Contributory liability is the liability of a party who is not the direct infringer, but who facilitates or contributes to the infringement committed by the direct infringer. With respect to trade marks, neither EU law nor national laws of member states (MS) provide specific rules to deal with the issue except very limited circumstances. Thus, the question of contributory trade mark liability is assessed under tort law rules. In that regard, the law seems straightforward. Yet, it is not. This is because, contributory liability now mainly arises in a new context: the Internet. Except from the cases of where the occurrence of a direct infringement of trade mark is questionable eg selling and buying keywords, Internet intermediaries' liability arise as contributory liability since they are the vehicles to facilitate transactions between third parties on the Internet. Here, it should be underlined that the thesis' scope is limited to the cases where it is unquestionable that the direct trade mark infringement has taken place, so the intermediaries' contributory liability is an issue. More precisely the cases dealing with selling of counterfeit goods. In those circumstances, trade mark owners have been seeking to fix the liability of an intermediary rather than the direct infringers themselves since reaching the latter is not always possible as they can easily remain anonymous or be located in jurisdictions which are not easily accessible for right holders. This is why, intermediaries have been the subject of contributory liability cases. As such, how should their liability be examined given that their involvement does not go beyond providing a necessary platform and infrastructure? How can their involvement be assessed as the Internet's infrastructure differs from that of the offline world? For these questions that arise from contributory trade mark liability, there are two legal instruments applicable within the EU: 1) tort laws of the MSs, and 2) pan-EU immunity regime established by the E-Commerce Directive 2000/31. The first is also applicable to the offline world while the latter provides a more Internet-specific approach as it establishes horizontally applicable safe harbour rules for certain activities of intermediaries. According to the Directive, intermediaries which provide mere conduit, caching and hosting services can be granted immunity from the liability arising from its users' infringements provided that the conditions stated under each Article are qualified. However, the immunity is provided as an additional protection meaning that not qualifying for immunity does not automatically result in the liability of an intermediary. Thus, whether an intermediary is liable or not is ultimately a subject of tort law of the MSs which is not harmonised within the EU. Thus, the law of contributory trade mark liability in the EU appears to be incoherent. On the one hand, the immunity rules govern when an intermediary would be granted immunity from liability and apply horizontally. On the other hand, tort law rules deal with the question of contributory liability but differ from one MS to another. Therefore, an analysis on existing law appears necessary in order to build the legal framework more systematically by demonstrating how it is applied. Yet, this analysis shall be undertaken to answer whether the current regime proves to be satisfactory in dealing with ongoing and emerging issues that the Internet brings and finally what the remedy would be for the issues where the law falls short in dealing them. These are the questions that have been neglected by the EU legislators. This thesis therefore undertakes this examination in the pursuit of answers to these questions and ultimately the remedy.

Property taxes tend to be under-used globally, especially in developing countries. This is particularly true in Pakistan. To explore the reasons, I studied policymaking and administration in relation to the recurrent (annual) property tax in Punjab, Pakistan's most populous and urbanised province. I used a mix of research methods, including extensive field observations of how the lower level tax staff of the Excise and Taxation Department go about their work. I found three major probable explanations for the very low levels of property tax collections: • Especially after a major decentralisation reform in 2001, responsibilities for collecting the property tax and the revenues it produces are both divided in complex ways between three levels of subnational government. Each level has low incentives to perform its tax collection functions. • Each level of subnational government obtains most of its income either from transfers from higher levels of government or from loans. It generally seems easier for them to increase their incomes by putting more effort into tapping these sources, rather than trying to improve their own tax collection performance. The lack of strong political pressures to increase spending has a reinforcing effect. • It has become administratively difficult for senior policymakers to increase property tax revenue collections through mobilising the organisational resources of the Excise and Taxation Department. Property tax collection has become locked into a system that combines (a) a high degree of informality in routine practices, (b) exclusive control of detailed information about tax collection potential and performance by lower level staff and (c) modest rent-taking and responsiveness to local pressures for leniency in tax collection at these lower levels. When higher-level officials in the Department attempt periodically to enforce the achievement of higher tax collection targets, they are mostly frustrated by these informal working practices and relationships.

