rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
_Gender Equality and Economic Development: The Role for ICTs_ 7

# <u>The Environment Effect</u>

It has been documented that female education tends to improve the quantity and quality of education of children via the support and general environment an educated mother can provide her children. As such, because there would be effectively less female education at each level of male education, gender inequality in education has negative effects on the quality of overall education of the population, and consequently the labor force. In addition, there is some evidence indicating that similarity in educational levels at the household level tends to generate positive external effects on the quality of education. For example, as argued in Klasen (1999), it is likely that equally educated siblings can strengthen each other’s educational success through direct support and play inspired by educational activities. Similarly, couples with similar educational levels may promote each other’s life-long learning. In summary, having relatively more educated women tends to improve the intellectual environment at home, leading to a more productive workforce and higher economic growth. (Figure 7)

# <u>The Demographic Transition Effect</u>

It is been found that high female education is one of the significant causal factors of fertility decline. This is because educated women tend to marry at a later age and also tend to increase the time intervals between pregnancies, and consequently giving birth to a smaller number of babies. Studies, such as Bloom and Williamson (1997), have also found that that lower fertility rates initiates a process known as the demographic transition, which may give rise to a transitory increase in the rate of economic growth via a sequence of events. First, reduced fertility tends to lower the youth dependency burden<sup>3</sup> and the total dependency burden<sup>4</sup> , which tends to increase the supply of aggregate savings within an economy. Second, lower fertility rates tend to over time result in a larger working-age population share because of previously high population growth. The resultant larger labor force will boost economic growth and investment demand. This higher investment demand, together with the aforementioned increased in domestic savings, will result in an increase in the investment rate, which should again increase economic growth.

> 3 The youth dependency burden is defined as the ratio of the number of youths to the number of people in the working-age population.  More specifically

_Youth Dependency Burden_ = _<u>persons</u> of ages_ 14 _<u>years</u> and_ _<u>younger</u> persons of ages between_ 15 _and_ 64 4 The total dependency burden is defined as the ratio of the number of youths and the elderly to the number of people in the working-age population. More specifically _Total Dependency Burden_ = <u>(</u> _<u>persons</u> of ages_ 14 _<u>years</u> and_ _<u>younger</u>_ <u>)</u> + <u>(</u> _<u>persons</u> of ages_ 65 _<u>years</u> and older_ <u>)</u> _persons of ages between_ 15 _and_ 64
of civic organizations may help spread popular views and/or government policies and encourage conformity. In Sierra Leone, for instance, more social capital is associated with a greater respect of their chiefs (Acemoglu et al. 2014), indicating ease in implementing leader policies. Local social networks in German towns had aided the rise of the Nazi party (Satyanath et al. 2017). These papers suggest that a high level of trust may speed up pandemic spread under wrong signals from the government, such as when facing official signals undermining the severity of the pandemic. When the government sends out signals that the pandemic risks are not that great—as in the case of a delay in restricting social mobility by the government—the strong trust in government may amplify this perception, and result in worse pandemic spread. _We thus expect that government policy delay in restricting mobility results in greater damage on pandemic outcomes where there is more trust_ .

Relatedly, when a high trust and a high vulnerability are combined in a country, the greater social interactions in such societies facilitate the spread of the pandemic, resulting in more infections and/or higher mortality from the pandemic. _We thus expect that high-trust countries experience higher pandemic damages when they also have a higher vulnerability_ .

# **III. Data and measurements**

Our key data source is the COVID-19 Data Repository by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at JHU, which contains the latest data including confirmed COVID-19 cases and deaths in 188 countries (or regions) from the beginning of COVID-19 outbreak. It is updated daily, and we use data up to November 19, 2020. We construct two key COVID-19 outcomes: the number of confirmed cases per 1,000 residents, to measure the pandemic spread; and the death rate among the COVID-19 infected, to measure the pandemic mortality rate. The pandemic mortality rate captures pandemic severity, and it sheds light on the amount of consumption a society is willing to give up to contain the pandemic (Hall, Jones and Klenow 2020).

The dataset on government policy responses to the COVID-19 outbreak is the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT),<sup>4</sup> which tracks government policy responses to COVID-19 across 147 countries and time. We use it to define international and domestic mobility restriction delay (denoted as _DelayI_ and _DelayD_ ), respectively. _DelayI_ is delay in controlling the international travel, equals to the number of days, divided by 100, from the day

> 4 Data available at https://github.com/OxCGRT/COVID-policy-tracker, see Hale et al. (2020).

11
Park, Jooyoun (2012). “Does Occupational Training by the Trade Adjustment Assistance Program Really Help Reemployment? Success Measures as Occupation Matching,” _Review of International Economics_ , 20(5): 999-1016.

