Teaching or Testing: The Role of the State in Japan
Japan rarely fails to get a mention these days when the inadequacies of Britain's system of vocational education and training are discussed. Whether it is the state-prescribed core curriculum proposed in the 1987 Great Educational Reform Bill, or the standard Ministerial complaint that British employers do not invest enough in their employees' training, comparison with Japan is often explicit. There is a firm belief that in the linkage between Competence and Competition (the title of a much-quoted report a US/ Germany/Japan/Britain comparison published by MSC/NEDO, Hayes et al., 1984), the Japanese have it better.
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Lifetime income is less variable than annual household income, since the latter reflects transitory shocks to wages, family status, and employment. This implies that lowincome households in one year have some chance of being higherincome households in other years, and significantly affects the estimated distributional burden of excise taxes. This paper shows that household expenditures on gasoline, alcohol, and tobacco as a share of total consumption (a proxy for lifetime income) are much more equally distributed than expenditures as a share of annual income. From a longer-horizon perspective, excise taxes on these goods are much less regressive than standard analyses suggest. I am grateful to Thomas Moehrle and Frank Sammartino for providing me with data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, to David Cutler for research assistance, and to Roger Gordon, Joseph Pechman, Nancy Rose, and Lawrence Summers for helpful discussions. This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation and is part of the NBER Program in Taxation. Lifetime Incidence and the Distributional Burden of Excise Taxes James M. Poterba* Although theoretical papers have noted the potentially important distinction between annual and lifetime tax burdens, with one exception the lifetime perspective is absent in empirical studies of tax incidence. Calculations based on annual income may provide particularly unreliable guidance on a central tax policy issues of the early 1990s: the incidence of excise taxes. Conventional wisdom holds that these taxes are regressive, falling most heavily on the poorest households. This has long been one of the central objections to proposals for raising excise taxes. Nevertheless, the evidence for this view may depend critically on the time horizon in incidence studies. Pechman (1985, p. 51) writes that "whether regressivity of [sales and excise] taxes with respect to income would remain for accounting periods longer than one year is not known. It seems clear, however, that the regressivity shown at the lowest income levels on the basis of annual figures would be moderated, if not completely eliminated, over the longer period." There is relatively little systematic evidence, however, 2 evaluating this conjecture. The present paper begins by documenting the unsurprising proposition that household income measured over long horizons is less variable than annual household income. This implies that lowincome households in one year have some chance of being higherincome households in other years. Thus, even if the share of income consumed by lowest income groups is higher than that for higherincome groups, excise taxes or taxes on consumption more generally may be less regressive than calculations based on annual income suggest. The second section explores the differences between the annual and lifetime incidence by considering the incidence of excise taxes on gasoline, alcohol, and tobacco. It shows that
EFFECT OF SAMPLE PREPARATION ON WATER TREE RESISTANCE OF XLPE/SEBS BLENDS
The effects of an aromatic polymer, such as poly[styrene-b-(ethylene-co-butylene)b-styrene] (SEBS), and its preparation processes on water tree resistance, morphology, crystallinity, dielectric constant and dielectric loss tangent of crosslinked polyethylene (XLPE)/SEBS and XLPE/SEBS/ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) blends were investigated. The XLPE/SEBS samples were characterized by means of differential scanning calorimetry, scanning electron microscopy, dielectric spectral analysis and the accelerated water treeing experiment. The results clearly showed that although SEBS was partially compatible with LDPE and it was dispersed evenly in XLPE matrix, the blends demonstrated excellent dielectric performances, such as dielectric constant and dissipation factor. The crystallinity of XLPE/SEBS blends was decreased with increase in SEBS content and it was further decreased with the addition of EVA. SEBS could effectively improve the water-tree resistance of XLPE and both SEBS and EVA were found to improve the water tree resistance of XLPE synergistically as expected. The differences in sample preparation processes could change the phase morphology and dielectric performance of the blends, and could also influence the dispersion of SEBS in XLPE matrix as well as the crystallinity of the blends. Different preparation processes led to different water tree resistance behaviours of the samples. The improvement of SEBS dispersion in XLPE matrix helped to improve the water tree resistance of XLPE.