rafmacalaba/data-use-mentions-extended huggingface dataset:
The data are then aggregated on a yearly basis and; thus, they correspond to the total flights that occurred during the year between a unique pair of origin and destination, measured as the log of the yearly total number of seats available on the incoming flights (LN_SEATS).

Finally, data on Instagram posts, as a proxy of digital presence, are also collected for studying STP tourism performance. These data consist of the daily counts of posts containing #hashtags following #travel[COUNTRYNAME] pattern or similar, if applicable, from January 2016 to October 2018. These hashtags contain the most relevant posts to this task. Construction is based on Instagram API output following a query of said hashtags on a global scale using a unique data access.

Other country-level information (GDP, population, exports, prices, nominal exchange rates) is used as control variables and taken from the World Development Indicators database. The variables are used in logs and they are given by LN_GDP, LN_POP and LN_X. The real exchange rate indicators are constructed using the exchange rate and prices of the country and with respect to the euro area, the United States and the United Kingdom. These are given by the variables, RER_EURO, RER_US and RER_POUND, respectively.

Over the last two decades, STP experienced major changes regarding its tourism industry. In order to construct a comparison group, STP performance is studied in several dimensions with respect to other “similar” tourism destinations. First, this note uses islands that are at a similar distance with respect to major tourism origins (i.e., Europe, the United States). The list of countries used for this group is Cabo Verde (CPV), Madagascar (MDG), Maldives (MDV), Mauritius (MUS), and the Seychelles (SYC). The econometric analysis below expands this control group to include Caribbean and Pacific islands as well as some other countries with strong tourism sectors.

**IIIa. Baseline random-effects model**

This first model establishes correlation and
3.5 months) of costs covered, and half of the observations exhibit less than one month of liquidity.<sup>7</sup> _Uncertainty_ : Following Altig et al. (2022), we rely on a measure of uncertainty computed using firm owners’ and directors’ forecasts about their own outcomes over different scenarios (e.g., normal, optimistic, and pessimistic) as well as the probability distributions associated with these scenarios. This information is used to construct two indices: the first

> 5The Mobility Index is based on Google mobility reports around transit stations. Specifically, and following Apedo-Amah et al. (2020) and Cirera et al. (2021), we construct a smoothed index as the weighted average of 30-day periods from the start of the pandemic until the date of the survey. The 30-day period average just before the survey has a weight of 1, the average from day 31-60 has a weight of 1/2, the average from day 61 to 90 has a weight of 1/3, and so on until the start of the pandemic.

> 6In the first wave of data collection, the share of firms that reported falling or expecting to fall into arrears was 74%.

> 7Across the two rounds where this variable was collected, the variation is high. In the first round, firms reported around 8 weeks, while in the second, it increased to around 16.

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firms to formalize may be more cost-effective than the interventions here which instead provided services and support to firms.

# **6.6 Why don’t more firms formalize?**

In the third treatment group, which combined all packages of incentives and in which the impact was the greatest, the formalization rate was 18.6 percent (16.3 percentage points more than in the control group). This impact is greater than for similar programs in other contexts (Bruhn and McKenzie, 2014) in which formalization is also linked to taxes. But it means that even though this type of program had a significant impact, the majority of the informal firms still remain informal. This is true even if we consider specific sub-population like businesses operating outside the market or with an owner who went to secondary school, for which impact on formalization remained below 23 percentage points.

Why do most firms remain informal? A first potential explanation is the presence of other legal barriers to formalizing. Data from our midline survey reveals that only 54 percent of informal business owners have legal identification needed to formalization (either a passport or a Beninese ID card). In contrast, 85 percent have a birth certificate and 75 percent an electoral card, so amending the process to allow these alternative forms of identification to be used would alleviate this constraint for many firms. However, lack of identification does not seem to be the binding constraint to formalizing for most informal firms: only 0.6 percent of the control group said this was one of the two main reasons for not formalizing (table A8).

Our endline survey asked informal business owners the two main reasons why they were still informal (table A8). The most common responses in the control group were that firms did not see any benefits from doing so (32 percent), or that they do not want to have to pay more taxes (26 percent). The other main reason was that they viewed the process as too costly, complicated, or time-consuming (
# **1. Introduction**

