rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Employment Data in Household Surveys
            : Taking Stock, Looking Ahead
Individual-level employment data have a
            wide range of applications. They are used to monitor labor
            markets and the Sustainable Development Goals, contribute to
            understanding and explaining socioeconomic conditions, and
            may help to design and inform labor market policies. This
            paper is relevant for academics and policy makers who want
            to understand the main survey design issues behind the
            collection of individual-level employment data in nationally
            representative household surveys and the implications for
            data quality, particularly for women and young people. The
            paper reviews four survey programs (Living Standards
            Measurement Study, Living Standards Measurement
            Study–Integrated Surveys on Agriculture, Labor Force
            Surveys, and Demographic and Health Surveys) in 14
            developing countries. First, the paper reviews the
            Sustainable Development Goals to identify a core set of
            labor market indicators and briefly discusses the
            International Labour Organization's definitions of key
            concepts that shape these indicators. Second, it assesses
            whether the Sustainable Development Goals labor market
            indicators are captured in the reviewed surveys. Third, it
            takes stock of current approaches to collect employment data
            and discusses critical survey design features, such as the
            structure of the labor module and the wording of the
            questions. Fourth, the paper examines whether these survey
            design features are gender and age neutral. Data from the
            Living Standards Measurement Study–Integrated Surveys on
            Agriculture are used to illustrate these issues. The paper
            concludes by proposing short- and medium-term objectives to
            improve the data quality in the Living Standards Measurement
            Study–Integrated Surveys on Agriculture.
The Redistributive Effects of Fiscal
            Policy in Mali and Niger
This study assesses the redistributive
            effects of fiscal policy in Mali and Niger. Fiscal policy is
            poverty increasing in Mali (by 2.4 percentage points) and
            Niger (2.5 percentage points). This is a result of primarily
            two factors: indirect taxes (value-added taxes and import
            duties) and direct fiscal transfers. Although the richest
            people in Mali and Niger pay the majority of indirect taxes,
            the poorest people pay a nonnegligible amount (more than 8
            and 10 percent for the bottom three deciles, respectively).
            Although existing direct fiscal transfers have
            poverty-reducing effects, they are too small (Mali) or not
            well targeted (Niger).
Well Spent : How Governance
            Determines the Effectiveness of Infrastructure Investments
This study explores the role of
            governance in improving infrastructure reliability. It
            estimates that increasing infrastructure spending and
            improving governance in parallel is six times more effective
            at enhancing transport system performance than increasing
            spending alone. It also estimates that under current fiscal
            budgeting, every $1 spent on infrastructure maintenance is
            as effective as $1.5 of new investments in many OECD
            economies. Overall, the evidence in this study demonstrates
            that it is the quality rather than the quantity of
            infrastructure spending that determines the quality of
            infrastructure services.
Underutilized Potential : The
            Business Costs of Unreliable Infrastructure in Developing Countries
This study constructs a microdata set of
            about 143,000 firms to estimate the monetary costs of
            infrastructure disruptions in 137 low- and middle-income
            countries, representing 78 percent of the world population
            and 80 percent of the GDP of low- and -middle-income
            countries. Specifically, this study assesses the impact of
            transport, electricity, and water disruptions on the
            capacity utilization rates of firms. The estimates suggest
            that utilization losses amount to $151 billion a year -- of
            which $107 billion are due to transport disruptions, $38
            billion due to blackouts, and $6 billion due to dryouts.
            Moreover, this study shows that electricity outages are
            causing sales losses equivalent to $82 billion a year. Firms
            are also incurring the costs of self-generated electricity,
            estimated to amount to $64 billion a year (including
            annualized capital expenditure). At almost $300 billion a
            year, these figures highlight the substantial drag that
            unreliable infrastructure imposes on firms in developing
            countries. Yet, these figures are likely to be
            under-estimates as neither all countries nor all types of
            impacts are covered.
