rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Pension Funds with Automatic
            Enrollment Schemes : Lessons for Emerging Economies
Since the introduction of the KiwiSaver
            scheme in New Zealand in 2006, several countries have
            implemented, or are in the process of implementing,
            voluntary funded pension systems with automatic enrollment
            features. Since most of the literature has focused on
            countries with the common law tradition, including the
            United Kingdom and the United States, this note analyzes
            cases of countries with the civil code tradition, including
            Turkey, Poland, the Russian Federation, Chile, Brazil, and
            the Province of Quebec in Canada. This sample includes
            mostly emerging economies, with reforms at different stages,
            from those that have already been completed to those that
            are about to start discussions in their parliaments.
            Although they are not a substitute for necessary parametric
            reforms, automatic enrollment schemes offer the possibility
            of improvements in future retirement income for a
            significant part of the labor force. This note stresses that
            the paternalistic approach of automatic enrollment schemes
            imposes a great degree of responsibility on governments and
            requires careful consideration of the design of the system,
            including the industrial organization of the pension fund
            industry and default investment strategies. Sufficient time
            and resources for preparing communication and educational
            campaigns has played a key role in achieving high rates of participation.
A Joint Foreign Currency Risk
            Management Approach for Sovereign Assets and Liabilities
An asset and liability management
            framework for managing risks arising from sovereign foreign
            exchange obligations requires a joint analysis of (i) the
            external financial liabilities resulting from a
            country's sovereign debt and (ii) the foreign exchange
            assets of its central bank. Governments often issue sizable
            amounts of debt denominated in foreign currencies,
            subjecting their fiscal positions to foreign exchange
            volatilities. Prudent management of a sovereign&#x2019;s
            foreign exchange position under an asset and liability
            management framework enables governments to mitigate risks
            at the lowest possible cost, hence increasing resilience to
            external shocks. Based on the challenges associated with the
            implementation of an asset and liability management
            framework, this study recommends a practical approach that
            includes analysis of the foreign exchange positions of
            central bank reserves and central government debt portfolios
            and optimization of the net position. The proposed model is
            tested, using the foreign exchange reserve and external debt
            data of seven countries (Albania, Ghana, FYR Macedonia,
            South Africa, the Republic of Korea, Tunisia, and Uruguay).
            The paper employs quantitative methods to explore the impact
            of an overarching asset and liability management strategy
            and integrated approach on the efficient management of
            foreign exchange risk. It provides policy recommendations on
            ways to minimize the risk of foreign exchange mismatches and
            increase the return on foreign exchange reserves.
Why Do So Many Water Points Fail in
            Tanzania An Empirical Analysis of Contributing Factors
According to the 2015 Tanzania Water
            Point Mapping data, about 29 percent of all water points are
            non-functional, out of which 20 percent failed within the
            first year. This paper analyzes the various factors which
            impact water point failure and measures the relative
            contributions of these determinants. The results indicate
            that water points managed by village committees had a much
            higher likelihood of failure than those managed by private
            operators or water authority. Factors that cannot be
            modified such as hydrogeological factors play a major role
            in determining water points failure during the first year
            after installation.  However, management type as well as the
            type of pump and technology matter considerably more in the
            short and medium term.
Why Do So Many Water Points Fail in
            Tanzania An Empirical Analysis of Contributing Factors
WPS8729 Policy Research Working Paper 8729 Why Do So Many Water Points Fail in Tanzania? An Empirical Analysis of Contributing Factors _George Joseph Luis Alberto Andres Gnanaraj Chellaraj Jonathan Grabinsky Zabludovsky Sophie Charlotte Emi Ayling Yi Rong Hoo_ Water Global Practice February 2019
Measuring Human Capital
Students around the world are going to
            school but many of them are not learning -- an emerging gap
            in human capital formation. To understand this gap, this
            paper introduces a new global data set measuring learning in
            164 countries. The data cover 98 percent of the world’s
            population from 2000 to 2017. The data set will be publicly
            available and updated at regular intervals by the World Bank
            and is designed to serve as a public good to accelerate
            global policy and research agendas focused on quality
            education and human capital formation. The paper presents
            several motivating facts in a first application of the data:
            (a) although enrollment has increased worldwide, learning
            progress is more limited; (b) girls outperform boys on
            learning -- a positive gender gap -- in contrast to a
            negative gender gap observed for schooling; (c) human
            capital when measured by both schooling and learning
            accounts for between a fifth to half of cross-country income
            differences -- a middle ground in the recent development
            accounting literature and (d) average estimates mask
            important underlying heterogeneity by country income status
            and region. These stylized facts demonstrate the potential
            of this new global dataset to reveal insights into the
            relationship between human capital and economic development.