Pavcnik, Nina (2002). “Trade liberalization, exit, and productivity improvements: Evidence from Chilean plants.” _Review of Economic Studies_ , 69: 245-276.

Prina, Silvia (2013). “Who Benefited More from NAFTA: Small or Large Farmers? Evidence from Mexico,” _Review of Development Economics_ 17(3): 594–608.

Prina, Silvia (2015). “Effects of Border Price Changes on Agricultural Wages and Employment in Mexico,” _Journal of International Development_ 27(1): 112–132.

Topalova, Petia (2010). “Factor Immobility and Regional Impacts of Trade Liberalization: Evidence on Poverty from India,” _American Economic Journal: Applied Economics_ , 2(4): 1-41.

42
In Section 4 we complement this analysis with a non-structural empirical investigation using a cross section of 62 countries. In practice net foreign assets can be predicted fairly well based on a country’s wealth, population, and a measure of institutional quality that we take as an underlying determinant of productivity. Net foreign asset positions are positively related to wealth per capita and, controlling for that, negatively related to institutional quality. In particular, developing countries with better institutional quality (higher productivity) attract more capital inflows and retain more of their own people’s savings. In this empirical implementation, China is a large outlier, with a more positive net foreign asset position than would be predicted by its characteristics. That finding is consistent with the calibration result.

In Section 5 we then use the calibration and empirical models to investigate a number of plausible scenarios for the future. There are certainly different directions in which China’s economy could go, and quite a large existing literature with different views on just how significant productivity growth has been during China’s reform. One plausible scenario is that economic reform continues, including the shift from state to private ownership and deepening of financial sector reform. We draw on recent empirical analyses of productivity growth in Chinese industry that find significant productivity growth resulting in part from reallocation from state to private as well as significant further scope for this reallocation: for example, nearly two-thirds of the industrial capital stock is still under state control. This high reform scenario we model as continued improvement in China’s productivity relative to the rest of the world together with some moderation of the very high savings rates of recent years. Improvements in consumer finance, pension instruments, and health insurance should enable Chinese households to save less and increase welfare. The high reform scenario suggests that China will emerge by 2025 as a significant net debtor, and that a linear path of current account balances to achieve this would result in average deficits in the 5% of GDP range.

The opposite of the high reform scenario is a situation in which reforms stagnate or backtrack, with little further productivity gain relative to the rest of the world and continued high savings in the face of poorly functioning pension and health insurance systems. In this calibration China emerges as a smaller net debtor in 2025. One of our important findings, which may be counter-intuitive to some policy-makers, is that 3
dynamics and other policies not considered in this paper, such as investments in public charging infrastructure.

# 6. References

- Alberini, Anna, Markus Bareit, Massimo Filippini, and Adan L. Martinez-Cruz. 2018. “The Impact of Emissions-Based Taxes on the Retirement of Used and Inefficient Vehicles: The Case of Switzerland.” _Journal of Environmental Economics and Management_ 88: 234–58.

- Auerbach, Alan J. 2019. “Tax Equivalences and Their Implications.” _Tax Policy and the Economy_ 33: 81–107.

- Aznar, Alexandra et al. 2021. _Building Blocks of Electric Vehicle Deployment: A Guide for Developing Countries_ . https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1785089/ (October 14, 2021).

- Bansal, Prateek et al. 2021. “Willingness to Pay and Attitudinal Preferences of Indian Consumers for Electric Vehicles.” _Energy Economics_ 100: 105340.

- Barwick, Panle Jia, Shengmao Cao, and Shanjun Li. 2021. “Local Protectionism, Market Structure, and Social Welfare: China’s Automobile Market.” _American Economic Journal: Economic Policy_ , forthcoming.

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- Berry, Steven, James Levinsohn, and Ariel Pakes. 1995. “Automobile Prices in Market Equilibrium.” _Econometrica_ 63(4): 841.

- ———. 2004. “Differentiated Products Demand Systems from a Combination of Micro and Macro Data: The New Car Market.” _Journal of Political Economy_ 112(1): 68–105.

- Brambilla, Irene. 2005. _A Customs Union with Multinational Firms: The Automobile Market in Argentina and Brazil_ . Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research. http://www.nber.org/papers/w11745.pdf (September 22, 2021).

- Clerides, Sofronis. 2008. “Gains from Trade in Used Goods: Evidence from Automobiles.” _Journal of International Economics_ 76(2): 322–36.

- D’Haultfœuille, Xavier, Pauline Givord, and Xavier Boutin. 2014. “The Environmental Effect of Green Taxation: The Case of the French _Bonus/Malus_ .” _The Economic Journal_ 124(578): F444–80.

- Fershtman, Chaim, and Neil Gandal. 1998. “The Effect of the Arab Boycott on Israel: The Automobile Market.” _The RAND Journal of Economics_ 29(1): 193.

