When are tariffs convenient from a standpoint of its own cost-benefit ratio?

Tariffs in general, increase the cost of imports, leading to higher prices for consumers less demand of a product and a decline in consumer surplus.

Domestic production will benefit with the introduction of tariffs. The reason is that it makes domestic products more competitive compared to imports. However, the other argument is that the restriction of competition encourages inefficient firms in the economy. Therefore, it skews the market in favor of inefficiencies that can also lead to corruption and retaliation from other countries. The other side of the coin is subsidies to export production which has the reverse effect of a tariff. Cost-Benefit analysis of the effects of tariffs and subsidies has been a subject of controversy for domestic trade policies and international trade.

For instance, if an ore is found in abundance in Australia and a country imports ore from China, it has to impose tariffs on Chinese ore to safeguard the interests of its domestic producers or cheaper Chinese ore will cause a shutdown of iron ore producing factories in Australia.

Another example is China as a follower of an export subsidy policy for its electronic goods and letting its exporters gain unfair advantage in international market so as to improve its exports.

James E. Anderson and J. Peter Neary Boston College University and College Dublin conducted a joint study to determine the effects of a skewed market and developed an index that reflects the measures of restrictiveness to international trade policy.

A Trade Restrictiveness Index (TRI) developed by these researchers reviews some of the theoretical extensions and applications of this Index. A number of institutions have provided motivating research settings and practical support with some of the components originated from a World Bank project. The impact of a country’s trade policy on its economic well-being is one of the most widely-debated topics in economics. Yet, the question of how to conduct trade policy and its economic assessment or measurement has received almost no attention in the past. In practice it has been done using a variety of “ad hoc measures such as the trade-weighted average tariff, the coefficient of variation of tariffs or the non-tariff-barrier coverage ratio.” The most natural criterion from an economist’s perspective is that of welfare of a nation. The question that arises is how the restrictiveness of trade policy should be measured where trade barriers take a single and well-defined form.

The question of cost-benefit of a tariff has wide implications and a variety of issues need be addressed in the applicability of value to the equation of differential economics foreign exchange rates, domestic parity values and comparisons of premiums in the transfer of payments to national account balances.

Tariffs are weighted by their relative importance in some sense. The simplest and most commonly-used method of doing it is by using actual trade volumes as weights. This result in trade-weighted average tariff but despite its convenience, the trade-weighted average tariff runs into flaws immediately. As the tariff on a good rises, its imports fall, so the now higher tariff gets a lower weight in the index. For high tariffs this fall in the weight may be so large that the index is decreasing in the tariff rate and averaging doesn’t work very well.

The economic value of a traded item-either an export or an import-at the border crossing or port of entry must reflect its export or import parity value. These values are derived by adjusting the c.i.f. (cost, insurance, and freight) or f.o.b. (free-on-board) prices (converted to economic values) by all the relevant charges between the origin and the destination point where the c.i.f. or f.o.b. price is agreed to in the terms of trade for Customs valuation.

“The WTO agreement on customs valuation aims for a uniform and neutral system for the valuation of goods for customs purposes — a system that conforms to commercial realities, and which outlaws the use of arbitrary or fictitious customs values. The Committee on Customs Valuation of the Council for Trade in Goods (CGT) carries out work in the WTO on customs valuation. royalties and licence fees related to the goods being valued that the buyer must pay, either directly or indirectly, as a condition of sale of the goods being valued, to the extent that such royalties and fees are not included in the price actually paid or payable; You should include in the declared value any money paid for selling commissions, assists, royalties, production costs, packing, proceeds and these items should be noted on the commercial invoice. Duty will be assessed on the price paid for the goods unless the basis for duty is some other measure, such as quantity or volume (i.e. cents per bushel or metric tons) Terms of Sale.”

Commercial Invoice—Required Entries for Customs Valuation

1. Terms of sale

a. Date of sale

b. Place of sale

c. Seller name & address

d. Buyer name & address

2. Shipment Terms

a. Date of shipment

b. Place of shipment

c. Destination port

d. Shipper’s name

e. Receiver or consignee’s name

3. Merchandise Details

a. A detailed description of the merchandise supporting the HTS classification.

b. Shipping and packaging marks and numbers detailing contents of each package

c. Quantities in weights and measures

d. Country of origin

e. HTS Classification

4. Value of the merchandise

a. Unit and total purchase price

b. Currency of the sale

c. If not specifically included in the purchase price all charges including cost of packing, cases, containers, and inland freight to the port of exportation.

d. All rebates or commissions

e. All goods or services furnished for the production of the merchandise (e.g., assists such as dies, molds, tools, engineering work) not included in the invoice price.

f. Any discount allowed on the price of the merchandise

5. Name of a responsible employee of the exporter, who has knowledge, or who can readily obtain knowledge, of the transaction.

