rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Quantifying institutional impacts
            and development synergies in water resource programs : a
            methodology with application to the Kala Oya basin, Sri Lanka
The success of development programs,
            including water resource projects, depends on two key
            factors: the role of underlying institutions and the impact
            synergies from other closely related programs. Existing
            methodologies have limitations in accounting for these
            critical factors. This paper fills this gap by developing a
            methodology, which quantifies both the roles that
            institutions play in impact generation and the extent of
            impact synergies that flows from closely related programs
            within a unified framework.  The methodology is applied to
            the Kala Oya Basin in Sri Lanka in order to evaluate the
            impacts of three water-related programs and the roles of 11
            institutions in the context of food security.  The results
            provide considerable insights on the relative role of
            institutions and the flow of development synergies both
            within and across different impact pathways. The methodology
            can also be used to locate slack in impact chains and
            identify policy options to enhance the impact flows.
Does Hepatitis B infection or son
            preference explain the bulk of gender imbalance in China : a
            review of the evidence
China has a large deficit of females,
            and public policies have sought to reduce the son preference
            that is widely believed to cause this.  Recently a study has
            suggested that up to 75 percent of this deficit is
            attributable to hepatitis B infection, indicating that
            immunization programs should form the first plank of policy
            interventions.  However, a large medical dataset from Taiwan
            (China) shows that hepatitis B infection raises women's
            probability of having a son by only 0.25 percent.  And
            demographic data from China show that the only group of
            women who have elevated probabilities of bearing a son are
            those who have already borne daughters. This pattern makes
            it difficult to see how any biological factor can explain a
            large part of the imbalance in China's sex ratios at
            birth -- unless it can be shown that it somehow selectively
            affects those who have borne girls, or causes them to first
            bear girls and then boys. The Taiwanese data suggest that
            this is not the case with hepatitis B, since its impact is
            unaffected by the sex composition of previous births. The
            data support the cultural, rather than the biological,
            explanation for the "missing women."
How does Vietnam's accession to
            the World Trade Organization change the spatial incidence of poverty
Trade policies can promote aggregate
            efficiency, but the ensuing structural adjustments generally
            create both winners and losers. From an incomes perspective,
            trade liberalization can raise gross domestic product per
            capita, but rates of emergence from poverty depend on
            individual household characteristics of economic
            participation and asset holding. To fully realize the growth
            potential of trade, while limiting the risk of rising
            inequality, policies need to better account for
            microeconomic heterogeneity. One approach to this is
            geographic targeting that shifts resources to poor areas.
            This study combines an integrated microsimulation-computable
            general equilibrium model with small area estimation to
            evaluate the spatial incidence of Vietnam's accession
            to the World Trade Organization. Provincial-level poverty
            reduction after full liberalization was heterogeneous,
            ranging from 2.2 percent to 14.3 percent. Full
            liberalization will benefit the poor on a national basis,
            but the northwestern area of Vietnam is likely to lag
            behind. Furthermore, poverty can be shown to increase under
            comparable scenarios.
The effectiveness of policies to
            control a human influenza pandemic : a literature review
The studies reviewed in this paper
            indicate that with adequate preparedness planning and
            execution it is possible to contain pandemic influenza
            outbreaks where they occur, for viral strains of moderate
            infectiousness. For viral strains of higher infectiousness,
            containment may be difficult, but it may be possible to
            mitigate the effects of the spread of pandemic influenza
            within a country and/or internationally with a combination
            of policies suited to the origins and nature of the initial
            outbreak. These results indicate the likelihood of
            containment success in 'frontline risk' countries,
            given specific resource availability and level of
            infectiousness; as well as mitigation success in
            'secondary' risk countries, given the assumption
            of inevitable international transmission through air travel
            networks. However, from the analysis of the modeling results
            on interventions in the U.S. and U.K. after a global
            pandemic starts, there is a basis for arguing that the
            emphasis in the secondary risk countries could shift from
            mitigation towards containment. This follows since a
            mitigation-focused strategy in such developed countries
            presupposes that initial outbreak containment in these
            countries will necessarily fail. This is paradoxical if
            containment success at similar infectiousness of the virus
            is likely in developing countries with lower public health
            resources, based on results using similar modeling
            methodologies. Such a shift in emphasis could have major
            implications for global risk management for diseases of
            international concern such as pandemic influenza or a
            SARS-like disease.