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 111-116)

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-100)

The question of whether IP incentivizes innovation is a long debated one in the literature on economics of innovation and technological change. The first chapter explores this fundamental question in an emerging market context, applying a 'private returns to R&D framework' to the Indian bio-pharmaceutical industry. In a fundamental policy shift, India agreed to introduce product patents for pharmaceuticals when it signed the WTO TRIPS treaty in 19951.1 This policy came into effect through enabling legislation in 2000 and final implementation in 2005. Using this policy shift as the setting for a natural experiment, the paper estimates its impact by using data on a panel of 315 Indian pharmaceutical firms drawn from the years 1990 to 2005. Private returns of a firm are measured using a hedonic stock market valuation of the tangible total assets (A) and intangible inventive assets (K). The findings indicate an economic and statistically significant increase in private returns to inventive activity. However, this effect appears to he highly concentrated in the most technologically progressive Indian firms. Subsequent investigations through firm-level field case studies, patent data analysis and discussions with industry experts reveal that IP apart, economic liberalization in India since 1991 and the Hatch-Waxman Act in the United States have had accompanying effects in guiding the evolution of the industry. / During the period of our analysis, a substantial number of Indian bio-pharmaceutical firms became export intensive, with enhanced access to Western markets. This came about aided by a rationalized currency regime through an economic reforms process in India. The 2nd chapter explores how export destinations and firm capabilities influence the extent of learning by exporting (LBE) in Indian pharmaceutical firms that exported to a variety of both advanced and emerging destinations between 1994 and 2007. Departing from previous studies the paper explores if exports result in other gain besides improvements in technical efficiency. We find that LBE is not restricted to technical efficiency gains alone but also reduces costs of production. Furthermore, exporters also gain access to other types of knowledge that improves R&D efficiency and the rate of new product introductions. Interestingly these gains are more especially when firms export to high income destinations (as evidenced from higher gains when firms export to US rather than non-US destinations). Finally, results also indicate that the gains are higher for more capable firms. / The third chapter connects the rise of the Indian bio-pharmaceutical producers to the global value chain in the pharmaceutical industry. Specifically, it explores the welfare effects of early generic entry in the United States during the period 1997 and 2008. This is the period during which, with increasing frequency, generic drug manufacturers in the United States (many from Israeli, India, North America, or European Union) have been able to challenge the monopoly status of patent-protected drugs even before the patents expire. The legal foundation for these challenges is found in Paragraph IV of the Hatch-Waxman Act. If successful, these Paragraph IV challenges generally lead to large market share losses for incumbents and sharp declines in average market prices. The 3rd chapter estimates, for the first time, the welfare effects of accelerated generic entry via these challenges. Using aggregate brand level sales data between 1997 and 2008 for hypertension drugs in the U.S. we estimate demand using a nested logit model in order to back out cumulated consumer surplus, which we find to be approximately $270 billion. We then undertake a counterfactual analysis, removing the stream of Paragraph IV facilitated generic products, finding a corresponding cumulated consumer surplus of $177 billion. This implies that gains flowing to consumers as a result of this regulator mechanism amount to around $92 billion or about $130 per consumer in this market. These gains come at the expense to producers who lose, approximately, $14 billion. This suggests that net short-term social gains stands at around $78 billion. We also demonstrate significant cross-molecular substitution within the market and discuss the possible appropriation of consumer rents by the insurance industry. The findings from the 3rd chapter have implications related to innovation policy as it pertains to pharmaceutical markets around the world. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) / 1World trade Organization's Trade Related Intellectual Property Agreement.

The relationship between population and residential property taxes is not well understood. This study is an attempt to discern the relationship. The basic questions examined are: How does population affect tax bills? What are the short-run and long-run relationships between population and taxes? What reasons lie behind the answers to the first two questions? Nearly all of a typical residential property tax bill is paid to the three units of local government, counties, cities, and school districts. The equation for determining the tax bill is the same for each unit of government: Total Expenditures minus other non-property tax revenues equals the Levy which divided by the total value of all property in the district equals the tax rate which multiplied by the value of a residence gives that residence's tax bill. The relationships between each of the above variables and population are examined to facilitate understanding of the tax-population relationship. The model chapter provides a logical link between each variable and population and corresponding estimating equations to assess long-run and short-run relationships and the relative effect of population on the separate tax variables. For long-run relationships both simple linear and quadratic functions are used with population as the explanatory variable. For short-run equations, first difference estimates are computed. Elasticities are computed for comparing the relative effect of population on the tax variables. The results obtained show that despite high R2 values the large confidence intervals about the regression lines imply that substantial variation is left unexplained by population variables. Generally, levies appear to be more responsive to population than does the value of all property as a whole resulting in a rate of growth in the levies which exceeds that of property values. Hence, tax rates tend to increase slightly with increases in population. Higher residential property taxes are associated with larger populations. This appears to be due in part to the relatively more elastic response of residential values to population than all property values as a whole. Taxes appear to be shifting toward residential property owners. Finally, short-run changes in taxes and variables composing the tax equation do not appear to be related to short-run changes in population. / Graduation date: 1979

Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 104-106)

We study several classes of finite posets equipped with linear orderings. We examine these classes according to the Ramsey and the ordering property. As an application we give several new extremely amenable groups of automorphisms of countable structures and compute several new universal minimal flows for such groups. The technique that we develop is also useful for studying classes of structures related to posets, such as quasi-orderings.