6. Invoice must be in English.

As a result of national trade policies and different fiscal policies within member countries of WTO people pay a premium on traded goods over what they pay for domestic goods. This added cost is not reflected evenly when the prices of traded goods are converted to the domestic currency equivalent at the official exchange rate, specially, in countries with two different exchange rates one official and a market rate. This premium which people are willing to pay for traded goods, then, represents the amount that is over priced in relation to non traded items when the official exchange rate is used to convert foreign exchange prices into domestic values. An alternative arithmetic formulation is to view the issue as comparative economics in a domestic market. California’s GDP if far greater than Florida’s where wages and tax revenue for state and local coffers have a “premium” for a price conversion factor in food, rents, transportation etc. However, the exchange rate of a dollar in California and one in Florida is the same but the purchasing power is different. If one multiplies by 1 plus the differential premium stated in decimal terms it would be similar lent to the adjustment of an exchange rate in commercial foreign trade for instance if the total is 8% higher it would become 1.08% over local price.

In the European Union (EU) countries, commercial trade that takes place among members taxes are based on a commodity code and Value Added Tax (VAT), but not an import duty. A business can reclaim the VAT paid if the goods are to be used in the business. However, tariffs apply when a EU country imports from a non-EU country. Customs, excise are paid at the point of entry before the goods are sold, while VAT and sales tax come into play at the point of sale.

“China Customs assesses and collects tariffs. Import tariff rates are divided into six categories: general rates, most-favored-nation (MFN) rates, agreement rates, preferential rates, tariff rate quota rates, and provisional rates. As a member of the WTO, imports from the United States are assessed at the MFN rate. The five Special Economic Zones, open cities, and foreign trade zones within cities offer preferential duty reductions or exemptions. The importer must provide proof of origin to Customs and Border Protection (CBP) in the form of a Certificate of Origin. “

TRUMP & VAT: NAFTA, TRADE BARRIERS & RETALIATORY TARIFFS

https://www.bu.edu/law/files/201...

Boston University School of Law

Law & Economics Working Paper No. 17-06 Richard T. Ainsworth

Boston University makes the following legal argument regarding the posture Trump is taken on different tax regimes regarding NAFTA:

· Value added taxes (VAT) used in most of the world

· Retail sales tax (RST) used in the United States

“This import VAT is creditable/ recoverable for domestic importers, but not for U.S. importers from NAFTA. Can American manufacturing company move its operations to Canada or Mexico and gain an unfair advantage when selling their product back into the US VAT-free; that is, can a manufacturer unfairly benefit from the VAT refund aspect of border adjustment that is provided to exporters from VAT jurisdictions, as compared to comparable manufacturers producing and selling entirely within the US ? When transaction chains cross borders destination-based consumption taxes have some difficulties. Production is in one jurisdiction, and consumption is in another. But, once again, the RST and the VAT achieve the same tax result, although the VAT (unlike the RST) requires border adjustments to do so. This can be demonstrated through the common example.”

Suppose in this permutation there are two jurisdictions, A & B, each with a separate tax administration, and each with different applicable tax rates. Assume that the manufacturer and wholesaler are in jurisdiction A where the tax rate is 8%. Assume that the retailer and final consumer are in jurisdiction B where the applicable tax rate is 10%.

Figure 3 applies this permutation to the retail sales tax. No tax is collected in jurisdiction A, and the full tax of 19 cu is collected in Jurisdiction B. There is no need for a border adjustment.”

In closing, the issue of a tariff cost-benefit analysis gets murky for study when one considers the complexity of international trade and the trend towards globalized economies that have different fiscal policies but are trading with rules from WTO or agreement combination such as the EU or NAFTA that are also members of WTO. These taxation regimes need to be reconciled in order to avoid complex tax adjustments at border crossings. This is one of the burning issues now plaguing the UK and BREXIT.

What are the trading routes in Europe nowadays?