Assessing Rural Accessibility and
            Rural Roads Investment Needs Using Open Source Data
Rural accessibility is the only metric
            used in the Sustainable Development Goals to track progress
            toward better transport services in low- and middle-income
            countries. This paper estimates the rural accessibility
            index, defined as the proportion of the rural population who
            live within 2 kilometers of an all-season road, in 166
            countries using open data. It then explores the cost of
            increasing the rural accessibility index in 19 countries,
            using an algorithm that prioritizes rural roads investments
            based on their impact on rural access and connectivity.
            Investment costs quickly balloon as the rural accessibility
            index increases, questioning the affordability of universal
            access to paved roads for many countries by 2030. If
            countries spent 1 percent of their gross domestic product
            annually on the upgrade of rural roads, even under
            optimistic assumptions on growth of gross domestic product,
            rural accessibility would only increase from 39 to 52
            percent by 2030 across all developing countries. Alternative
            solutions to rural integration must thus be implemented in
            the short run until countries can afford to increase
            significantly access to all weather roads. For example,
            drones that supply regular food and medicine supply to
            remote communities are much more affordable than roads in
            the short term.
Are Trade Preferences a Panacea The
            Export Impact of the African Growth
Does “infant industry” preferential
            access durably boost exports? Using country-product-year
            data for 1992–2017 and triple-differences regressions, we
            show that the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA)
            enhanced apparel exports of African countries on average.
            But the impact leveled off after the Multi-Fiber Arrangement
            unleashed competition from Asian countries. Furthermore, the
            positive average impact masks regional heterogeneity: East
            Africa’s late-bloomers offset Southern Africa’s boom-bust
            pattern. Firm-level data reveal that even East Africa’s
            export growth was driven by entrants rather than incumbents
            who received large preference margins during the early AGOA
            years. Overall, the authors find little evidence that
            preferences durably boosted exports.
Are Public Sector Workers in
            Developing Countries Overpaid Evidence from a New Global
            Data Set
This paper examines the public sector
            wage premium using nationally representative household
            surveys from 91 countries.  The public sector generally pays
            a wage premium compared to all private sector salaried
            employees, but the size of the premium is sensitive to the
            choice of the private sector comparator and varies
            considerably by worker characteristics. For most countries,
            the average premium disappears when the public sector is
            compared to only formal sector private employees, especially
            when controlling for occupation. The public sector wage
            premium is higher for women and low-skilled workers. In
            contrast, high-skilled public sector employees are most
            often paid the same as their private sector counterparts or
            may even pay a penalty for working in the public sector.
            Consistent with this, the public sector premium is greater
            for employees with less education, those working in lower
            paid occupations, and those whose earnings fall in the lower
            part of the conditional earnings distribution. Across
            countries, the wage premium is only weakly associated with
            countries’ level of development. These findings nuance the
            existing consensus that public sector workers tend to enjoy
            a significant wage premium over their private sector
            counterparts, and that this premium is especially large in
            low-income countries.