Migrant opportunity and the
            educational attainment of youth in rural China
This paper investigates how the
            reduction of barriers to migration affected the decision of
            middle school graduates to attend high school in rural
            China. Change in the cost of migration is identified using
            exogenous variation across counties in the timing of
            national identity card distribution, which made it easier
            for rural migrants to register as temporary residents in
            urban destinations. After taking care to address potential
            strengths and weaknesses of our identification strategy, we
            find a robust, negative relationship between migrant
            opportunity and high school enrollment that cannot be
            explained by geographic convergence in access to education
            across rural China.
Attitudes to equality : the
            "socialist legacy" revisited
It is routinely assumed that residents
            of post-socialist countries have a preference for greater
            income equality, other things being equal, owing to the
            legacy of socialism.  This proposition is examined in the
            context of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union using
            data from three waves of the World Values Survey.  Contrary
            to expectations, the authors find little evidence of a
            'socialist legacy' en bloc.  Considering the
            former Soviet Union separately from other post-socialist
            countries, the analysis finds that as a group these
            countries display significantly lower preference for moving
            toward greater income equality than both Eastern Europe and
            other comparator groups (developed and developing
            countries).  These findings hold up even when controlling
            for the conventional determinants of attitudes such as
            income level and employment status of the individual
            respondent, as well as national factors such as per-capita
            income and its distribution.  Moreover, the preference for
            greater income inequality appears to have persisted at least
            since the mid-1990s and possibly since the early 1990s (data
            difficulties preclude a robust examination of this latter
            question).  The results are consistent with the fairly low
            levels of public spending on redistribution commonly found
            in the former Soviet Union.
Lessons from China for Africa
China has been the most successful
            developing country in this modern era of globalization.
            Since initiating economic reform after 1978, its economy has
            expanded at a steady rate over 8 percent per capita, fueling
            historically unprecedented poverty reduction (the poverty
            rate declined from over 60 percent to 7 percent in 2007).
            Other developing countries struggling to grow and reduce
            poverty are naturally interested in what has been the source
            of this impressive growth and what, if any, lessons they can
            take from China. This paper focuses on four features of
            modern China that have changed significantly between the
            pre-reform period and today. The Chinese themselves call
            their reform program Gai Ge Kai Feng, "change the
            system, open the door." "Change the system"
            means altering incentives and ownership, that is, shifting
            the economy from near total state ownership to one in which
            private enterprise is dominant.  "Open the door"
            means exactly what it says, liberalizing trade and direct
            investment.  A third lesson is the development of
            high-quality infrastructure: China's good roads,
            reliable power, world-class ports, and excellent cell phone
            coverage throughout the country are apparent to any visitor.
            What is less well known is that most of this infrastructure
            has been developed through a policy of "cost
            recovery" that prices infrastructure services at levels
            sufficient to finance the capital cost as well as operations
            and maintenance. A fourth important lesson is China's
            careful attention to agriculture and rural development,
            complemented by rural-urban migration.
Governance arrangements for state
            owned enterprises
The aim of this paper is to shed new
            light on key challenges in governance arrangements for state
            owned enterprises in infrastructure sectors. The paper
            provides guidelines on how to classify the fuzzy and
            sometimes conflicting development goals of infrastructure
            and the governance arrangements needed to reach such goals.