Alfonso Llanes, studied at Florida International University

Answered just now

There is a vast amount of information and statistical data from the World Shipping Council and the European Commission. Here are the links to both:

http://www.worldshipping.org/abo...

MOBILITY AND TRANSPORT

European Commission

Transport > Legal acts on transport statistics > Statistical pocketbook 2017

https://ec.europa.eu/transport/s...

TRADE ROUTES

Trade between an origin group of countries and a destination group of countries is referred to as a trade route.

There are almost 500 liner shipping services providing regularly scheduled service (usually weekly) that enables goods to move between ports along the many trade routes of the world.

How do you measure and evaluate the quality of recommendation engines?

Currently, the Internet provides a large number of data points that can be overwhelming, therefore, there is need to filter, prioritize and deliver pertinent information in a way to lessen the problem of information overload, which, has created a potential problem for many data managers.

In order to obtain customized data content recommender—systems can solve this problem by searching through large volume of dynamically generated information. There are specific characteristics and different prediction techniques in recommendation systems as a guide for research and practice in the field of recommendation systems.

The exponential growth in the amount of digital information created by the vast number of visitors to the Internet have resulted in a challenge of information burdens which delays personalized access to the items of interest on the Internet. Existing information retrieval systems, such as Google, DevilFinder and Altavista have partially solved this problem but arranging and personalizing content to user’s interests of unique information is not available. This has provoked demand for recommender—systems more than ever before. In essence, recommender—systems are information filters that tackle the problem of information overload by filtering selective information extracted out of large amounts of dynamically generated information related to user’s preferences, interest, or observed behavior about items, events or texts. As such, recommender—system can predict whether a user would prefer an item not based on a profile.

Recommender—systems are beneficial to service providers as well as users by reducing the transaction costs of finding and selecting items online like in a shopping environment. Recommendation—systems are also proven to make improved decision processes of quantity and quality of searches. For instance, in e-commerce a recommender—system can improve revenues, simply because they are more effective means of selling products. In other field’s libraries, recommender—systems help users by permitting them to move beyond catalog searches. In this light, the need to use precise recommendation techniques within a system that can provide pertinent and reliable recommendations for users is of utmost importance.

Various approaches for structuring recommender—systems have been developed, that can make use of collaborative filtering content-based or hybrid filtering. Collaborative filtering technique is the most well-known and the most commonly implemented. Collaborative filtering recommends selects and identify items other users with similar taste have chosen and it uses their opinion to recommend items to a searching user. Collaborative recommender—systems have been implemented in different application areas. As an example, the Social Computing Research at the University of Minnesota “GroupLens” is a news-based database design which uses collaborative methods for assisting a researcher find articles from a massive news database construct.

Another example is Amazon which makes use of a topic diversification algorithm to advance its recommendation. The system uses a collaborative filtering method by generating a matrix of similar items offline through the use of item-to-item connection in the matrix. The system also recommends other products which are similar in accordance with a users’ purchase profile.

Here is a diagram and a rating matrix produced by:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/sc...

Rating Matrix

“Collaborative filtering (CF) in the newer sense, is a method of making automatic predictions (filtering) about the interests of a user by collecting preferences or taste information from many users (collaborating). The underlying assumption of the collaborative filtering approach is that if a person A has the same opinion as a person B on an issue, A is more likely to have B's opinion on a different issue than that of a randomly chosen person.”

“Memory-based CF can be achieved in two ways through user-based and item-based techniques. User based collaborative filtering technique calculates similarity between users by comparing their ratings on the same item, and it then computes the predicted rating for an item by the active user as a weighted average of the ratings of the item by users similar to the active user where weights are the similarities of these users with the target item.”

Models are developed using different data mining, machine-learning-algorithms in order to predict users' rating of unrated items. Among these model are: Bayesian analysis, clustering models, latent semantic models such as singular value decomposition matrix (SVD), probabilistic latent semantic analysis, multiple multiplicative factor, latent Dirichlet allocation and Markov chains decision process based models as the most commonly used machine learning algorithms.

Dimensionality reduction methods are used as a complementary procedure to improve sturdiness and accuracy of memory-based approach. Methods like singular value decomposition (SVD), principle component analysis (PCA) are both known as latent factor models, which compress a user’s-item matrix into a low-dimensionality representation of latent factors in the data.

