Defining the Relationship between Domestic General Anti-Avoidance Rules and Double Tax Agreements

<p>Double taxation agreements pose a particular analytical problem. While they provide a coherent structure that encourages cross-border investment, the agreements also provide opportunities for taxpayers to avoid their domestic tax obligations. To prevent tax avoidance, some countries enact domestic general anti-avoidance rules to protect their domestic interests. These rules raise questions as to what the relationship between the domestic law and the double tax agreement is. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Committee on Fiscal Affairs provides Commentary on the Organisation for Cooperation and Economic Development Model Double Tax Agreement. This Commentary sets out an analytical framework from which this relationship is to be evaluated. This paper argues that the framework is of little practical significance. The paper concludes that the weight and usefulness of the Commentary lies in a guiding principle set out in the Commentary. Consequently, the wider interpretative approaches do not practically add to the analysis and should be given little weight.</p>

Defining the Relationship between Domestic General Anti-Avoidance Rules and Double Tax Agreements

<p>Double taxation agreements pose a particular analytical problem. While they provide a coherent structure that encourages cross-border investment, the agreements also provide opportunities for taxpayers to avoid their domestic tax obligations. To prevent tax avoidance, some countries enact domestic general anti-avoidance rules to protect their domestic interests. These rules raise questions as to what the relationship between the domestic law and the double tax agreement is. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Committee on Fiscal Affairs provides Commentary on the Organisation for Cooperation and Economic Development Model Double Tax Agreement. This Commentary sets out an analytical framework from which this relationship is to be evaluated. This paper argues that the framework is of little practical significance. The paper concludes that the weight and usefulness of the Commentary lies in a guiding principle set out in the Commentary. Consequently, the wider interpretative approaches do not practically add to the analysis and should be given little weight.</p>

Negotiating the Descriptive–Normative Frontier of Complexity Research in the Anthropocene

This mini-review article offers a commentary on a singular analytical problem faced by legal scholars who use complexity theory and methods in legal research on climate change and the “Anthropocene”. It positions such research as a subset of complexity scholarship in law, which is generally faced with the methodological and analytical challenge of negotiating and reconciling empirical description with normative prescription. It argues that this challenge is particularly acute for legal scholars writing on climate change and the Anthropocene. Using examples from scholars writing about “Earth systems law,” it demonstrates how a heavy reliance on complexity-based empirical data as a source material for normative claim-making can distract scholars from important but difficult questions about normative legitimacy and how legal change happens at multiple levels. The special epistemological challenges posed by climate change and the Anthropocene should demand that scholars writing in this domain be especially mindful and explicit on how they link complexity descriptions to the normative claims they make, both for the sake of scientific credibility as well as for the legitimacy and viability of their propositions.

Returning the Other

The author reviews Nataliya Yakubova’s monograph Irena Solska: The Burden of Unusualness (Moscow 2019) which is the result of more than ten years of work. Yakubova emphasizes that for her the past remains an “open project” to which one can (and should) return many times and her book can be seen as such “portal to the past”. The creative and life path of Irena Solska was chosen as the object of research, and its subject was defined as the “burden of unusualness” of the actress’s personality. Yakubova sees the main analytical problem in the conservation of social stereotypes about Irena Solska and diagnoses the fundamental bias, spread in Polish culture, of the myth of Irena Solska as a “demonic woman”. Therefore, the purpose of the study was the interpretation of sources, the destruction of stereotypes, and overcoming patterns of representations. The principle of interdisciplinary research allows her to consider the fate of the star actress as a phenomenon of her time, in the dynamics of complex socio-political, socio-cultural, aesthetic-technological and ideological-emancipatory changes from the late nineteenth century to the late 1930s. (Transl. S. Harbuziuk)

Toward multi-label sentiment analysis: a transfer learning based approach

Sentiment analysis is recognized as one of the most important sub-areas in Natural Language Processing (NLP) research, where understanding implicit or explicit sentiments expressed in social media contents is valuable to customers, business owners, and other stakeholders. Researchers have recognized that the generic sentiments extracted from the textual contents are inadequate, thus, Aspect Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) was coined to capture aspect sentiments expressed toward specific review aspects. Existing ABSA methods not only treat the analytical problem as single-label classification that requires a fairly large amount of labelled data for model training purposes, but also underestimate the entity aspects that are independent of certain sentiments. In this study, we propose a transfer learning based approach tackling the aforementioned shortcomings of existing ABSA methods. Firstly, the proposed approach extends the ABSA methods with multi-label classification capabilities. Secondly, we propose an advanced sentiment analysis method, namely Aspect Enhanced Sentiment Analysis (AESA) to classify text into sentiment classes with consideration of the entity aspects. Thirdly, we extend two state-of-the-art transfer learning models as the analytical vehicles of multi-label ABSA and AESA tasks. We design an experiment that includes data from different domains to extensively evaluate the proposed approach. The empirical results undoubtedly exhibit that the proposed approach outperform all the baseline approaches.

A Practical Application of Analytic Guiding Frame (AGF) and Overall Guiding Frame (OGF): An Illustration from Literacy Education

This paper illustrates how the Analytic Guiding Frame (AGF) and the Overall Guiding Frame (OGF) are applied when analytic shifts occur in qualitative data analysis. Analytic shifts mainly occur when a proposed analytical method is found to be not fully amenable for analysis because of the contextually-bound nature of qualitative data. In this paper, the illustration located in the field of literacy education revolves around how a methodological and analytical problem was confronted during the fieldwork/analysis stage of research and how analytic negotiations were made with the help of the AGF/OGF framework. From here, it is proposed that much more consideration on matters of epistemology, methodology, research objective and research questions in qualitative research must be made when the iterative process of qualitative data analysis takes place.