This paper investigates the intricate interplay between tax expenditures (TEs) and social policy. Leveraging the Global Tax Expenditures Database (GTED), we carry out the first data-driven comparative assessment of direct spending and TEs for social welfare across countries to shed light on this often-overlooked aspect of fiscal policy. Our research reveals prevalent TE usage for social purposes and substantial costs in terms of revenue forgone worldwide, averaging over 1 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 6 per cent of tax revenue. Our analysis showcases varying strategies employed by countries, particularly emphasizing the reliance of high-income economies on TEs granted through personal income taxes, and low/middle-income countries predominantly using value-added tax-related TEs for social objectives. Our results also highlight the importance of functions such as housing in contributing significantly to social spending through TEs with the ratio tax expenditure/direct spending reaching roughly 365 per cent in the US and 203 per cent in France. Hence, our study underlines the necessity for meticulous evaluation and efficient design of TEs to better align TE regimes with governments social policy objectives as well as to minimise unintended social or economic consequences.

Surgical advancements in paediatric cardiovascular surgery have led to improved survival rates for those patients with the most complex CHDs leading to greater numbers of patients who are living well into adulthood. Despite this new era of long-term survival, our current reporting systems continue to focus largely on using short-term postoperative outcomes as the criteria to both rate and rank hospitals. Using such limited criteria to rate and rank hospitals may mislead the intended audiences: patients and families. The goal of this article is to describe the creation of a local benchmarking report which aims to retrospectively review long-term outcomes from our single centre. This report is updated annually and published on our cardiac surgery webpage in an effort to be as transparent as possible for our patient and family communities.

Sodium intake attributed to fast food is increasing globally. This research aims to develop maximum sodium reduction targets for New Zealand (NZ) fast foods and compare them with the current sodium content of products. Sodium content and serving size data were sourced from an existing database of major NZ fast-food chains. Target development followed a step-by-step process, informed by international targets and serving sizes, and previous methods for packaged supermarket foods. Sodium reduction targets were set per 100 g and serving, using a 40% reduction in the mean sodium content or the value met by 35–45% of products. Thirty-four per cent (1797/5246) of products in the database had sodium data available for target development. Sodium reduction targets were developed for 17 fast-food categories. Per 100 g targets ranged from 158 mg for ‘Other salads’ to 665 mg for ‘Mayonnaise and dressings’. Per serving targets ranged from 118 mg for ‘Sauce’ to 1270 mg for ‘Burgers with cured meat’. The largest difference between the current mean sodium content and corresponding target was for ‘Other salads’ and ‘Grilled Chicken’ (both –40% per 100g) and ‘Fries and potato products’ (–45% per serving), and the smallest, ‘Pizza with cured meat toppings’ (–3% per 100 g) and ‘Pies, tarts, sausage rolls and quiches’ (–4% per serving). The results indicate the display of nutrition information should be mandated and there is considerable room for sodium reduction in NZ fast foods. The methods described provide a model for other countries to develop country-specific, fast-food sodium reduction targets.

The point has repeatedly been made that validation is a crucial success factor in demonstrating the scientific contribution and ensuring the adoption of results. Still, researchers in design science validate their research findings too infrequently. We must all evaluate our claimed contributions on open benchmarks to improve validation quality and foster cumulative research. In this paper, we propose a meta-model to standardise and operationalise the concept of open scientific benchmarks in design science and to guide communities of researchers in the co-development of scientific benchmarks.

When do cross-national comparisons enable citizens to hold governments accountable? According to recent work in comparative politics, benchmarking across borders is a powerful mechanism for making elections work. However, little attention has been paid to the choice of benchmarks and how they shape democratic accountability. We extend existing theories to account for endogenous benchmarking. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a test case, we embedded experiments capturing self-selection and exogenous exposure to benchmark information from representative surveys in France, Germany, and the UK. The experiments reveal that when individuals have the choice, they are likely to seek out congruent information in line with their prior view of the government. Moreover, going beyond existing experiments on motivated reasoning and biased information choice, endogenous benchmarking occurs in all three countries despite the absence of partisan labels. Altogether, our results suggest that endogenous benchmarking weakens the democratic benefits of comparisons across borders.

We study an optimal investment problem under a joint limited expected relative loss and portfolio insurance constraint with a general random benchmark. By making use of a static Lagrangian method in a complete market setting, the optimal wealth and investment strategy can be fully determined along with the existence and uniqueness of the Lagrangian multipliers. Our numerical demonstration for various commonly used random benchmarks shows a trade-off between the portfolio outperformance and underperformance relative to the benchmark, which may not be captured by the widely used Omega ratio and its utility-transformed version, reflecting the impact of the benchmarking loss constraint. Furthermore, we develop a new portfolio performance measurement indicator that incorporates the agent’s utility loss aversion relative to the benchmark via solving an equivalent optimal asset allocation problem with a benchmark-reference-based preference. We show that the expected utility performance is well depicted by looking at this new portfolio performance ratio, suggesting a more suitable portfolio performance measurement under a limited loss constraint relative to a possibly random benchmark.