Underutilized Potential : The
            Business Costs of Unreliable Infrastructure in Developing Countries
Policy Research Working Paper 8899 Lifelines: The Resilient Infrastructure Opportunity _Background Paper_

# Underutilized Potential

The Business Costs of Unreliable Infrastructure in Developing Countries _Jun Rentschler Martin Kornejew Stéphane Hallegatte Johannes Braese Marguerite Obolensky_ Climate Change Group Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery June 2019
Methodology and Findings for the
            Exposure Analysis of the Chinese Wastewater Sector to
            Flooding and Earthquakes Hazards
This paper describes the methodology and
            findings for the extreme hazard exposure analysis of the
            Chinese wastewater sector to flooding and earthquakes
            hazards. This analysis is undertaken for changing flooding,
            under climate scenarios, and earthquake exposure of a
            spatially accurate wastewater treatment plants (WWTP)
            database for China, covering a total of 1,346 assets with
            additional attributes quantifying the treatment capacity and
            users dependent on each plant. For flooding, we apply and
            downscale a global river routing (CaMa-Flood) model that
            quantifies the change degree of flood exposures from the
            present time-period (1980-2005) to the near future
            time-period (2016-2035) to a far future time period
            (2036-2055). We find evidence that most climate models
            project increasing number of WWTP assets face
            climate-induced flood hazards in both the near and far
            future, potentially affecting as many as 208 million users
            by 2050. However, there are spatial and temporal variations
            from these projections which means that planning for
            resilient wastewater infrastructure requires more detailed
            understanding of the vulnerability attributes of WWTPs
            including their exact location, the number of users they
            serve as well as their flood protection standards. For
            earthquakes, we examine the exposure of WWTPs to earthquake
            hazards through both seismic shaking and induced
            liquefaction. Overall, we demonstrate the significant risk
            that earthquakes can have on the WWTP process -- especially
            on centralized systems. By considering liquefaction
            susceptibility in combination with shaking, we expose a
            number of WWTPs that face an increased level of exposure to
            damages following earthquakes compared to looking at shaking
            in isolation.
Corruption, Regulatory Burden and
            Firm Productivity
Using firm-level data from more than
            39,000 firms in 111 economies, this paper tests the
            hypothesis that corruption impedes productivity more at
            higher levels of regulation. The analysis finds that there
            is a significant negative relationship between corruption
            and firm productivity when regulation is high and an
            insignificant relationship when it is low. These findings
            are robust to different controls and specifications.
Making Secure Land Tenure Count for
            Global Development Goals and National Policy : Evidence from Zambia
Adding a module designed to measure land
            tenure-related Sustainable Development Goals indicators to
            the 2018 round of Zambia's labor force survey shows low
            transferability and high levels of tenure insecurity. Having
            a title is associated with greater transferability and
            reduced insecurity. Although demand for titles, including
            willingness to pay, is high, current policies limit the
            scope for tenure regularization and reinforce rather than
            reduce gender discrimination. Efforts in this direction need
            to be preceded by (i) procedural reform to reduce costs,
            streamline procedures, and make them gender-sensitive; (ii)
            institutional change to increase the efficiency of service
            delivery and ensure record maintenance; and (iii) legal
            change to recognize customary tenure and improve land
            management and transferability. Adding the Sustainable
            Development Goals land tenure module to ongoing surveys has
            the potential to provide the evidence base needed to design
            results-based approaches for the land sector and reliably
            track progress.
Preschool Availability and Female
            Labor Force Participation : Evidence from Indonesia
At 50.9 percent, female labor force
            participation in Indonesia is far below the regional average
            of 60.8 percent. Is it being hindered by a lack of
            affordable childcare services in the country? This paper
            exploits the joint variations in preschool age eligibility
            and access to preschool across regions and over years in a
            difference-in-difference-in-differences framework. With a
            longitudinal survey that tracks individuals for an average
            of 22 years, a panel of mothers was constructed to estimate
            the elasticity of maternal employment to preschool access.
            The analysis finds that an additional public preschool per
            1,000 children increases the work participation of mothers
            of preschool age eligible children by 11-16 percent from the
            baseline mean. Private preschools do not increase work
            participation at the extensive margin, but they increase the
            likelihood of holding a second job. The availability of
            preschools induces mothers to informal sector occupations
            that do not require full-time commitments.