Memory-based

This Technique is applied in user rating data to compute the similarity between users or items.

Model-based

In this method, models are developed using different algorithms for data mining and machine learning to predict ratings of unrated items.

Hybrid

A number of applications combine the memory-based and the model-based CF algorithms to overcome the limitations of both approaches and to improve prediction performance. Nevertheless, they have increased complexity and are expensive to implement. They are mainly used commercially, such as Google news recommender—system.

Current Algorithms in Use:

· Memory-based algorithms

· Model-based algorithms

· Item-based collaborative filtering

· Personality Diagnosis

· Single Value Decomposition (SVD)

· Principle Component Analysis (PCA)

· Association Rules

Commonly there are two similarity measurements the Pearson correlation coefficient and the other is called vector similarity. These two measures are identified by Breese, D.Heckerman, and C.Kadie in their work“Empirical analysis of predictive algorithms for collaborative filtering.”

The quality of predictions ar good but It uses the entire database every time it makes a prediction, and so, it depends on memory availability which could make it very slow.

Artificial Neural network (ANN) is an architecture of many connected neurons or nodes which are arranged in layers in methodical ways. The connections between neurons have weights depending on the amount of influence one neuron or node has on another. There are some advantages in using neural networks in some special problem situations.

Neuroph Studio is free Java Neural Network development environment on top of NetBeans Platform based on Neuroph framework. It has been licensed under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). http://neuroph.sourceforge.net/d...

In terms of cost structure and management, what is the significance of free trade zones for firms involved in global trade?

This question has many legs involving not only free trade but trade finance which are inseparable from international trade in general.

In order to address the issues involved in these complex parts of trade some definitions are necessary to assemble the puzzle into a clear picture.

Special Economic Zones as defined by The World Bank: “A free-trade zone (FTZ) is a specific class of special economic zone. It is a geographic area where goods may be landed, stored, handled, manufactured, or reconfigured, and re-exported under specific customs regulation and generally not subject to customs duty. Free trade zones are generally organized around major seaports, international airports, and national frontiers—areas with many geographic advantages for trade.”

The historical record shows that Shannon, Ireland has claimed to be the first "modern" free trade zone that was established in 1959. It follows that the Shannon Zone was started to help the city airport adjust to a radical change in aircraft technology that permitted longer range aircraft to avoid a required refueling stops at Shannon. The Irish Government saw it as a way to maintain employment around the airport and continue generating revenue for the Irish economy. The gamble turned out to be a huge success which still is in operation today.

Special economic zones (SEZs) have been established in many countries for the purpose of trial and error on the implementation of liberal market economy principles. The change in terminology has been driven by the trade rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO) which prohibits members from offering certain types of fiscal incentives to promote the exports of goods.

Many a times the domestic governments pay part of the initial cost of industrial parks for factory setup which critics contend that it loosens environmental protections and any rules regarding treatment of workers, and in exchange not demand payment of taxes for the next few years. However, when the taxation-free honeymoon years are over, the corporation that set up the factory will just pack up and leave. Starting over an operations elsewhere would be less expensive than paying owed taxes. In most cases, it results in taking the host government to the bargaining table with more demands, while parent companies in the United States are rarely held accountable.

Political writer Naomi Klein has also criticized the transient nature of FTZs and has made the factory closures connection to the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

There are several other operations that take place in many countries for the fiscal benefit of trading corporations. For instance this type of fiscal advantage takes place in what is known as a Bonded Logistics Park which is a type of special economic zone. Customs arrangements are similar to that of a bonded warehouse but over a specific geographic area such as a seaport, airport, or park.

Under this fiscal regime goods may be stored, repackage or undergo manufacturing operations without payment of duty.

An entrepôt in French means a transshipment port, city, or trading post where merchandise may be imported, stored or traded, usually to be exported again. Entrepôts were especially significant in the Middle Ages, when mercantile shipping grew exponentially between Europe and its colonial empires in the Americas and Asia. The spice trade for instance had long trade routes, which led to a much higher market price than the original purchase price after transportation, handling, waste and pilferage were added. For these reasons many traders did not want to travel the whole route, relying more on the entrepôts between the shipping lanes to sell their goods. Amsterdam is a good example of an Entrepôt in the early trading routes existing in the 17th-century.

