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International migration is intimately intertwined with issues of taxation, inequality and public welfare benefits, both in home and destination countries. In home countries the emigration of workers, especially high-skilled workers, is often perceived to create a fiscal loss due to the cost of educating these workers and foregone tax revenues that may reduce the fiscal resources available for income redistribution. On the other hand, remittances, when well spent, can create multiplier effects and contribute to increasing domestic demand and growth, as well as increasing tax collections. In destination countries, immigration raises other challenges, especially when poor and undocumented workers are perceived as taking more from the government budget in the form of social welfare and health care benefits than what they contribute in the form of tax revenues. This note discusses some of the current issues around migration and taxation including how to compensate home countries for the fiscal losses of high-skilled emigration, how to bring immigrants into the tax system and make them net contributors, whether or not to tax inward, cross-border remittances, and designing appropriate tax incentives to encourage diaspora investment in the home country.

Albania has made considerable progress since transition in overcoming the legacy of nearly forty years of autarky. But despite significant progress and some of the fastest rates of gross domestic product (GDP) growth in South East Europe, it remains one of the impoverished countries in Europe, with the majority of the population, and the majority of the poor, living in rural areas. These areas, despite the acknowledged links between infrastructure provision and poverty reduction, are currently poorly served by infrastructure, with the majority of the secondary and local road network in poor condition, and often impassable in inclement weather. Accordingly, in 2006, the Prime Minister established a task force to prepare a program to improve a significant proportion of the secondary and local network and requested the assistance of the World Bank to prepare, and contribute to the financing, of such a program. This transport note summarizes the experience of the World Bank and details the key factors underpinning what has became a very successful program, together with the main lessons learned.

Rapid warming in Arctic ecosystems is resulting in increased frequency of disturbances such as fires, changes in the distribution and productivity of different plant communities, increasing thaw depths in permafrost soils and greater nutrient availability, especially nitrogen. Individually and collectively, these factors have the potential to strongly affect soil C decomposition rates, with implications for the globally significant stores of carbon in this region. However, considerable uncertainty remains regarding how C decomposition rates are controlled in Arctic soils. In this study we investigated how temperature, nitrogen availability and labile C addition affected rates of CO2 production in short (10-day for labile C) and long-term (1.5 year for temperature and N) incubations of samples collected from burned and unburned sites in the Anaktuvuk river burn on the North Slope of Alaska from different depths (organic horizon, mineral horizon and upper permafrost). The fire in this region resulted in the loss of several cms of the organic horizon and also increased active layer depth allowing the impacts of four years of thaw on deeper soil layers to be investigated. Respiration rates did not decline substantially during the long-term incubation, although decomposition rates per unit organic matter were greater in the organic horizon. In the mineral and upper permafrost soil horizons, CO2 production was more temperature sensitive, while N addition inhibited respiration in the mineral and upper permafrost layers, especially at low temperatures. In the short-term incubations, labile C additions promoted the decomposition of soil organic matter in the mineral and upper permafrost samples, but not in the organic samples, with this effect being lost following N addition in the deeper layers. These results highlight that (i) there are substantial amounts of labile organic matter in these soils (ii), the organic matter stored in mineral and upper permafrost in the tussock tundra is less readily decomposable than in the organic horizon, but that (iii) its decomposition is more sensitive to changes in temperature and that (iv) microbial activity in deeper soil layers is limited by labile C availability rather than N. Collectively, these results indicate that in addition to the loss of C by combustion of organic matter, increasing fire frequency also has the potential to indirectly promote the release of soil C to the atmosphere in the years following the disturbance. © 2016 Elsevier Ltd.

Aims: Natural resource management and biodiversity conservation rely on inventories of vegetation that span multiple management or political jurisdictions. However, while remote sensing data and analytical tools have enabled production of maps at increasing spatial resolution and reliability, there are limited examples where national or continental-scaled maps are produced to represent vegetation at high thematic detail. We illustrate two examples that have bridged the gap between traditional land cover mapping and modern vegetation classification. Study area: Our two case studies include national (USA) and continental (North and South America) vegetation and land cover mapping. These studies span conditions from subpolar to tropical latitudes of the Americas. Methods: Both case studies used a supervised modeling approach with the International Vegetation Classification (IVC) to produce maps that provide for greater thematic detail. Georeferenced locations for these vegetation types are used by machine learning algorithms to train a predictive model and generate a distribution map. Results: The USA LANDFIRE (Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools Project) case study illustrates how a history of vegetation-based classification and availability of key inputs can come together to generate standard map products covering more than 9.8 million km2 that are unsurpassed anywhere in the world in terms of spatial and thematic resolution. That being said, it also remains clear that mapping at the thematic resolution of the IVC Group and finer resolution require very large and spatially balanced inputs of georeferenced samples. Even with extensive prior data collection efforts, these remain a key limitation. The NatureServe effort for the Americas - encompassing 22% of the global land surface - demonstrates methods and outputs suitable for worldwide application at continental scales. Conclusions: Continued collection of input data used in the case studies could enable mapping at these spatial and thematic resolutions around the globe. Abbreviations: CART = Classification and Regression Tree; CONUS = Conterminous United States; DSWE = Dynamic Surface Water Extent; EPA = United States Environmental Protection Agency; FGDC = Federal Geographic Data Committee; IVC = International Vegetation Classification; LANDFIRE = Landscape Fire and Resource Management Planning Tools Project; LFRDB = LANDFIRE Reference Database; LiDAR = Light Detection and Ranging; NDVI = Normalized Difference Vegetation Index; NLCD = National Land Cover Database; USNVC = United States National Vegetation Classification; USA = United States of America; WWF = World Wildlife Fund or Worldwide Fund for Nature.