A large literature has examined the difference in productivity and performance between businesses owned or run by women vs. men. The general finding is that women-owned or run firms perform worse than men-owned or run firms (Klapper and Parker 2010; Rijkers and Costa 2012; HallwardDriemeier 2013; Campos and Gassier 2017; Gui-Diby et al. 2017; Islam et al., 2020; Essers et al. 2021). Factors that contribute to widening or narrowing of the gender-based gap are identified. Most studies in the area focus on the formal or registered firms. The few studies on informal firms that exist are mostly on the informal firms in rural areas. There is much to uncover about genderbased differences within the informal sector, especially in urban areas. The present paper contributes to this literature using firm-level survey data on informal or unregistered firms in 55 cities across 14 developing countries. The results show that labor productivity of female owned/run firms is on average lower by 15.2 percent (or 0.165 log point) compared to men owned/run firms. The difference is robust to several controls for firm, industry, and country characteristics. Using the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition technique, we find the primacy as contributors to the productivity gap of factors such as education level of the owner/manager, manager experience, use of capital equipment, ties with the formal sector, and security payments that informal firms need to make to remain informal. For most of these factors, difference in their level rather than in their returns to labor productivity is what contributes to the productivity gap. As we discuss below, this is important from the policy point of view as it may be easier to improve the availability of resources to women than improve to the returns of resources to women. Several other specific and general policy recommendations to improve labor productivity of informal women-owned firms follow from our results.

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9 changes accompanying urbanization play a generally positive role in overall poverty reduction.” (pp 690‐ 691).

We will discuss specific mechanisms underlying these types of findings, which are quite common in the literature. However, they still only address urbanization in the aggregate. What about the composition of urbanization, in particular, the relative growth of small towns and big cities? This is more difficult to assess—the greater is the level of disaggregation, the weaker is the availability and quality of relevant data. However, Christiaensen and Todo (2014) use such disaggregated data from 51 countries to ask the following question: “....if two economies were to grow at the same speed, would the rate of poverty reduction be faster when people move out of agriculture to larger cities (empirically defined as exceeding 1 million people) or when they move out of agriculture into small towns and the surrounding rural economy?” (Christiaensen, De Weerdt and Kanbur, 2015, p. 3). For 1980‐2004, Christiaensen and Todo (2014) find that there is indeed an additional effect on poverty reduction when people move into secondary towns and the rural non‐farm economy from agriculture (Table 1). Of course growth matters for poverty reduction. But for given growth rate migration to secondary towns matter more than migration to large cities.

But even when leaving growth out, using a totally reduced form as in Ravallion, Chen and Sangraula (2007) cited above, the authors find that it is moves to secondary towns that reduce poverty, not population expansion of the cities. This suggests that the inclusive nature of growth patterns associated with secondary town expansion outweighs the possible loss in terms of growth, at least on average, in this sample of experiences from across developing countries. This is somewhat surprising as larger cities are considered to yield faster economic growth because of larger agglomeration economies, as emphasized by the New Economic Geography School. Yet, recent evidence looking at the effect of average city
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents summary statistics on the passport data, Section 3 examines the relationship between passport costs and measures of governance and Section 4 then relates the per capita migrant stock of a country to passport costs and other determinants of migration. Section 5 summarizes the evidence on the time costs involved in obtaining a passport, Section 6 documents a number of legal restrictions on emigration and their relationship with migrant stock and Section 7 concludes.

# **2. Passport Costs around the World**

Data on the cost of a passport in the country of issue was collected in October 2005. The principal form of collection was through faxes, emails and telephone calls to the consular offices of each country having an embassy or consulate office in the United States. Other sources of information included websites of passport authorities, telephone calls and faxes to the relevant government ministry in charge of issuing passports in countries, and through staff in World Bank country offices. Passport costs were collected in local currency, and converted into United States dollars at the prevailing interbank exchange rate.<sup>4</sup> After several follow-up attempts, data were able to be collected for passport costs in 127 countries.

In many countries there is not a single passport cost. Passport costs may differ for children and adults, for first-time passports compared to renewals, and for expedited service compared to regular service. Several countries also offer the options as to the duration of the passport (for example, 1, 5 or 10 years) and as to the number of pages

> 4 Obtained from <u>www.oanda.com and www.xe.com.</u>

- 4 -
3 This paper assesses the possible contribution of various factors to the decline of infant mortality in Kenya using a Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition analysis of changes in infant mortality as measured in Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) conducted in 2003 and 2008. Previous studies such as Rajaratnam et al (2010) have documented the recent declines in mortality of infants and older children, many studies have documented the effectiveness of insecticide-bednet nets (ITN) in preventing malaria (see Lengeler 2004 for a review), and various studies have tracked changes in child survival in response to particular interventions, generally in narrowly defined populations (e.g. Kleinschmidt et al. 2009 and Ndirangu et al. 2010). This paper makes several contributions. First, the Oaxaca-Blinder analysis allows for an analysis which simultaneously considers several possible drivers of the change observed over time. Second, the use of DHS data makes it possible to examine changes for Kenya as a whole. Third, the use of local malaria prevalence data makes it possible to allow for a varying impact of ITNs by malaria prevalence.