35
To calculate the volume of goods transported by these vehicles, we assume that:

- 250 trucks can carry 3.5 tons each, or a total of 875 tons;

- 100 small trucks can carry 0.5 tons each, or a total of 50 tons;

- 500 cars can carry 0.2 tons each, or a total of 100 tons.

This puts the overall total at 1,025 tons per day, or 328,000 tons per year on the basis of a 320-day year, which excludes holidays.

For the Algerian border, we estimate that 500<sup>32</sup> small vans cross the border carrying imported contraband (excluding fuel). In other words, this is 500x1 ton=500 tons per day, or 160,000 tons per year. This makes an overall total for the two borders of 328,000+160,000=488,000 tons. If we take an average value of TND 3 per kg,<sup>33</sup> we find a total value of TND 1,464 million, or roughly 4% of the total value of all imports (excluding fuel).<sup>34</sup> Factoring in the figures for fuel imports, we compute a grand total of nearly TND 2,400 million (or more than 7% of the country's total imports).

# **4. The Economic and Social Impacts of Cross-Border Trade in Terms of Income and Job Creation among Border Populations**

**Informal trade has a positive benefit that goes beyond people living in border regions or those directly involved in this type of trade. However, it also has a cost to the Tunisian government in the form of lost tax revenues, which can lead, for example, to a decline in public investment.** In this section, we assess both the positive and negative aspects of informal trade.

**The two governorates covered by our research—Médenine and Kasserine—have very different levels of socioeconomic development.** To assess the variation in the level of development between the different regions, the Tunisian Ministry of Regional Development and Planning decided to create a regional development index, based on the quality of the infrastructure, access to healthcare, education levels, and economic activity in each governorate (Ministère du Développement Régional et de la Planification 2012a). The level of development in the Médenine governorate (0.50) is close to that in other coastal and southern Tunisian governorates. By contrast, the Kasserine governorate is the least developed in all of Tunisia, behind other governorates in the center-west of the country.

**Moreover, there are also disparities within each governorate.** The position of the delegations that make up the Kasserine and Médenine governorates within the overall ranking of the 264 Tunisian delegations shows that the Ben Gardane delegation ranks just below the Tunisian median (Table 9), while the Foussana delegation is one of the least developed. Within the region, only the North Kasserine delegation has a relatively high level of development.

> 32 Out of the 3,000 in use in border regions.

> 33 Apart from apples and bananas, all the other products cost more than TND 3 per kg.

> 34

> Total imports were TND 33,695.4 million in 2011. Source: INS (National Statistical Institute).

22
**7. References**

- de Mel, Suresh, David McKenzie and Christopher Woodruff, 2008. “Who Are the Microenterprise Owners? Evidence from Sri Lanka on Tokman vs. de Soto,” IZA DP No. 3511.

- De Mel, S., D. McKenzie, and C. Woodruff. 2009. "Measuring microenterprise profits: Must we ask how the sausage is made?" _Journal of Development Economics_ 88(1): 19-31.

- Fajnzylber, P., W. Maloney, and G. Montes Rojas. 2006. "Does Formality Improve Micro-Firm Performance? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from the Brazilian SIMPLES Program," Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) Discussion Paper 4531.

- Fajnzylber, P., W. Maloney and G. Montes, 2009. “Releasing Constraints to Growth or Pushing on a String? The Impact of Credit, Training, Business Associations and Taxes on the Performance of Mexican Micro-Firms,” Journal of Development Studies 45(7): 1027-1047.

- Foster, L., J. Haltiwanger, and C. Syverson. 2008. “Reallocation, firm turnover, and efficiency: Selection on productivity or profitability?” _American Economic Review_ 98(1): 394-425.

- Hernández-Cánovas, G. and J. Koëter-Kant, 2011. “SME financing in Europe: Cross-country determinants of bank loan maturity,” International Small Business Journal vol. 29 no. 5, 489-507.

- López-García, P. and S. Puente, 2006. “Business demography in Spain: determinants of firm survival,” Documentos de Trabajo N.o 0608, Banco de España.

- Katayama, H., S. Lu, and J.R. Tybout. 2009. "Firm-level productivity studies: Illusions and a solution," _International Journal of Industrial Organization_ 27(3): 403-413.

- Kirschenmann, K. and L. Norden, 2012. “The Relationship between Borrower Risk and Loan Maturity in Small Business Lending,” Journal of Business Finance and Accounting. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1011261

- McKenzie, D., and Y. S. Sakho. 2010. "Does it pay firms to register for taxes? The impact of formality on firm profitability," _Journal of Development Economics_ 91(1): 15-24.