Aid to developing countries has largely neglected the population-wide health services that are core to communicable disease control in the developed world. These mostly non-clinical services generate "pure public goods" by reducing everyone's exposure to disease through measures such as implementing health and sanitary regulations. They complement the clinical preventive and treatment services which are the donors' main focus. Their neglect is manifested, for example, in a lack of coherent public health regulations in countries where donors have long been active, facilitating the spread of diseases such as avian flu. These services can be inexpensive, and dramatically reduce health inequalities. Sri Lanka spends less than 0.2% of GDP on its well-designed population-wide services, which contribute to the country's high levels of health equity and life expectancy despite low GDP per head and civil war. Evidence abounds on the negative externalities of weak population-wide health services. Global public health security cannot be assured without building strong national population-wide health systems to reduce the potential for communicable diseases to spread within and beyond their borders. Donors need greater clarity about what constitutes a strong public health system, and how to build them. The paper discusses gaps in donors' approaches and first steps toward closing them.

One particular tool commonly used by people in delivering thoughts is speech, in this case, formal speech. Collecting Illocutionary Actions within formal speech is very interesting activity. By analyzing Illocutionary Actions, people can reveal the intended meaning of the speaker. The data source in thisresearch is taken from the script of Obama‟s formal speechdelivered at Interfaith Prayer Vigil in Newtown, Connecticut.The objectives of this research are to propose a list of Act ofRepresentative and to provide an analysis about Act of Representative inside the speech, by connecting the Act of Representative found with the prevailing circumstances in USA when the speech were delivered. By collecting some of the representative acts in the Obama‟s speech, the writer is able to provide some thorough analysis toward some truths and factsspoken by Obama himself, as the president of the United States of America. There are 22 representative acts in the Obama‟s Speech delivered at Interfaith Prayer Vigil in Newtown, Connecticut. The truths and facts themselves talk about some different themes, such us religious themes, family, future US policy, shootings tragedy, and the circumstances in the relatedneighborhood.

Varicella vaccine was licensed in Canada in 1998, and a publicly funded vaccination programme introduced in the province of Alberta in 2001. In theory the vaccination programme might increase the burden of disease from shingles, making it important to develop baseline data against which future comparisons can be made. The study's aim was to describe the epidemiology of non-fatal cases of shingles for which publicly funded health services were utilized for the period 1986-2002. Shingles cases were identified from the records of Alberta's universal, publicly funded health-care insurance system for 1986-2002. The earliest dated health service utilizations for ICD-9-CM codes of 053 or ICD-10-CA codes of B02 were classified as incident. Diagnostic codes at least 180 days after the first were classified as recurrent episodes. Denominators for rates were estimated using mid-year population estimates from the Alberta Health Care Insurance Plan Registry. Annual age- and sex-specific rates were estimated. We explored the pattern of rates for sex, age and year effects and their interactions. Shingles rates increased between 1986 and 2002. There was a sex effect and evidence of an age-sex interaction. Females had higher rates than males at every age; however, the difference between females and males was greatest for the 50-54 years age group and declined for older age groups. The increased rate of shingles in Alberta began before varicella vaccine was licensed or publicly funded in Alberta, and thus cannot be attributed to vaccination.

This paper examines how international remittances are affected by structural characteristics, macroeconomic conditions, and adverse shocks in both source and recipient economies. The paper exploits a novel, rich panel data set, covering bilateral remittances from 103 Italian provinces to 87 developing countries over the period 2005-2011. Remittances are negatively correlated with the business cycle in recipient countries and increase especially strongly in response to adverse exogenous shocks, such as natural disasters or large terms-of-trade declines. Financial development in the source economy, which eases access to financial services for migrants and reduces transaction costs, is positively associated with remittances. Conversely, recipient-country financial development is negatively associated with remittances, suggesting that remittances help alleviate credit constraints.