The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 of the paper describes patterns in infant mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa. Section 3 presents the changes in infant mortality and the possible set of drivers in Kenya along with an analysis of correlates of infant mortality. Section 4 focuses on the Oaxaca-Blinder analysis. Section 5 considers what these results imply about the costeffectiveness of bednet interventions, and Section 6 concludes.

# **2 The Infant Mortality Decline in Sub-Saharan Africa**

A broad decline in infant mortality has occurred across Sub-Saharan Africa. Table 1 shows both infant (under age 1) and under-5 mortality for countries with recent Demographic and Health Surveys.<sup>1</sup> The most recent DHS-based estimates indicate infant mortality to be below 100 per 1000 live births in all 20 countries for which post-2005 DHS data is available and to be falling in 18 of those 20 countries. This paper focuses on infant mortality, but similar trends are found for under-5 mortality. Among
ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF RENEWABLE ENERGY POLICIES ON DECARBONIZATION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES Clara Galeazzi, Jevgenijs Steinbuks and Laura Diaz Anadón<sup>1</sup>

**Keywords:** developing countries, energy mix, renewable energy policies, RISE index

**JEL:** O13, Q48

1 Galeazzi: Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge; Belfer Center, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Steinbuks: Senior Economist, Office of the Chief Economist, Infrastructure VP, the World Bank. Diaz Anadón: Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resource Governance, Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge; Belfer Center, John F. Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University.

The authors would like to thank Juliette Besnard, Vivien Foster, Tigran Parvanyan, and Elisa Portale for their helpful comments and suggestions and Eric Jardim for outstanding research assistance. They appreciate the financial support from the World Bank Energy Sector Management Assistance Program, the Department of Land Economy at the University of Cambridge, and the Stapley Trust. They also appreciate the World Bank Energy Sector Management Assistance Program for sharing the RISE dataset used in this paper.
Policy Research Working Paper 6042

# **Abstract**

The Nepal Poverty Alleviation Fund is a World Bank supported community-driven development program. Its objective is to improve rural welfare, particularly for groups that have traditionally been excluded for reasons of gender, ethnicity, caste, and location. Since its launch in 2004, the Fund has covered the 40 poorest districts of the country, supported some 15,000 community organizations, and benefited more than 2.5 million people. This paper attempts to estimate the impact of this large-scale program using a randomized phasein approach, in which certain localities are randomly selected for earlier intervention than others. Using two rounds of survey data and a difference-in-difference combined with instrumental variable estimation method, it finds statistically significant causal impact of the program on key welfare outcomes. The treatment-onthe-treated estimate on real per capita consumption is 19 percent growth. Other impacts include a 19 percentage points decline on incidence of food insecurity (defined as food sufficiency for six months or less) and a 15 percentage points increase in the school enrollment rate among 6–15 year-olds. Impacts (positive or negative) are yet to be detected on indicators associated with child malnutrition, social capital, and empowerment. The policy implications of these results should be of interest to the government and to development partners in determining what may be effective instruments to deliver services to marginalized communities in what remains a fragile and difficult political environment.

This paper is a product of the Sustainable Development Unit and the Human Development Unit, South Asia Region. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank. org. The authors may be contacted at dparajuli@worldbank.org.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out
discrimination. But they also have an indirect impact on employment and wage opportunities through the demand side: buyers might pay lower prices or refuse to buy at all if they know that producers exploit child labor or mistreat employees.

The Cambodian and Sri Lankan governments had different strategies to improve working conditions in the apparel sector. Sri Lanka, as a part of its Five-Year Strategy, designed an international image-building campaign, _Garments without Guilt_ , in 2006 and a local imagebuilding campaign _Abhimani_ (“pride”) in 2008 to improve the image of the apparel sector and working conditions. Despite these efforts, working conditions are still far from ideal. As mentioned earlier, labor costs in Sri Lanka are lower than in China and India. Besides low wages, issues such as the lack of appointment letters, long working hours, high work intensity, and, in particular,how the right of association and collective bargaining (as many firms are reluctant to recognize trade unions) have been problematic in parts of the apparel sector, particularly in smaller firms (Staritz and Frederick 2011b).

Cambodia has a good record of labor compliance because of the _Better Factories Cambodia_ program that began in 1999. Through this program, compliance with international labor standards was directly linked to the apparel export quotas that Cambodia received from the United States. In2004, the Foreign Investment Advisory Service survey of the 15 largest U.S. and EU buyers of Cambodian apparel, Cambodia was rated the highest on “level of labor standards” and “protecting the rights of workers to organize unions” among Asian apparelexporting countries, including Bangladesh, China, Thailand, and Vietnam(Staritz and Frederick 2011a). The MFA phase-out coincided with the expiration of the U.S. quotas in 2004, which eliminated the incentive motive of _Better Factories Cambodia_ (Staritz and Frederick 2011a). But, the Cambodian government encouraged the apparel sectorto continue with the program to maintain its reputation for compliance with good labor standards in order to remain attractive to the foreign investors.