- Perry, G., W. Maloney, O. Arias, P. Fajnzylber, A. Mason, and J. Saavedra-Chanduvi. 2007. _Informality: Exit and Exclusion_ . Washington, DC: The World Bank.

- Straub, S. 2005. "Informal sector: The credit market channel," _Journal of Development Economics_ 78(2): 299-321.

- USAID, 2005. “Microempresas y Microfinanzas en Ecuador: Resultados del Estudio de Linea de Base de 2004.”

- World Bank. 2008. _Peru: Trajectories  towards Formality_ . Washington, DC: The World Bank.

- World Bank. 2009. _Increasing Formality and Productivity of Bolivian Firms_ . Washington, DC: The World Bank.

- World Bank. 2010. _Informality: Causes, Consequences, Policies_ . Turkey Country Economic Memorandum, Washington, DC: The World Bank.

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Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Delhi, labor laws do not seem to draw significant complaint in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Punjab.

# **(b) Business environment indicators: power shortages**

Disparities in power supply and transport are often cited as sources of regional gaps in economic performance in India. Regional differences in road and rail transport networks cannot be identified separately from other components of market access and should be treated accordingly as influences on productivity. When we turn to power supply the basic problem in India at the moment is one of shortage, high costs and unreliability, all reportedly stemming more from problems of transmission and distribution than of generation. There are several indicators in the World Bank Investment Climate Survey in terms of which regional differences in the gravity of the problem could be described. One of these is the frequency of outages reported by managers. According to the survey, power outrages occur almost every other day for the average business in India, as compared to once every two weeks in China, and once a week in Brazil. A more accurate indicator from the point of industrial productivity seems to be, however, the output that managers estimate to lose on account of the outages. This is the indicator we use in estimating the productivity equation in the next section. According to World Bank surveys, the average manufacturer in India reports losing 8.4 percent a year in sales as opposed to under 2 percent for the average manufacturer in China or Brazil. Outages could lead to loss of sales by forcing downtime (or idle capacity) on managers. They could also cause wastage of material that would have been in-process at the point of the outage and could not be used when production subsequently resumes. Then there could be the additional cost of equipment maintenance costs directly attributable to physical damages done by outages. Regional variation in reported losses due to outages within India are shown in the first column of Table 2, losses ranging from under 4 percent in the state of Gujarat to more than 15 per cent in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

Many view the problem of power shortages in India as one of regulatory policy and ownership in the energy sector. At the root of the current supply shortage to industry 12
**Box 11: How development can reduce access to land**

Until 1981, coal mining companies could acquire substantial tracts of land with few restrictions under the Coal Bearing Areas Act. Under an agreement reached in 1981 between GOO and the coal companies, land is now required to be acquired by the Revenue Department at market rates (under the Land Acquisition Act) and each displaced family is to be assured of one permanent job in the mines.

Two major obstacles have frustrated the original intentions of this agreement:

- _the definition of family':_ households often consist of extended families with several adult members. Only one will be found a job although all are displaced.

- _inadequate land records:_ since land claims may not be accurately established in land records, intra-family struggles may ensue to establish a claim to the single job offered in compensation. All other household members are forced to seek alternative livelihoods.

The loss of common land is generally not compensated under this agreement, which adversely affects the landless. One study of people displaced by the Upper Indravati dam in Koraput district found that many of the displaced were landless people dependent upon _podu_ (shifting cultivation) on common lands (Mohapatra, 1983). Entitlement to government compensation rested upon private property rights only and ignored customary rights in common property.

villagers revealed that little usable common grazing land remains. Grazing commons have either been encroached upon or are so degraded that they are no longer used for grazing and the animals are now stall-fed.

In the absence of more reliable data, it is difficult to form an accurate view of the socio-economic status of those who encroach on common land. A series of focus group discussions with land owners and landless farmers in Laderpally village, Sambalpur district, suggest that 90 percent of all who encroach on village land in Laderpally own less than two hectares of private land. Medium and large farmers make up the remaining 10 percent. The estimated distribution of encroachers by size of class of existing land holding is as follows:

|Landless|10%|
|---|---|
|Marginal (0-1 ha)|10%|
|Small (1-2 ha)|70%|
|Semi-medium (2-4 ha)|_5%_|
|Medium and Large (>4 ha)|5%|

At least in Laderpally, much of the impetus for encroachment comes from small farmers, belonging to the middle level of the village hierarchy. While poor, they are not the poorest, and while predominantly dependent upon agriculture, it is not their only source of livelihood. There is evidence that, having acquired some skills and education, small-farmer households are beginning to move into the service sector and rural non-farm enterprises (Sarap, personal comm.). This upwards mobility provides them with the additional clout in the village necessary to displace poorer groups from common land, and the ability to influence lower-level land revenue officers to their advantage.

51