There is still another (illegal in most cases) method employed even today for completing a commercial transaction and is called triangular trades which are not uncommon in global commerce today. In many a case, importers who purchase goods from an enterprise, might not be purchasing those goods from the manufacture but rather from a trader who might be located elsewhere in the world. Therefore, the actual movement of the goods does not accurately represent the transaction taking place. Although, the goods may be moving directly from the factory to the importer, the financial transactions tracks on a different route. Here is where the commercial transaction can cross illegality because the shipping documentation must also match all the commercial transactions within the shipment and where corruption sets in false claims.

For example, a simple triangular trade takes place when a factory sells goods to a trader, who in turn sells the same goods to an importer. In this case, a bill of lading needs to be issued for every transaction taking place, so a second set, or switch bill of lading, needs to be issued for this shipment. In this second set of bills of lading the trader becomes the shipper and the importer the consignee.

Generally, a switch bill of lading is used to conceal the identity of the manufacturer for the trader is selling the goods to an importer adding a commission and so, does not want to reveal the identity of the enterprise from which they are procuring the goods. This type of transaction is commonly legal but it can become illegal when the trader is handling a controlled trade where the final consignee is not revealed to Customs.

There are three kinds of bills of lading:

• A straight bill of lading means the carrier received payment in advance.
• An order bill of lading means the goods will ship before payment is received.
• An endorsed bill of lading is signed by the shipper and transfers title of the goods upon delivery. (Bl’s titles are financial instruments which can be traded during transit of the shipment).
• An endorsed bill of lading is a document of title, and a very important financial instrument and a security trade able in transit. This issue enters into another area of international trade referred to as Trade Finance.

https://tradefinanceanalytics.co...

Trade finance is applicable when financing is needed by buyers and sellers to complete a trade cycle that has a funding gap but it can also be used as a form of risk mitigation.

Trade finance helps settle the conflicting commercial transaction needs of the exporter and the importer. For instance, an exporter might wish to mitigate the risk of not getting paid a pre-sale agreement by the importer. By the same measure the importer wants to mitigate a supply risk from the exporter shipping sub-standard goods. Therefore, the function of trade finance is to act as a risk mediator of purchase or supply of merchandise in a commercial transaction while providing the seller with prompt receivables and the buyer with extended credit.

When the importer is another manufacturer using parts for the assembly of a finish product the commercial transaction becomes a supply chain financial mechanism.

A typical financial mediator service offering from a bank will include:

Letters of credit (LC)

Bills for collection

Shipping Insurance

Import financing

Performance bonds

Export LC advising

LC confirmation

LC release against documentation

Export finance

Export financing

Over the years the—terms of trade finance—has been shifting away from this weighty method of conducting international trade business. Today, it is estimated that over 80% of global trade is conducted on an open account basis because the largest amount of trade volume and value takes place among transnational corporations.

Open account transactions are common among large corporations that trade in supply chain manufacturing for a continuing flow of goods rather than specific transactions. This extension of payment terms is much cheaper for the corporates and offers mutual benefits where payment-supply risk is minimized to one shipment.

Factoring, receivables factor happens when a company buys a debt obligation or invoice from another company. Factoring is a form of invoice discounting for cash in many financial markets. Accounts receivable are discounted by a risk factor of profit upon the settlement of the debt.

Structured commodity finance (SCF) is split into three main commodity groups:

• Metals & mining
• Energy
• Soft commodities such agricultural crops

SCF provides liquidity management and risk mitigation for the production, purchase and sale of commodities and materials. This is done by isolating assets, which have relatively predictable cash flow attached to them through pricing prediction, from the corporate borrower and using them to mitigate risk and secure credit from a lender. A corporation might also borrow against a commodity’s expected worth at the landing destination.

Export credit agencies (ECA’s) can be governmental or private institutions that provide international trade finance, credit insurance guarantees, or both. Most developed countries have ECA’s available for traders. Traditionally, in order to approve a transaction ECA’s would require a large percentage of domestically produced content to guarantee a loan; nonetheless, as financial crisis affect jobs ECA’s reduce content limits. For example: Export Development Canada requires just 20% of content to be produced domestically, compared to UK Export Finance which requires 30-70% and the USA requirements short-term transactions for eligible goods and services that must include more than 50 percent U.S. content.

Why are free trade agreements secret?

There are two schools of thought regarding secrecy in the negotiation of trade agreements:

1. Ratification is more likely because the lack of transparency makes it harder for special interest to rally against the treaty by focusing criticism on an unpopular aspect of the agreement.