Understanding Inflation in Emerging
            and Developing Economies
Emerging market and developing economies
            (EMDEs) have experienced an extraordinary decline in
            inflation since the early 1970s. After peaking in 1974 at
            17.3 percent, inflation in these economies declined to 3.5
            percent in 2017. Despite a checkered history of managing
            inflation among many EMDEs, disinflation occurred across all
            regions. This paper presents a summary of a recent book,
            "Inflation in Emerging and Developing Economies:
            Evolution, Drivers, and Policies," that analyzes this
            remarkable achievement. The findings suggest that many EMDEs
            enjoy the benefits of stability-oriented and resilient
            monetary policy frameworks, including central bank
            transparency and independence. Such policy frameworks need
            to be complemented by strong macroeconomic and institutional
            arrangements. Inflation expectations are more weakly
            anchored in EMDEs than in advanced economies. In EMDEs that
            do not operate inflation targeting frameworks, exchange rate
            movements tend to have larger and more persistent effects on inflation.
Migration and Urbanization in
            Post-Apartheid South Africa
Although Africa has experienced rapid
            urbanization in recent decades, we know little about the
            process of urbanization across the continent. The paper
            exploits a natural experiment, the abolition of South
            African pass laws, to explore how exogenous population
            shocks affect the spatial distribution of economic activity.
            Under apartheid, black South Africans were severely
            restricted in their choice of location and many were forced
            to live in homelands. Following the abolition of apartheid
            they were free to migrate. Given a migration cost in
            distance, a town nearer to the homelands will receive a
            larger inflow of people than a more distant town following
            the removal of mobility restrictions. Drawing upon this
            exogenous variation, the authors study the effect of
            migration on urbanization in South Africa. While they find
            that on average there is no endogenous adjustment of
            population location to a positive population shock, there is
            heterogeneity in these results. Cities that start off larger
            do grow endogenously in the wake of a migration shock, while
            rural areas that start off small do not respond in the same
            way. This heterogeneity indicates that population shocks
            lead to an increase in urban relative to rural populations.
            Overall, the evidence suggests that exogenous migration
            shocks can foster urbanization in the medium run.
Global Inflation Synchronization
The paper studies the extent of global
            inflation synchronization using a dynamic factor model in a
            large set of countries over a half century. The
            authors' methodology allows them to account for
            differences across groups of countries (advanced economies
            and emerging market and developing economies) and to analyze
            commonalities in inflation synchronization across a wide
            range of inflation measures. The paper reports three major
            results. First, inflation movements have become increasingly
            synchronized internationally over time: a common global
            factor has accounted for about 22 percent of variation in
            national inflation rates since 2001. Second, inflation
            synchronization has also become more broad-based: while it
            was previously much more pronounced among advanced economies
            than among emerging market and developing economies, it has
            become substantial in both groups over the past two decades.
            In addition, inflation synchronization has become
            significant across all inflation measures since 2001,
            whereas it was previously prominent only for inflation
            measures that included mostly tradable goods.
Estimating Small Area Population
            Density Using Survey Data and Satellite Imagery : An
            Application to Sri Lanka
Country-level census data are typically
            collected once every 10 years. However, conflict, migration,
            urbanization, and natural disasters can cause rapid shifts
            in local population patterns. This study uses Sri Lankan
            data to demonstrate the feasibility of a bottom-up method
            that combines household survey data with contemporaneous
            satellite imagery to track frequent changes in local
            population density. A Poisson regression model based on
            indicators derived from satellite data, selected using the
            least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, accurately
            predicts village-level population density. The model is
            estimated in villages sampled in the 2012/13 Household
            Income and Expenditure Survey to obtain out-of-sample
            density predictions in the nonsurveyed villages. The
            predictions approximate the 2012 census density well and are
            more accurate than other bottom-up studies based on
            lower-resolution satellite data. The predictions are also
            more accurate than most publicly available population
            products, which rely on areal interpolation of census data
            to redistribute population at the local level. The
            accuracies are similar when estimated using a random forest
            model, and when density estimates are expressed in terms of
            population counts. The collective evidence suggests that
            combining surveys with satellite data is a cost-effective
            method to track local population changes at more frequent intervals.