            Three policy recommendations emerge. First, some of the
            structures implied by internationally adopted principles of
            corporate governance for state owned enterprises favoring a
            centralized ownership function versus a decentralized or
            dual structure have not yet been sufficiently
            "tested" in practice and may not suit all
            developing countries. Second, general corporate governance
            guidelines (and policy recommendations) need to be carefully
            adapted to infrastructure sectors, particularly in the
            natural monopoly segments. Because the market structure and
            regulatory arrangements in which state owned enterprises
            operate matters, governments may want to distinguish the
            state owned enterprises operating in potentially competitive
            sectors from the ones under a natural monopoly structure.
            Competition provides not only formidable benefits, but also
            unique opportunities for benchmarking, increasing
            transparency and accountability.  Third, governments may
            want to avoid partial fixes, by tackling both the internal
            and external governance factors. Focusing only on one of the
            governance dimensions is unlikely to improve SOE performance
            in a sustainable way.
Informal payments and moonlighting
            in Tajikistan's health sector
This paper studies the relationship
            between gender and corruption in the health sector. It uses
            data collected directly from health workers, during a recent
            public expenditure tracking survey in Tajikistan's
            health sector. Using informal payments as an indicator of
            corruption, women seem at first significantly less corrupt
            than men as consistently suggested by the literature.
            However, once power conferred by position is controlled for,
            women appear in fact equally likely to take advantage of
            corruption opportunities as men. Female-headed facilities
            also are not less likely to experience informal charging
            than facilities managed by men. However, women are
            significantly less aggressive in the amount they extract
            from patients. The paper provides evidence that workers are
            more likely to engage in informal charging the farther they
            fall short of their perceived fair-wage, adding weight to
            the fair wage-corruption hypothesis. Finally, there is some
            evidence that health workers who feel that health care
            should be provided for a fee are more likely to informally
            charge patients. Contrary to informal charging, moonlighting
            behavior displays strong gender differences. Women are
            significantly less likely to work outside the facility on
            average and across types of health workers.
Economics of irrigation water
            management : a literature survey with focus on partial and
            general equilibrium models
Water policy is an important topic on
            the agenda of the international community, and efficiency
            and equity in the allocation of water have emerged as
            important factors to be considered. Water pricing can be
            used to mitigate both the quantity and quality dimensions of
            water scarcity. This paper reviews partial equilibrium
            models and general equilibrium models that are relevant to
            irrigation water management issues. The most widely
            discussed issues in these models are water markets and water
            pricing. The interrelationships between economic, cultural,
            social, and political aspects that are related to water
            policy make it difficult to provide a comprehensive policy
            analysis. General equilibrium models of irrigation water
            management allow incorporation of both the irrigation sector
            and the other sectors in the economy and analysis of
            policies affecting each of them and the interaction between
            them. In addition to being able to address sector and
            household specifications, production factors, time horizon,
            pricing policies, and institutions such as water markets,
            general equilibrium models allow the analysis of the impact
            of water policies on equity and poverty alleviation. The
            authors conclude that, although there has been a significant
            increase in efforts to analyze water related problems,
            analytical and empirical research in the field is still
            deficient and more effort is needed to address them.
Reading tealeaves on the potential
            impact of the privatization of tea estates in Rwanda
The Poverty Reduction Strategy of the
            Government of Rwanda seeks to unlock the growth and poverty
            reduction potential of the tea sector through the
            privatization of tea estates. This paper uses the logic of
            causal inference and data from the 2004 Quantitative
            Baseline Survey of the tea sector to assess the potential
            impact of the privatization program. This entails a
            normalized comparison of productivity outcomes to account
            for household heterogeneity in terms of observable and
            non-observable determinants of these outcomes. The paper
            also compares living standards between tea and non-tea
            households. Three main findings emerge from the analysis.
            Productivity outcomes are generally better in the private
            sector than in the public sector. Male-headed households
            outperform female-headed households along all dimensions
            considered here. And tea households tend to be better off
            than non-tea households.