The Next Frontier in Water Supply
            Service Delivery : An Assessment of the Performance of Water
            Sector Service Providers in Pourashavas in Bangladesh
Using data from the International
            Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation Utilities,
            this paper on the water sector in pourashavas
            (municipalities) in Bangladesh provides an analysis of the
            trends in the water sector development over 2010–16. The
            main purpose of the paper is to examine the average
            performance of the water sector providers in the pourashavas
            to encourage conversation on identifying and addressing
            deficiencies in service performance in comparison with that
            in the rest of Bangladesh and the world. This analysis finds
            that although pourashavas perform on the lower end of the
            spectrum compared with the rest of Bangladesh on many
            indicators, the top 20 percent of the pourashavas are
            globally competitive on indicators of staff productivity,
            cost coverage, and daily per capita consumption of water.
Unfortunate Moms and Unfortunate
            Children : Impact of the Nepali Civil War on Women's
            Stature and Intergenerational Health
This paper analyzes the long-term health
            impacts of Nepal's 1996-2006 civil conflict. It
            exploits the heterogeneity in conflict intensity across
            villages and birth cohorts to document long-term health and
            intergenerational impacts. The analysis finds that childhood
            exposure to conflict and, in particular, exposure starting
            in infancy, negatively impacts attained adult height. Each
            additional month of exposure decreases a women's adult
            height by 1.36 millimeters. The impacts are not limited to
            first-generation. The analysis also finds that a
            mother's exposure to conflict in her childhood is
            detrimental to her child's health. Mothers exposed to
            conflict during their childhood have more children and live
            in less wealthy households, likely reducing their ability to
            invest during their children’s critical period of physical
            development. The finding points to a potential trade-off
            between the quantity and quality of children. The paper uses
            information on monthly conflict incidents at the village
            level, which allows identifying identify the effects of
            exposure to conflict more accurately than prior studies.
Effects of Trade Liberalization on
            Textile and Apparel Exports from Sub-Sahara Africa
This paper estimates the impact of
            market access liberalization in high-income countries on
            sub-Saharan African exports. The methodology exploits the
            large reduction in trade barriers that was induced by three
            unilateral trade liberalization initiatives: (1) the
            dismantling of the Multi-Fiber Arrangement, (2) the African
            Growth and Opportunity Act in the United States, and (3) the
            extension of EU trade preferences for developed countries
            through its Everything-but-Arms program and the General
            System of Preferences. Using detailed product-level
            information at the 6-digit level of the Harmonized System
            and a triple-difference empirical specification, the usual
            endogeneity-of-policy critique is flexibly controlled for.
            The results indicate strongly positive export effects, which
            are especially large for textile, apparel, and leather
            products, and tend to be realized fully within 5 years. Each
            percentage point reduction in import tariffs raises exports
            to the EU by 0.73 percent and to the United States by 0.30
            percent; effects are two to three times as large for
            textiles. The presence of strong Chinese imports has
            ambiguous effects on countries' ability to take
            advantage of trade liberalization as the impact on the
            export effects to the EU and the United States show an
            opposite sign.
The Extent of GVC Engagement in
            Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper exploits information from two
            different datasets to provide a novel and multi-dimensional
            picture of the engagement of all sub-Saharan African
            countries in global value chains (GVCs). It documents in
            detail the nature of the underlying data and the way it is
            used to construct several indicators of GVC engagement. As a
            companion to the paper, the data files are made available to
            interested researchers. While it is impossible to summarize
            the broad range of experiences that we document, two
            patterns stand out. First, the level of GVC engagement of
            most countries in sub-Saharan Africa is rather low,
            especially for their manufacturing sectors. Second, while
            there is increased GVC engagement over time in some
            countries, this pattern is by no means universal. The
            average engagement for the region over the time period
            studied (1995-2018) is not even positive on average across
            countries for several indicators.
Why South Africa Is Cheap for the
            Rich and Expensive for the Poor : Reconsidering the
            Balassa-Samuelson Effect
This paper investigates cross-sectoral
            productivity differentials in South African industry and
            their distributional consequences. The analysis shows that
            typically, traded sectors have experienced low productivity
            growth over the past decade, while skill intensive service
            sectors have had significant productivity growth. This is
            the inverse of the traditional Balassa-Samuelson sectoral
            transformation hypothesis, where high wages in
            high-productivity traded sectors increase wages throughout
            the economy, thus increasing prices on non-traded goods and
            revaluing the country's real exchange rate. Instead,
            the higher productivity of non-traded sectors experienced in
            South Africa induces a devaluation of the real exchange rate
            and a contraction of the traded sectors. The results of the
            estimation show evidence of this "inverse"
            Balassa-Samuelson effect for agriculture and manufacturing
            and in particular mining. This "inverse"
            Balassa-Samuelson effect has important distributional
            consequences: the high-productivity sectors are associated
            with cheaper goods and services for wealthy households. This
            in turn burdens poor households, which are more dependent on
            traded goods, with higher prices, which are a consequence of
            low productivity and high markups.