2. Others believe that secrecy makes it easier for special interests to seize benefits from the agreement at the public’s expense.

Between these two well held views are the policy makers walking a tight rope in a balancing act between private and public interest.

For instance, the European Commission has sustained the covert nature of the negotiations by introducing a new regulation, “allowing only politicians to view the text in a secure 'reading room' in Brussels.” According to EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström, this was allegedly necessary because of "important vulnerabilities in the last rounds of negotiations."

In this atmosphere of secrecy of using secret reading rooms, signing “confidentiality agreements and having mobile devices be surrendered a maximum of 8 people are allowed in a reading room at one time, and the computers available have no internet connection. “

The logical explanation of these extraordinary security measures during the talks is that the agreement will include terms that would certainly have push back from the average citizen. The most controversial issue is the Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS) which gives un-elected transnational corporations officials the power to dictate the policies of democratically elected governments.

Under these circumstances the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP), is not a free trade agreement – rather, it is yet another example of “managed trade”. Keeping negotiations secret has certainly spelled a question mark over the intentions underlining the deal or whether it will be in the best interests of American, EU citizens, or any other citizen whose country is currently engaged in secret talks.

As a result, the world is questioning in a great debate about new trade agreements that have outcomes more in line with “managed trade”. As a matter of fact so called “free-trade agreements”; are in fact managed trade agreements, custom-made to corporate interests, mainly in the US and the European Union. Today, such deals have been renamed “partnerships,” such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). But in reality these are not partnerships of equals for the US effectively commands the terms of an agreement. Nevertheless, the so call “partners” are becoming increasingly more resistant to bullying into accepting undesirable terms.

Moreover, these agreements reach outside trade into governing investment and intellectual property rights. The most challenging issues are the imposition of unwarranted changes to a country’s legal, judicial, and regulatory charters, without input or accountability from any democratic institution.

Investor protection has become one of the most a thorny question on how to protect investors against the risk of a rogue government seizing their property. But these provisions are not focused on that issue, in fact, there have been very few expropriations in recent decades, and investors who want to protect themselves can buy insurance from the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, a World Bank affiliate. The US and other governments provide similar insurance.

Opponents argue that the real intent of these “protective measure” is to block health, environmental, safety, and financial regulations meant to protect corporate interests. The provisions give companies the ability to sue governments for compensation if a reduction of expected profits resulting from regulatory changes occurs.

This is not an academic issue for in February 2010, Philip Morris filed a complaint against Uruguay arguing that “Uruguay's anti-smoking legislation devalues its cigarette trademarks and investments in the country.” In July 2016, after 6 years, the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) ruled in favor of Uruguay. Australia has also obtained a favorable ruling against the tobacco company. In this case, Philip Morris was demanding to be compensated for lost profits because labeling was discouraging smoking.

Now the same interest groups are attempting an end to democratic processes by inserting such requirements in trade bills, while the contents are being kept secret from the public. Leaks had been the only source of information from government officials who seem more committed to democratic processes than protecting corporations.

Joseph E. Stiglitz, Professor at Columbia University and a Nobel Laureate in Economics writes:

“Rules and regulations determine the kind of economy and society in which people live. They affect relative bargaining power, with important implications for inequality, a growing problem around the world. The question is whether we should allow rich corporations to use provisions hidden in so-called trade agreements to dictate how we will live in the twenty-first century. I hope citizens in the US, Europe, and the Pacific answer with a resounding no.”

If a transaction is done online, what is POS?

Alfonso Llanes, studied at Florida International University

Answered just now

Point of sale is a term that has been in use for many decades in commodity trade, mainly, international ocean transportation. It merely means that the price of the commodity is calculated from the point where it is physically located i.e. Port, warehouse, dock, grain elevator at spout etc.

Some examples of point of sale include:

• London Metal Exchange, grade A cathodes, spot price, CIF European ports
• London Metal Exchange, aluminum standard grade, spot price, minimum purity 99.5 percent, CIF U.K. ports
• China import Iron Ore Fines 62% FE spot price CFR Tianjin port
• Malaysian, straits, minimum 99.85 percent purity, Kuala Lumpur Tin Market
• EU import price, unpacked sugar, CIF European ports.
• Sugar Central American and Ecuador, U.S. importer's price FOB U.S. ports
• Georgia docks, ready to eat whole body chicken, packed in ice, spot price

In addition, transportation companies also make use of point of sale pricing whether the commodity is sold on board a vessel, alongside a vessel, at warehouse or other location in order to calculate freight charges for transportation, cargo handling, stevedores, dunning, port equipment rental and so on.

