The costume culture of China is as old and varied as her long history (중국 소수민족의 복식 연구(1))
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- Journal of the Korean Society of Costume
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- v.26
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- pp.175-206
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- 1995
The costume culture of China is as old and varied as her long history. As China is a multiracial nation and consists of fifty-six min-ority races including Han race, there are not only fifty-six different costumes in China but each races' costume habit is very different. Therefore, Chinese penninsula can be considered an enor-mous exhibition center of the costumes. This study undertook on the assumption that the costumes' mainstream of Korea and east-northern Asia as well as that of China could be examined by investigating the minority races' costumes in the east-and west-northern areas of China. The process of evolution of the costume of a particular people, country or area is subject not only to constraints related to geography such as climate, topography or local products but is also affected by numorous environmental influences including cultural, economic, social and even pol-itical ones in terms of the selection of material, styling, color and standard of tailoring. In other words, things like philosophy of life, religious be-lief, aesthetic outlook, moral code, class system, degree of affluence, and cultural exchange will all be reflected directly or indirectly by features of a people's or country's style costume. Of course, there are several factors affecting to the style of costume of the minority people in China. However, the only three factors-geo-graphical and environmental, production method, and religious belef-will be touched in this study. First of all, the geograghical and eenviron-mental factor would be the decisive one because the costume should be designed to overcome the constraints of climate and geographical environ-ments. Accordingly, each race has an unique style of costume. The costume of the minority races in the northern parts are loose and wide, and made of warm furs. For instance, Mongolian robe has the quality of anti-wind, anti-cold and warmness, and the width of a sleeve is narrow and long. Secondly, the costume style can be said to be limited by the production pattern, when the geo-graphical environment was affected to decide the costume style, the production pattern was together affected to it . In case of Mongolian robe, they should satisfy the dual condition as the practical function. One is the condition that they should be fitted to the climate, and the other is the condition that they should be suit-able to the nomadic life. Mongolian robes are suitable to the nomadic peoples because they are designed for not only overcoming the cold wind and weather but being used as the bedquit at night. The costumes of Hoche people was made of the skin of the fish and wild animals because of their main means of living being fishing and hunting. Accordingly, their costumes are dur-able, warm and water-proof. Finally, the style of the costume is affected by the religious belief. In other words, the pattern in fashion is closely related with the religious be-lief or ancestor worship and nature worship. Ac-cordingly, the symbols of these worship are often emerged in the decoration of the costume. The design of costume of the people in the northern areas of China is very simple. It is related with their monotheism. On the other hand, the costumes of twen쇼 minority races in the east-northern parts of China can be devided into three racial groups such as the long robes of Man people and Mongols, Tunics of the peoples in the west-northern areas, and the pants and jackets of Hoche people. The minorority races all has not only the unique costume habit but their costumes are also related with their living style and production means.
The purpose of this research is to develop a prototype of the support system in order for team building associated with web-based project learning having applied Kolb's learning style. To accomplish this purpose, the following research tasks were performed. First, core idea in order to embody the system's value, key activities, tools that will support pertinent activities and the strategy so as to develop guidelines, etc. were devised and prepared. Second, a system was designed on the basis of structural model of teaching design, then after, interface was developed. The core factors in this system are inspection of learning style, organizing a team and team building. Above all, it is required to make learners know about learning environments, of which they are in favor, and also its distinctive features through inspection of learning style, and then focusing on learning style, a team should be organized insomuch as to accommodate a variety of learning styles as much as possible. For the purpose of team building, after learning style of each constituent member of the team has been made known, then the roles will be divided among the constituent members of the team so as to suit their individual characteristics referring to each of their learning styles that have been exposed. To verify the value of this system developed and efficiency thereof, a focus group interview was conducted. The focus group consisted of professionals, all from related fields. After the interview, the points required to make further improvements were elicited and taken care of by follow-up actions as needed. And having reflected such improvements made, the final system was developed. With this newly developed system, learners can get the results of inspection of learning style so quickly by performing inspection any time any where, and based on the results from such inspection, a team comprising dissimilar constituents who exhibit a variety of different propensities will be automatically organized. Thus, this system may be used not only for web-based project learning having unspecified persons elected as constituents, but in the offline space also.
