Statistician

Data Analyst
Social Scientist
Telecoms Engineer

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3. Summarize the fundamentals of research methodology

6. Apply appropriate statistical tests to adequately interpret data and test hyp
othesis

Licence-exempt communications were first approved for the international ISM spec
trum bands. Due to the high-powered industrial processes that used these bands t
his spectrum was considered to be 'junk', unsuitable for any other use. However,
as shown in this report, in twenty-five years the 2.4GHz band alone has been tr
ansformed through licence-exempt operation into one of the most economically imp
ortant bands of spectrum in the world. Critical to this success has been a rapid
pace of technological innovation in licence-exempt bands, many aimed at improvi
ng reliability in a noisy environment.
From their inception licence-exempt spectrum devices have been designed to comba
t expected channel noise. Licence-exempt communications adopted more resistant d
igital encoding more than five years before cellular technologies and Wi-Fi was
the first major communications technology to utilise spread spectrum - originall
y used by the military for robust undetectable communication. Wi-Fi also pioneer
ed the use of the more robust OFDM modulation method. More recently advanced ant
enna techniques that allow spatial multiplexing and beamforming have been introd
uced first into Wi-Fi, enabling greater throughput or more robust links at a giv
en power output129.
Using a
statistical technique called regression analysis, you could determine which of t
he other four variables appeared to be the most effective predictors of grade-po
int-average. The four predictor variables would then become the independent variable
s for the study while gradepoint average remains the dependent variable.
The statistical regression analysis of these data would give you information abo
ut which, if any, of these four independent variables appears to be useful in pr
edicting the dependent variable. After that is determined, you can also calculat
e a regression equation in which each of the predictor variables is weighted to
provide the best possible prediction of the dependent variable, in this case the
overall grade-point average. Correlation-prediction analysis can easily be appl
ied in many situations involving use of existing data, providing some advantage
over procedures that require group comparison.
Chapter 2. VAT Gaps and other measures of tax non-compliance
This Chapter discusses the definition and the possible advantages and shortcomin

gs of VAT Gaps as have been used in this study, as well as other alternatives co
ncepts existing in the literature.
The VAT Gap measured in this report is simple in concept. It is the difference b
etween the theoretical tax liability according to the tax law and the actual rev
enue collected. However, to understand how and to what extent the estimates in t
his report can be used to measure trends in tax fraud, it is important not only
to know the details of how the VAT Gap has been calculated, as set out in the ne
xt chapter, but also to understand how the gap measured here relates to a number
of gap concepts and other measures relating to tax evasion, tax compliance, and t
he assessment of the performance of tax administrations that may be found in the
literature.
This literature pursues several distinct objectives. One such objective may be t
o quantify the impact on revenue of the extent to which the VAT in force in any
country deviates from a benchmark structure. We discuss such measures in section
2.1. Another objective may be to distinguish between the extent to which such d
eviations reflect policy decisions embodied in the VAT legislation as opposed to
the effectiveness with which that legislation is enforced. We discuss such meas
ures in section 2.2. Yet another objective may be, as already mentioned, to quan
tify and understand the extent and nature of tax evasion associated with the VAT
and ideally the causes of such evasion. The first step in such analysis is to c
alculate the compliance gap, as discussed in section 2.3. A final objective may
be to provide a basis for assessing the effectiveness with which the tax adminis
tration is able to reduce such evasion over time. We discuss measures aimed spec
ifically at these objectives in section 2.4. As will be seen, different measures
have been developed that can be valuable in achieving each of these objectives,
and many of these measures are complementary to each other. The estimates of th
e compliance gap in the present report provide what in many ways is the key meas
ure needed to link this array of attempts to benchmark VAT performance across co
untries and over time.

2.1. Benchmarking the VAT

The simplest measure of VAT effectiveness
VAT productivity , as it is sometimes cal
led in the literature is VAT collections divided by the standard rate of VAT as a
percentage of GDP. A more refined version originating with the IMF (Ebrill et a
l. 2001), called c-efficiency
and currently estimated annually for OECD countrie
s under the name of the VAT Revenue Ratio (VRR) (OECD 2012) -- is by far the mos
t commonly used gap measure found in the literature.3 This benchmark