect costs. Using project-level university-sponsored research administrative records from four institutions, we examine indirect cost recovery. We find significant variation in the amount of indirect funding recovered—both across and within funders, as well as to different academic fields within a university. The distribution of sponsors in the overall research funding portfolio also impacts indirect cost recovery. The recovery variation has important implications for the sustainability and cross-subsidization of the university research enterprise. Together, our results show where universities are under-recovering indirect costs.

OBJECTIVES: Obesity burdens families, governments, and companies with a variety of direct costs for healthcare, and also indirect costs in lower productivity and well-being. To measure these costs in a middle-income country with rapidly rising obesity rates, we conducted a systematic review of the literature on the direct and indirect costs of obesity in Brazil. METHODS: We searched for English and Portuguese language publications from 2004 to 2017 in EconLit, SciELO, NBER, PubMed, and Scopus. We included all studies that calculated the direct and indirect costs of obesity, except those that exclusively measured costs associated with bariatric surgery. No studies included were based on interventions. When studies calculated costs of obesity for a subset of the population, we extrapolated to the whole of Brazil, and all values were adjusted for inflation and expressed in 2017 prices. RESULTS: The initial search identified 811 abstracts, of which eight publications met our criteria and were included. Seven of them have direct costs, while only one assessed indirect costs of obesity. Total costs of obesity in Brazil ranged from USD 133.8 million to USD 6.3 billion per year. This wide variance was driven by the difference in methods employed as well as diseases considered. Medication and out-of-pocket expenses were higher in households with obese individuals. The studies included were assessed according to the Quality Assessment Tool for Observational Cohort and Cross-Sectional Studies of the National Institute of Health, complying from 40% to 60% of the applicable criteria. All studies included only a fraction of known costs. Most included only data from public health care facilities, omitting expenditures at private clinics and pharmacies, and they used different comorbidities and criteria for measurement. Studies are also cross-sectional, and cannot determine causality. CONCLUSIONS: Evidence of the cost of obesity in Brazil is limited. The wide variance in methods used to calculate direct costs in the country ...

Corporate tax avoidance hampers domestic revenue mobilization and, with it, the development of lower- and middle-income countries. While a wide range of studies has shed light on the magnitude of profit shifting by multinational corporations, the indirect costs of this behaviour is underexplored. These indirect costs are likely to be skewed based on a country's level of income. We hypothesize that developed countries tend to recover a larger part of corporate tax revenue losses (primary effects or direct costs) via capital gains and dividend taxes on corporate investors (secondary effects). Furthermore, developed countries can offset tax losses by borrowing in financial markets at very low interest rates (tertiary effect or, together with secondary effects, indirect costs). In this paper, we introduce a dynamical model that includes not only corporate tax revenue losses but also tax revenue collected from capital gains and dividend taxes, as well as government borrowing costs. We use country-by-country reporting data on the operations of multinational corporations to estimate profit shifting, alternative operationalizations of the location of investors to proxy the tax revenues from capital gains and dividend taxes, and yields on government bonds to measure the cost of borrowing. Our results show that when these indirect costs are included, the total cost of profit shifting for developing countries increases significantly, while some developed countries can often offset or recover the majority of the direct costs of profit shifting. The ability of the latter to do this is, however, uneven with, for example, most European countries losing revenues from profit shifting even after indirect effects are taken into account. Only a handful of other countries actually appear to profit from profit shifting-and by an amount that is far smaller, in relation to gross domestic product, than the losses suffered by others.