With the continued globalization of world markets, transfer pricing has become one of the dominant sources of controversy in international taxation. Transfer pricing is the process by which a multinational corporation calculates a price for goods and services that are transferred to affiliated entities. Consider a Korean electronic enterprise that buys supplies from its own subsidiary located in China. How much the Korean parent company pays its subsidiary will determine how much profit the Chinese unit reports in local taxes. If the parent company pays above normal market prices, it may appear to have a poor profit, even if the group as a whole shows a respectable profit margin. In this way, transfer prices impact the taxable income reported in each country in which the multinational enterprise operates. It's importance lies in that around 60% of international trade involves transactions between two related parts of multinationals, according to the OECD. Multinational enterprises (hereafter MEs) exert much effort into utilizing organizational advantages to make global investments. MEs wish to minimize their tax burden. So MEs spend a fortune on economists and accountants to justify transfer prices that suit their tax needs. On the contrary, local governments are not prepared to cope with MEs' powerful financial instruments. Tax authorities in each country wish to ensure that the tax base of any ME is divided fairly. Thus, both tax authorities and MEs have a vested interest in the way in which a transfer price is determined, and this is why MEs' international transfer prices are at the center of disputes concerned with taxation. Transfer pricing issues and practices are sometimes difficult to control for regulators because the tax administration does not have enough staffs with the knowledge and resources necessary to understand them. The authors examine transfer pricing practices to provide relevant resources useful in designing tax incentives and regulation schemes for policy makers. This study focuses on identifying the relevant business and environmental factors that could influence the international transfer pricing of MEs. In this perspective, we empirically investigate how the management perception of related variables influences their choice of international transfer pricing methods. We believe that this research is particularly useful in the design of tax policy. Because it can concentrate on a few selected factors in consideration of the limited budget of the tax administration with assistance of this research. Data is composed of questionnaire responses from foreign firms in Korea with investment balances exceeding one million dollars in the end of 2004. We mailed questionnaires to 861 managers in charge of the accounting departments of each company, resulting in 121 valid responses. Seventy six percent of the sample firms are classified as small and medium sized enterprises with assets below 100 billion Korean won. Reviewing transfer pricing methods, cost-based transfer pricing is most popular showing that 60 firms have adopted it. The market-based method is used by 31 firms, and 13 firms have reported the resale-pricing method. Regarding the nationalities of foreign investors, the Japanese and the Americans constitute most of the sample. Logistic regressions have been performed for statistical analysis. The dependent variable is binary in that whether the method of international transfer pricing is a market-based method or a cost-based method. This type of binary classification is founded on the belief that the market-based method is evaluated as the relatively objective way of pricing compared with the cost-based methods. Cost-based pricing is assumed to give mangers flexibility in transfer pricing decisions. Therefore, local regulatory agencies are thought to prefer market-based pricing over cost-based pricing. Independent variables are composed of eight factors such as corporate tax rate, tariffs, relations with local tax authorities, tax audit, equity ratios of local investors, volume of internal trade, sales volume, and product life cycle. The first four variables are included in the model because taxation lies in the center of transfer pricing disputes. So identifying the impact of these variables in Korean business environments is much needed. Equity ratio is included to represent the interest of local partners. Volume of internal trade was sometimes employed in previous research to check the pricing behavior of managers, so we have followed these footsteps in this paper. Product life cycle is used as a surrogate of competition in local markets. Control variables are firm size and nationality of foreign investors. Firm size is controlled using dummy variables in that whether or not the specific firm is small and medium sized. This is because some researchers report that big firms show different behaviors compared with small and medium sized firms in transfer pricing. The other control variable is also expressed in dummy variable showing if the entrepreneur is the American or not. That's because some prior studies conclude that the American management style is different in that they limit branch manger's freedom of decision. Reviewing the statistical results, we have found that managers prefer the cost-based method over the market-based method as the importance of corporate taxes and tariffs increase. This result means that managers need flexibility to lessen the tax burden when they feel taxes are important. They also prefer the cost-based method as the product life cycle matures, which means that they support subsidiaries in local market competition using cost-based transfer pricing. On the contrary, as the relationship with local tax authorities becomes more important, managers prefer the market-based method. That is because market-based pricing is a better way to maintain good relations with the tax officials. Other variables like tax audit, volume of internal transactions, sales volume, and local equity ratio have shown only insignificant influence. Additionally, we have replaced two tax variables(corporate taxes and tariffs) with the data showing top marginal tax rate and mean tariff rates of each country, and have performed another regression to find if we could get different results compared with the former one. As a consequence, we have found something different on the part of mean tariffs, that shows only an insignificant influence on the dependent variable. We guess that each company in the sample pays tariffs with a specific rate applied only for one's own company, which could be located far from mean tariff rates. Therefore we have concluded we need a more detailed data that shows the tariffs of each company if we want to check the role of this variable. Considering that the present paper has heavily relied on questionnaires, an effort to build a reliable data base is needed for enhancing the research reliability.