Low Tax Jurisdictions and
            Preferential Regimes : Policy Gaps in Developing Economies
This paper reviews recent international
            initiatives and domestic policy developments aimed at
            helping countries to protect their tax base against erosion
            by individuals and companies that allocate assets to or
            route income via low tax jurisdictions. The paper highlights
            the benefits and limitations of existing policy instruments
            from the perspective of capital-importing developing
            economies. Focusing on two common policy gaps for developing
            economies, options are explored for (i) introducing
            necessary charging provisions to ensure effective taxation
            of individuals, and (ii) an anti-diversion rule tailored to
            reflect developing economy contexts and administrative
            constraints. These proposals include a possible definition
            of excess profits in low tax jurisdictions and options for
            distribution keys to reallocate profits to countries where
            there is "real" economic substance and activity.
            The measures discussed could also address the diversion of
            profits to entities benefitting from preferential regimes in
            countries with high nominal tax rates.
Rural Roads, Poverty, and Resilience
            : Evidence from Ethiopia
This study analyzes the impacts of the
            recent rural road development in Ethiopia on welfare and
            economic outcomes. The identification of the impacts relies
            on a difference-in-differences matching approach, taking
            advantage of the nationally representative household survey
            and the original road database, both of which are panel data
            spanning between 2012 and 2016. The results of the
            econometric analysis overall suggest that Ethiopia's
            recent rural road development has substantially increased
            household welfare and supported households in coping with
            the recent severe droughts. This study estimates that rural
            roads increased, on average, household consumption by 16.1
            percent between 2012 and 2016 (or 3.8 percent per year). The
            effects of rural road development were largest in the most
            remote communities, as it increased household consumption by
            27.9 percent. Furthermore, in the communities most affected
            by the El Niño drought, the likelihood of falling into
            poverty was 14.4 percent lower between 2012 and 2016 if the
            community was connected by a rural road. Taken together, the
            results suggest that, by connecting remote communities to
            markets, rural roads have substantially increased the
            welfare and resilience of rural households in shock-prone environments.
Who Wins, Who Loses Understanding
            the Spatially Differentiated Effects of the Belt and Road Initiative
This paper examines how cities and
            regions within countries are likely to adjust to trade
            openness and improved connectivity driven by large transport
            investments from China's Belt and Road Initiative. The
            paper presents a quantitative economic geography model
            alongside spatially detailed information on the location of
            people, economic activity, and transport costs to
            international gateways in Central Asia to identify which
            places are likely to gain and which places are likely to
            lose. The findings are that urban hubs near border crossings
            will disproportionately gain while farther out regions with
            little comparative advantage will be relative losers.
            Complementary investments in domestic transport networks and
            trade facilitation are complementary policies and can help
            in spatially spreading the benefits. However, barriers to
            domestic labor mobility exacerbate spatial inequalities
            whilst dampening overall welfare.
The Belt and Road Initiative :
            Economic, Poverty and Environmental Impacts
China's Belt and Road Initiative
            aims to improve connectivity between China and more than 70
            countries through infrastructure investment and regional
            cooperation. The initiative has the potential to accelerate
            significantly the rate of economic integration and
            development in the region, as trade costs decline. The goals
            of this paper are to (i) study the impacts of infrastructure
            improvements on Belt and Road Initiative and non–Belt and
            Road Initiative countries' trade flows, growth, and
            poverty; and (ii) suggest policies that would help maximize
            gains from the Belt and Road Initiative–induced trade cost
            declines. The analysis captures the trade costs reductions
            as a result of infrastructure improvements. The findings
            indicate that the Belt and Road Initiative would be largely
            beneficial. First, global income increases by 0.7 percent
            (in 2030 relative to the baseline). This translates into
            almost half a trillion dollars in 2014 prices and market
            exchange rates. The Belt and Road Initiative area captures
            82 percent of the gain, with the largest percent gains in
            East Asia. Second, globally, the Belt and Road Initiative
            could contribute to lifting 7.6 million people from extreme
            poverty and 32 million from moderate poverty. Third, the
            initiative would lead to a modest increase in global carbon
            dioxide emissions, with a complex set of positive and
            negative outcomes at the national level for other types of emissions.