Indicators are important sources of information about problems across many policy areas. However, despite a growing number of indicators across most policy areas, such as health care, business promotion, or environmental protection, we still know little about if, how, and when such indicators affect the policy agenda. This article develops a theoretical answer to these questions and examines the implications using a new large-n dataset with 220,000 parliamentary questions asked by government and opposition MPs in Australia, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain. The data contain information on political attention to 17 problems, such as unemployment, C02 emission, and crime from 1960 to 2015. Across this wealth of data, the article demonstrates that politicians respond to the severity and development of problem indicators over time and in comparison to other countries. Results also show that politicians respond much more when problem indicators develop negatively than when they develop positively.

Process models are among the principal artefacts used for managing design projects. However, the selection of effective modelling approaches can be difficult for design project managers, given that a plethora of tools exists for various modelling purposes. In addition to date no systematic approach for the assessment and selection of process modelling approaches is available to practitioners. This paper presents the development of criteria for benchmarking and selecting different process modelling tools. The results are based on three elements. (1) In a four-hour workshop undertaken by the Design Process SIG of the Design Society, bringing together around 20 international researchers and practitioners in design process modelling, an initial set of 58 criteria were brainstormed and consolidated during the workshop and in follow-up meetings. (2) The consolidated criteria were then compared with literature. The finalised criteria list was then validated by external experts in industry (3). The resulting list of 12 criteria provides a sound basis for practitioners to support a systematic selection of process modelling approaches. Further, it lays the foundation of a benchmarking tool, which is subject to future work.

Developing agents capable of commonsense reasoning is an important goal in Artificial Intelligence (AI) research. Because commonsense is broadly defined, a computational theory that can formally categorize the various kinds of commonsense knowledge is critical for enabling fundamental research in this area. In a recent book, Gordon and Hobbs described such a categorization, argued to be reasonably complete. However, the theory’s reliability has not been independently evaluated through human annotator judgments. This paper describes such an experimental study, whereby annotations were elicited across a subset of eight foundational categories proposed in the original Gordon-Hobbs theory. We avoid bias by eliciting annotations on 200 sentences from a commonsense benchmark dataset independently developed by an external organization. The results show that, while humans agree on relatively concrete categories like time and space, they disagree on more abstract concepts. The implications of these findings are briefly discussed.

Despite the continued investment in Indigenous support networks and dedicated education units within universities, levels of key performance indicators for Indigenous students—access, participation, success and completion (attainment)—remain below that of the overall domestic student population in most institutions. It remains important to determine what works to achieve Indigenous student success in higher education. This paper proposes that such methods have an integral role to play in providing a holistic view of Indigenous participation and success at university, and are particularly useful in the development and evaluation of strategies and programs. This project found no quantitative correlation between financial investment and success rate for Indigenous students. A negative correlation between access rate and success rate suggests that factors other than those that encourage participation are important in supporting successful outcomes. Those universities that have high success rates have a suite of programs to support Indigenous students, but it is not immediately clear which of these strategies and programs may be most effective to facilitate Indigenous student success rates. In this discussion, we suggest that a multi-layered determinants model is a useful way to conceptualise the many factors that may impact on student success, and how they might intersect.

Recent trends in multimedia technologies indicate the need for richer imaging modalities to increase user engagement with the content. Among other alternatives, point clouds denote a viable solution that offers an immersive content representation, as witnessed by current activities in JPEG and MPEG standardization committees. As a result of such efforts, MPEG is at the final stages of drafting an emerging standard for point cloud compression, which we consider as the state-of-the-art. In this study, the entire set of encoders that have been developed in the MPEG committee are assessed through an extensive and rigorous analysis of quality. We initially focus on the assessment of encoding configurations that have been defined by experts in MPEG for their core experiments. Then, two additional experiments are designed and carried to address some of the identified limitations of current approach. As part of the study, state-of-the-art objective quality metrics are benchmarked to assess their capability to predict visual quality of point clouds under a wide range of radically different compression artifacts. To carry the subjective evaluation experiments, a web-based renderer is developed and described. The subjective and objective quality scores along with the rendering software are made publicly available, to facilitate and promote research on the field.

Antimicrobial resistance is a limiting factor for the success of the treatment of infectious diseases and is associated with increased morbidity and cost. The present study aims to evaluate prescribing patterns of antimicrobials and quantify progress in relation to targets for quality improvement in the prescription of antimicrobials in Northern Ireland's secondary care sector using three repetitive point prevalence surveys (PPS) over a 6-year period: the European Surveillance of Antimicrobial Consumption (ESAC-PPS) in 2009 and 2011 and the Global-PPS on Antimicrobial Consumption and Resistance in 2015. Out of 3605 patients surveyed over the three time points, 1239 (34.4%) were treated with an antibiotic, the most frequently prescribed antibiotic groups were a combination of penicillins, including β-lactamase inhibitors. Compliance with hospital antibiotic policies in 2009, 2011 and 2015 were 54.5%, 71.5% and 79.9%, respectively. Likewise, an indication for treatment was recorded in patient notes 88.5%, 87.7% and 90.6% in 2009, 2011 and 2015, respectively, and surgical prophylactic antibiotic prescriptions for >24 h was 3.9%, 3.2% and 0.7% in 2009, 2011 and 2015, respectively. Treatment based on biomarker data was used in 61.5% of cases. In conclusion, a general trend in the improvement of key antimicrobial-related quality indicators was noted. The PPS tool provided a convenient, inexpensive surveillance system of antimicrobial consumption and should be considered an essential component to establish and maintain informed antibiotic stewardship in hospitals.