Tax law: rules or principles?

This is the year of simplification of tax legislation and I should like to add my thoughts to the debate. There is nothing new in complaining about the complexity of tax legislation. Every generation does it. To give two examples, the Codification Committee in 1936 looked back longingly to the early days of income tax: ‘... the Statutes of 1842 and 1853 were relatively simple. The growth of legislation since 1907 and its increasing complexity have been in large measure due to the high rates of tax in operation ... The space occupied by the provisions relating to such reliefs and exemptions is now prodigious, and contrasts with the comparative brevity of the earlier code.... Unhappily the actual language in which many of the statutory provisions are framed is so intricate and obscure as to be frankly unintelligible’. In 1955, the Royal Commission said much the same: ‘... the law on the subject of income tax remains voluminous, complicated and obscure.... The history of earlier attempts [to simplify it], however, suggests that the problem may be in fact an intractable one, beyond the reach of recommendations’.

Children of Migrants: The Cumulative Impact of Parental Migration on their Children\u27s Education and Health Outcomes

In the past 15 years, around 160 million Chinese rural workers migrated to cities for work. Because of restrictions on migrant access to local health and education system, many migrant children are left-behind in rural villages and growing up without parental care. This paper examines how parental migration affects children\u27s health and education outcomes in the long run. Using the Rural-Urban Migration Survey in China (RUMiC) data, we measure the share of children\u27s lifetime during which parents were away from home. We instrument this measure of parental absence with weather changes in their home villages when parents were aged 16-25, or when they were most likely to initiate migration. Results show a sizable adverse impact of exposure to parental migration on the health and education outcomes of children, in particular boys. We also find that what the literature has always done (using contemporaneous measure for parental migration) is likely to underestimate the effect of exposure to parental migration on children\u27s outcomes.JEL Classification Codes: J38, I28http://www.grips.ac.jp/list/jp/facultyinfo/yamauchi_chikako

Non-Formal Education and Learning in Europe: The Role of the Council of Europe

This chapter explores the contribution made by the Council of Europe to the Europeanization of learning through its commitment to promoting “non-formal education and learning”, within which “youth work” plays a pivotal role. Celebrating 50 years in 2022, the Council of Europe Youth Department has developed and diversified a range of projects and programs for its 46 member states, anchored within its distinctive participative and inclusive methodologies. The chapter draws on four illustrations of this practice: the international reviews of national youth policy 1997–2016; the Advanced Training the Trainers (ATTE) course that ran from 2001 to 2003; the “Madzinga” long-term training course (2002–2003) delivering experiential learning through outdoor education; and the pilot Master in European Youth Studies (2011). The increasing depth and diversity of the Youth Department’s activities have helped to produce a generation of young people with a European identity, an understanding of alternative ways of learning and teaching, and a belief in the transformative impact of transnational and intercultural learning

Taking Stock - Where are we now? Youth Work in contemporary Europe

In a Europe facing the multiple challenges of economy/finance, the promotion of entrepreneurship, health (after Covid-19), war (in Ukraine), climate, energy, mobility and more, it is perhaps time to take stock of the youth sector and youth work within it, in order to move forward more confidently and critically. This book, after providing some sense of the path created for youth policy and youth work at the European level, seeks to unravel that legacy with the objective of distilling what need to be the essential building blocks for a youth work in the new Europe for the future, embracing play, participation and partnership, considering its economic as well as social value – the ‘bang for its buck’, and exploring the implications for youth worker education and training if ‘quality’ youth work is to be operationalised on the ground

Managing Organisational Culture in a merged General Further Education College in England A Case Study

There has been a significant level of merger activity in General Further Education Colleges (GFEC) in England in recent years. GFEC mergers are of critical importance to understand and to inform the academic literature, policy and leadership professional practice. The need to understand how mergers impact on the experiences of key personnel has human, financial and practical implications for GFEC. This case study considered, in detail, the impact of a merger in a GFEC in England on key internal stakeholders: teachers, curriculum managers and senior leaders. It explored, through interviews with the Principal and the Chair of Governors, nominal group technique (NGT) and focus groups with eleven teachers and eight managers and through participant observations, the impact of the merger experience on them. The study analysed and reported on the lived experiences of participants to enable a detailed assessment of the impact of merger on the alignment of organisational culture between colleges during merger. This study explored the interrelatedness of the different strands that impact merger such as leadership action, merger management, communication, policy and pace, to develop a deep understanding of their impact on staff morale, emotional wellbeing and trust in leadership. The importance of this study emanated from the need to build a college community of practitioners who subscribe to one goal and strive towards achieving that goal. This was important as it builds resilience and enables organisations (colleges) to make sense of reality, empowering them to meet the needs of their localities, communities and businesses. This study contributed to filling the knowledge gap by providing a detailed analysis of the different perspectives of internal stakeholders; teachers, curriculum managers and leaders, on the ways in which they have been affected by merger. It found that leadership decision making, communication, merger management and pace, have considerable impact on staff emotional wellbeing and trust in leadership. It found that to manage mergers successfully, more attention needed to be paid to the human side of merger in comparison to the transactional and performative side. The study found considerable interrelatedness between the human side of merger and how the merger was managed and conducted. This study also contributes to the body of literature with a specific nuance on FE policy influence on leadership professional practice, with respect to mergers. It argued that leadership decision making in mergers is a function of the neoliberal and performative policy environment, see 6.2. It argued that many GFEC merger failures can potentially be avoided if the policy environment was less performative and more values and human driven. This study posits that what is needed in FE is an alternative approach to policy-making based on a collegiate and distributed approach. An evidence-based policy rooted in professional practice rather than neoliberalism, is considerably more likely to achieve better outcomes for the FE sector. In this regard, this study contributes to the academic literature by providing an insider researcher perspective. This study informs the GFEC leadership and management professional practice by arguing that mergers are complex and multifaceted therefore they need to be planned along more than one timeline, all of which need to be working in parallel and in tandem. The first timeline is the traditional timeline in which the transactional merger is enacted, the second is the plan to create a new organisational management structure, appoint to the new positions and align systems and processes, and the third is to plan people matters and the alignment of organisational culture. This way, leaders and other stakeholders start to view merger as a journey not an event and hence leads to better organisational wellbeing, organisational clarity and resilience. The study argued that the current guidance is inadequate and needs to pay attention to people matters in the same way as it does for assets and legal matters. It needs to articulate the expectations for the human side and dedicate funding as is currently the case for other aspects of merger due diligence. The study further found that teachers and managers need to engage in regular reflective practice to aid understanding and the building of trust which in turn can help improve organisational culture and merger success