Agglomeration, Urbanization and
            Employment growth in Ghana : Evidence from an
            industry-district panel
In this paper the impact of various
            agglomerative forces on employment growth in Ghanaian
            manufacturing is investigated, using data from two firm
            censuses, as well as population census and trade data. The
            study is the first to use nationally representative firm
            data that covers the formal and informal economy to
            investigate the impact of agglomerative forces on employment
            growth in an African economy. African economies are rapidly
            urbanizing, but this has not been accompanied by growth in
            manufacturing. A lack of agglomeration economies is one
            possible explanation for slow manufacturing growth and the
            attendant premature deindustrialization. The paper follows
            Combes (2000) in examining the importance of agglomeration
            economies on employment growth in Ghanaian manufacturing,
            finding that there is no evidence that population density is
            associated with faster employment growth. Other
            agglomeration economies do seem to play a role, although not
            always in the manner anticipated.
Housing, Imputed Rent, and
            Households' Welfare
Housing is the largest durable good
            consumed by households. As such, any consumption-based
            measure of welfare, to be comprehensive, must include the
            value of the flow of services households derive from their
            dwellings, the so-called imputed rent. However, estimating
            imputed rents is a daunting task, which researchers and
            practitioners tend to overlook. This paper is the first
            attempt to assess the distributional impact of including
            housing in the welfare aggregate; the paper tests two
            estimation methods and analyzes four developing countries.
            The distributional impact cannot be predicted a priori, and
            evidence suggests it is context and method specific.
            Although changes in poverty and inequality are always
            statistically significant, they are only occasionally larger
            than one percentage point. By contrast, shared prosperity
            exhibits sizable changes, which might also determine
            international re-rankings. Albeit the inclusion of imputed
            rents reshuffles the set of poor households, observed
            changes in the socioeconomic profiling of the poor are
            unlikely to affect pro-poor policy design.
Using Student and Teacher
            Assessments to Design More Pertinent In-Service Teacher
            Training : The Case of Ecuador
The development of pertinent and
            effective in-service teacher training remains a policy
            challenge for many countries in Latin America and the
            Caribbean. Ecuador stands out as a country in the region
            that has made significant investments in teacher training in
            the past decade. However, most in-service training provision
            has been designed without enough elements to properly
            address teachers' skills gaps. This paper proposes a
            roadmap for improving the design of in-service teacher
            training in Ecuador using available data from student and
            teacher assessments. Although countries in the region have
            made important efforts to carry out periodic evaluations of
            student and teacher performance, the data resulting from
            these evaluations are rarely used to guide teacher
            development programs. The analysis presented in this paper
            suggests that doing so has the potential to raise program
            pertinence while allowing the prioritization of investments
            in teachers and students with the greatest needs.
Can Taxes Help Ensure a Fair Globalization
This paper analyzes whether taxation can
            be successfully used to reduce the incidence of labor
            informality and achieve higher equality in a globalized
            economy. To this purpose, it develops a two-area model: a
            developed country and an emerging country. The two areas
            differ according to the size of the informal sector, which
            is characterized by a more flexible labor market and lower
            productivity. To illustrate the potential role of taxation
            in achieving a more fair income distribution, the paper
            introduces a trade shock to simulate the effects of trade
            liberalization. Trade expansion has often been blamed for
            leading to an expansion of the informal sector and a
            widening of wage income disparities. In this context, the
            paper analyzes whether a budget-neutral tax reform --
            switching the tax burden from payroll taxes paid by firms
            operating in the formal sector to a consumption tax -- can
            mitigate possible adverse effects of trade liberalization
            and support labor formalization. The effects of taxation are
            seen in the context of the trade-offs between growth, labor
            formality and equity. The analysis suggests that small
            improvements in formalization, resulting from the tax
            reform, come at the cost of widening income inequality. To
            reduce the incidence of low-quality jobs, tax policy
            interventions should go hand in hand with more effective
            social protection systems and labor laws.