This study analyzes the impact of a high-speed rail line on tax revenues and on the economy of affected regions within the country. The economic impact of infrastructure investment can be induced by changes in tax revenues when the infrastructure is in operation. Accurate regional GDP data are not necessarily available in many Asian countries. However, tax data can be collected. Therefore, this study uses tax revenue dates in order to estimate spillover effects of infrastructure investment. The Kyushu high-speed rail line was constructed in 1991 and was completed in 2003. In 2004, the rail line started operating from Kagoshima to Kumamoto. The entire line was opened in 2011. We estimated its impact in the Kyushu region of Japan by using the differencein- difference method, and compared the tax revenues of regions along the high-speed railway line with other regions that were not affected by the railway line. Our findings show a positive impact on the region’s tax revenue following the connection of the Kyushu rapid train with large cities, such as Osaka and Tokyo. Tax revenue in the region significantly increased during construction in 1991–2003, and dropped after the start of operations in 2004–2010. The rapid train’s impact on the neighboring prefectures of Kyushu is positive. However, in 2004–2013, its impact on tax revenue in places farther from the rapid train was observed to be lower. When the Kyushu railway line was connected to the existing high-speed railway line of Sanyo, the situation changed. The study finds statistically significant and economically growing impact on tax revenue after it was completed and connected to other large cities, such as Osaka and Tokyo. Tax revenues in the regions close to the high-speed train is higher than in adjacent regions. The difference-in-difference coefficient methods reveal that corporate tax revenue was lower than personal income tax revenue during construction. However, the difference in corporate tax revenues rose after connectivity with large cities was completed. Public–private partnership (PPP) has been promoted in many Asian countries. However, PPP-infrastructure in India failed in many cases due to the low rate of return from infrastructure investment. This study shows that an increase of tax revenues is significant in the case of the Kyushu rapid train in Japan. If half of the incremental tax revenues were returned to private investors in infrastructure, the rate of return from infrastructure investment would significantly rise for long period of time. It would attract stable and long-term private investors, such as pension funds and insurance funds into infrastructure investment. The last section of the paper will address how incremental tax revenues created by the spillover effects of infrastructure will improve the performance of private investors in infrastructure investment.

The high demand for quality healthcare services in Portugal is generating concerns about meeting the optimum number of healthcare professionals in the private sector, such as doctors and clinicians. Critical interventions are currently in progress, aiming to provide quality healthcare that will be accessible and sustainable through actionable retention strategies such as investing and developing human capital, introducing better conditions of service to attract and retain talent in the private healthcare sector, and prioritizing the needs of patients. The objective of this study is to understand which factors promote the migration of physicians from the public to the private sector according to the theoretical assumptions of incentives. In this context, a phenomenological study was carried out, using semi-structured interviews with fifteen physicians working in the private health network. Content analysis was done using NVivo 12. The results indicate that performance evaluation in the private sector exists but has no alignment with incentives. The condition makes the private healthcare sector unattractive, however, other policies of remuneration remain promising. Current proposals that could revive the image of the sector include collective decision-making and strong labour relations advocacy for physicians in the private sector.

Machine analysis of detection of the face is an active research topic in Human-Computer Interaction today. Most of the existing studies show that discovering the portion and scale of the face region is difficult due to significant illumination variation, noise and appearance variation in unconstrained scenarios. To overcome these problems, we present a method based on Extended Semi-Local Binary Patterns. For each frame, an aggregation of the pixel values over a neighborhood is considered and a local binary pattern is obtained. From these a binary code is obtained for each pixel and then histogram features is computed. Adaboost algorithm is used to learn and classify these discriminative features with the help of exemplar face and non-face signature of the images for detecting the location of face region in the frame. This Extended Semi Local Binary Pattern is sturdy to variations in illumination and noisy images. The developed methods are deployed on the real time YouTube video face databases and found to exhibit significant performance improvement owing to the novel features when compared to the existing techniques.

This research aimed to assess the results of two vendors used by the company in the shipping process of export goods. Two leading suppliers for one similar activity had caused more difficulties in the monitoring and controlling activities of DHL Global Forwarding Indonesia. This research used qualitative and quantitative methods, with the Analytic Hierarchy Process decision-making method using 36 internal staff members as the sample. Through a qualitative calculation method by distributing questionnaires to the existing suppliers, namely Monang Sianipar Kargo and Andima Transportindo, it was found that the weighted score for Monang Sianipar Kargo was 22.84 and for Andima Transportindo was 10.66. Subcriteria and indicators should be prioritized in the criteria of Price and service, significantly to improve the performance of problematic suppliers. This research recommended using the Analytic Hierarchy Process for assessment since it facilitated the research development by the opinion of the company’s experts. Such a finding implied that a policy from the management was needed in the assessment of suppliers. As an implication, it was necessary to assess all suppliers cooperating with DHL Global Forwarding Indonesia by using actual data from the current month.