Labor markets in rural and urban
            Haiti--based on the first household survey for Haiti
This paper addresses labor markets in
            Haiti, including farm and nonfarm employment and income
            generation. The analyses are based on the first Living
            Conditions Survey of 7,186 households covering the whole
            country and representative at the regional level. The
            findings suggest that four key determinants of employment
            and productivity in nonfarm activities are education,
            gender, location, and migration status. This is emphasized
            when nonfarm activities are divided into low-return and
            high-return activities. The wage and producer income
            analyses reveal that education is key to earning higher
            wages and incomes. Moreover, producer incomes increase with
            farm size, land title, and access to tools, electricity,
            roads, irrigation, and other farm inputs.
Technology trap and poverty trap in
            Sub-Saharan Africa
Since the industrial revolution,
            advances in science and technology have continuously
            accounted for most of the growth and wealth accumulation in
            leading industrialized economies. In recent years, the
            contribution of technological progress to growth and welfare
            improvement has increased even further, especially with the
            globalization process which has been characterized by
            exponential growth in exports of manufactured goods. This
            paper establishes the existence of a technology trap in
            Sub-Saharan Africa. It shows that the widening income and
            welfare gap between Sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of world
            is largely accounted for by the technology trap responsible
            for the poverty trap. This result is supported by empirical
            evidence which suggests that if countries in Sub-Saharan
            Africa were using the same level of technology enjoyed by
            industrialized countries income levels in Sub-Saharan Africa
            would be significantly higher. The result is robust, even
            after controlling for institutional, macroeconomic
            instability and volatility factors. Consistent with standard
            one-sector neoclassical growth models, this suggests that
            uniform convergence to a worldwide technology frontier may
            lead to income convergence in the spherical space.
            Overcoming the technology trap in Sub-Saharan Africa may
            therefore be essential to achieving the Millennium
            Development Goals and evolving toward global convergence in
            the process of economic development.
Infrastructure and development : a
            critical appraisal of the macro level literature
This survey reviews the existing
            macro-level empirical literature on the link between
            infrastructure and development outcomes in a critical light.
            After providing a general framework that casts the relevant
            terms of the controversy on the real effect of
            infrastructure on growth in the context of an aggregate
            production function, it signals what are the relevant
            empirical questions to be addressed. This guides the
            systematic review of a number of empirical studies and the
            discussion of the main econometric challenges to the
            identification of the effect of infrastructure on output and
            productivity. Finally, building on related research, in
            particular in contract theory and political economy, the
            paper spells out several promising research avenues.
Implications of higher global food
            prices for poverty in low-income countries
In many poor countries, the recent
            increases in prices of staple foods raise the real incomes
            of those selling food, many of whom are relatively poor,
            while hurting net food consumers, many of whom are also
            relatively poor. The impacts on poverty will certainly be
            very diverse, but the average impact on poverty depends upon
            the balance between these two effects, and can only be
            determined by looking at real-world data. Results using
            household data for ten observations on nine low-income
            countries show that the short-run impacts of higher staple
            food prices on poverty differ considerably by commodity and
            by country, but, that poverty increases are much more
            frequent, and larger, than poverty reductions. The recent
            large increases in food prices appear likely to raise
            overall poverty in low income countries substantially.
A ricardian analysis of the
            distribution of climate change impacts on agriculture across
            agro-ecological zones in Africa
This paper examines the distribution of
            climate change impacts across the 16 agro-ecological zones
            in Africa using data from the Food and Agriculture
            Organization combined with economic survey data from a
            Global Environment Facility/World Bank project.  Net revenue
            per hectare of cropland is regressed on a set of climate,
            soil, and socio-economic variables using different
            econometric specifications "with" and
            "without" country fixed effects.  Country fixed
            effects slightly reduce predicted future climate related
            damage to agriculture. With a mild climate scenario, African
            farmers gain income from climate change; with a more severe
            scenario, they lose income.  Some locations are more
            affected than others.  The analysis of agro-ecological zones
            implies that the effects of climate change will vary across
            Africa.  For example, currently productive areas such as
            dry/moist savannah are more vulnerable to climate change
            while currently less productive agricultural zones such as
            humid forest or sub-humid zones become more productive in
            the future.  The agro-ecological zone classification can
            help explain the variation of impacts across the landscape.