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which we have trade data, although coverage is not complete in all years. Our third measure of institutional quality is Protection of Property Rights; it is taken from the Heritage Foundation dataset, is available from 1995 and

> 21 Available at Rose’s web site, http://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/arose/ 22

> See Helpman, Melitz and Rubinstein (2005) for a framework that does not impose this restriction.

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destructive falls in real wages in both Indonesia and Argentina. Employment patterns were different, however. In Indonesia, female employment fell markedly less than male employment, as women entered self and family employment to offset job losses in the formal sector (Smith et al, 2002). Employment in medium and large manufacturing firms also declined more for men than women, as women were overrepresented in larger and exporting firms, which were more resilient to the crisis. (Hallward-Driemeier et al, 2010). During Argentina’s 1995 crisis, however, employment fell equally for both men and women (Mckenzie, 2004).

_Most preliminary studies of the current crisis have mostly emphasized large increases in youth unemployment._<sup>_7_</sup> Most of this evidence is from OECD countries, and indicates that youth unemployment skyrocketed in 2009. In addition, there are some indications that youth were more likely to shift to informal sector employment in six Latin American countries (Ha et al., 2010). This appears to be more consistent with past experience in Indonesia than Argentina. In Indonesia, employment declined slightly more for youth than adults, largely because older women rejoined the labor force in large numbers. Young workers, particularly women, experienced somewhat larger wage declines than their older counterparts. In Argentina, meanwhile, young and old workers experienced similar wage and employment changes.

_Existing analyses of the labor market effects of the current crisis on men and women are mixed._ Preliminary ILO estimates suggest that men and women have experienced roughly equal increases in unemployment, from which they conclude that the downturn has affected male and female outcomes more or less equally (ILO, 2010). Other studies, mostly drawing on data from Europe and the US, suggest that men suffered larger unemployment increases than women due to their concentration in banking and finance, and export oriented industry sector (Barakat, et al, 2010, Eurostat 2009, Elsby 2010, World Bank 2010c).

_The experience of educated workers depends on the nature
tax revenues.<sup>5</sup> While this is an upper-bound estimate, it illustrates the significant order of magnitude of the offshore tax holiday scheme.<sup>6</sup>

> 4The benefits of the offshore regime are such that Nucifora and Rijkers (2014) notes that "domestic companies that start to export tend to divide themselves into two distinct entities: one dedicated to the onshore market and the other under the fully exporting offshore regime."

> 5Approximately USD PPP 3.5 billion, using the GDP PPP conversion rate of 0.67 in 2013. 6This is estimated from the firm-level data described below multiplying each offshore firm’s reported accounting profit by the general corporate tax rate. This is obviously an upper bound estimation as it takes into account neither the tax exemptions/incentives that reduce the effective rate, nor the possible

6
tensive margin impacts of SPS and TBT inclusion in PTAs being stronger for smaller firms. Our paper relates to three literatures. A first extensive literature studies the impacts of preferential trade agreements on trade using structural gravity equations. Some selected key papers are Baier and Bergstrand (2007); Baier et al. (2014); Mattoo et al. (2017); Larch et al. (2018); Baier et al. (2019); Correia et al. (2020); Disdier et al. (2020); Anderson and Yotov (2020). These papers provide evidence of a strong positive impact of PTAs on bilateral trade based on state-of-the-art estimates of gravity equations by PPML. Mattoo et al. (2017) use the same World Bank Deep Trade Agreements database that we exploit and show that deep agreements lead to more trade creation and less trade diversion than shallow (not deep) agreements.<sup>8</sup> We innovate relative to previous studies by being the first to examine the impact of SPS and TBT provisions in PTAs on exports at the firm-product level. To our knowledge, only two papers examine the impact of SPS and TBT liberalization in the context of PTAs between high-income (mostly the European Union) and developing countries and focusing on trade at the product level and find that such liberalization fosters trade, especially when enforceable international regulatory mechanisms are included (Disdier et al., 2014, 2020).

The second literature studies the role of harmonization and mutual recognition of standards for trade. Conceptually, discussions on the contrast between mutual recognition and harmonization of standards for trade are provided in Baldwin (2000) and Costinot (2008). Empirically, harmonization and mutual recognition of standards among high-income countries are shown to increase trade, with a larger effect for mutual recognition by Chen and Mattoo (2008). Disdier et al. (2014) find that the harmonization of TBT standards in PTAs between high-income countries and developing countries has a detrimental effect on their trade when the harmonization is