In recent years the concept has been applied to retail sales that use computers and software not only for pricing the item but for accounting, inventory control, taxes, sales history etc. If one is trying to figure out what it means in a bill it refers to a purchase made in-person at a retailer.

A point of sale software system (POS) is a combination of devices and software for keeping track of transactions and effecting sales. They can be complicated programs that integrate with other systems for intranet accounting system.

Today, companies using a POS system are able to run reports based on sales, supervise employee performance, recall what people bought on past visits and confirm that they are keeping the accurate stock on their shelves. A POS system saves time to store owners, bookkeepers and sales associates by performing repetitive tasks and automating manual processes.

Using a POS as the central app in a retail store system ensures that the owner gets the most from inventory, and the best returns from a brick & mortar store. This integration also allows to sell everywhere from one inventory source with all products listed and available in-store and online.

1 View

What does data management do?

The official definition provided by Data Management Association (DAMA) International, is: "Data Resource Management is the development and execution of architectures, policies, practices and procedures that properly manage the full data lifecycle needs of an enterprise." This definition is broad and includes a number of professions which may not have direct technical contact with lower-level data management, like relational database management.”

Data Collection and Analysis

in the 1980′s the notion of "Data Management" ascended as technology moved from sequential processing cards, then tape to random access processing. And now, it was technically possible to store a single data point in a single place and access that data using a random access disk. As applications became interactive it was obvious that both data management and processes management were equally important. If the data was not well defined, the application data would render poor results if on the other hand the process wasn't well defined, it became awkward to meet user needs.

Data analysis, also known as data analytics, is the process of examining, purging, converting, and modeling data with the aim of learning useful information, making inferences, and supporting decision-making. As a result of this evolution data analysis has developed multiple aspects and approaches, covering diverse modeling techniques under a variety of labels as it applies to different business, science, and social disciplines domains.

Data mining is a particular analytical technique that focuses on modeling and detection for predictive analysis rather than purely descriptive purposes. At the same time, business intelligence covers data analysis that depends on aggregation, focusing mainly on business information.

With the advent of powerful computing power another area of data analysis surged and it is being updated as it is being developed referred to as “Big Data” analysis that can operate with multiple algorithms designed to execute custom functionality for the user.

How do you clear alerts as a compliance analyst?

Alfonso Llanes, studied at Florida International University

Answered just now

Important Industry Anti-Money Laundering Topics can be found at:

http://www.dominion-advisors.com...

However, compliance monitoring depends on the industry being monitored. In essence, auditors of regulation compliance are employed throughout private industry and government agencies tasked with finding violators or errors of compliance. Complete and compliant alert analysis must provide the auditor, or regulator, with important information about what the alert is about who was involved, the type of activity, and why the auditor decided to close the alert or send it for further review.

Alert analysis is not a process where Suspicious Activity Reports (SAR’s) are written. Alert analysis is about clearing out the low value alerts and defining which alerts need be investigated.

Let’s look at an example from the shipping industry regulated by the Federal Maritime Commission for ocean cargo, Surface Transportation Board for rail cargo, the Federal Highway Administration for trucking cargo and the Federal Aviation Administration for air cargo.

Each agency is responsible for making sure vendors of transportation services follow the regulatory concepts embedded in commerce and trade. These can include cargo tariffs for conditions; description and freight charges for such described carriage service tariff. Freight tariffs when applied are one area that regulators or independent industry auditors must monitor for compliance. Other areas of compliance in the transportation industry include monitoring:

Equipment

Packaging

Handling

Storage

Border Crossings

Ports of Entry or Departure

Customs, Duties, According to the Official Harmonized Tariff Schedule. Also, Fees and Taxes that might apply.

In conclusion, a compliance auditor can wear many hats depending on the regulated industry that needs to be supervised such as: Financial, banking, industrial, manufacturing, and transportation sectors among others.

Banks , non-bank lenders and brokers need to comply with a recent set of laws that regulate the mortgage industry. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has implemented regulations that requires all non-bank institutions to comply with laws regarding Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs).