rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Mauritania : counting on natural
            wealth for a sustainable future
A data set of key macro-sustainability
            indicators, constructed after several fact-finding missions,
            and World Bank methodologies on estimating wealth accounting
            are used to study  Mauritania's wealth, which is
            estimated to be between USD50 and USD60 billion. The
            country's produced wealth represents roughly 12 percent
            of total wealth, much less than in lower-middle-income
            countries; by contrast, natural wealth represents
            approximately 45 percent of the total figure. Renewable
            resources account for slightly less than two-thirds of
            natural wealth, with fisheries alone equaling about
            one-fourth of natural wealth. This is good news for
            Mauritania, as sound management of these resources may
            ensure a constant flow of resources in the future and
            therefore -- with adequate policies -- the achievement of
            the same or higher levels of welfare for future generations.
            On the negative side, however, the ratio of net adjusted
            savings over gross national income is estimated to have been
            negative since 2006, meaning that the wealth of the country
            is being depleted. Mauritania has recently joined the ranks
            of lower-middle-income countries, largely thanks to its
            considerable natural resources endowment. Over time the
            mining sector's contribution to gross domestic product
            has grown significantly and important discoveries continue
            to be made. The overarching objective of this wealth
            accounting exercise is thus to support Mauritania  to
            measure its assets better and achieve a more complete
            picture of the prospects for future income, with a view to
            better orienting public policies toward sustainable growth
            and shared prosperity. The paper concludes with several
            indicative policy recommendations.
Immigrant versus natives
            displacement and job creation
The impact of immigration on native
            workers is driven by two countervailing forces: the degree
            of substitutability between natives and immigrants, and the
            increased demand for native workers as immigrants reduce the
            cost of production and output expands. The literature so far
            has focused on the former substitution effect, while
            ignoring the latter scale effect. This paper estimates both
            of these effects using labor force survey data from Malaysia
            (1990-2010), a country uniquely suited for understanding the
            impact of low-skilled immigration. The instrumental variable
            estimates imply that the elasticity of labor demand (3.4) is
            greater than the elasticity of substitution between natives
            and immigrants (2.5). On average the scale effect outweighs
            the substitution effect. For every ten additional
            immigrants, employment of native workers increases by 4.1 in
            a local labor market. These large reallocation effects are
            accompanied by negligible relative wage changes. At the
            national level, a 10 percent increase in immigrants,
            equivalent to 1 percent increase in labor force, has a small
            positive effect on native wages (0.14 percent). The impact
            of immigration is highly heterogeneous for natives with
            different levels of education, resulting in substantial
            changes in skill premiums and hence inequality. Immigrants
            on net displace natives with at most primary education;
            while primarily benefiting those with a little more
            education, lower secondary or completed secondary education.
Agreeing on robust decisions : new
            processes for decision making under deep uncertainty
Investment decision making is already
            difficult for any diverse group of actors with different
            priorities and views. But the presence of deep uncertainties
            linked to climate change and other future conditions further
            challenges decision making by questioning the robustness of
            all purportedly optimal solutions. While decision makers can
            continue to use the decision metrics they have used in the
            past (such as net present value), alternative methodologies
            can improve decision processes, especially those that lead
            with analysis and end in agreement on decisions. Such
            "Agree-on-Decision" methods start by
            stress-testing options under a wide range of plausible
            conditions, without requiring us to agree ex ante on which
            conditions are more or less likely, and against a set of
            objectives or success metrics, without requiring us to agree
            ex ante on how to aggregate or weight them. As a result,
            these methods are easier to apply to contexts of large
            uncertainty or disagreement on values and objectives. This
            inverted process promotes consensus around better decisions
            and can help in managing uncertainty. Analyses performed in
            this way let decision makers make the decision and inform
            them on (1) the conditions under which an option or project
            is vulnerable; (2) the tradeoffs between robustness and
            cost, or between various objectives; and (3) the flexibility
            of various options to respond to changes in the future. In
            doing so, they put decision makers back in the driver's
            seat. A growing set of case studies shows that these methods
            can be applied in real-world contexts and do not need to be
            more costly or complicated than traditional approaches.
            Finally, while this paper focuses on climate change, a
            better treatment of uncertainties and disagreement would in
            general improve decision making and development outcomes.
Institutions and firms' return
            to innovation : evidence from the world bank enterprise survey
This paper poses a question: do firms in
            developing countries not innovate because they are unwilling
            to? The question moves away from the conventional focus on
            the obstacles (such as the lack of access to finance) that
            hinder firms' innovation ability. The World Bank's
            Enterprise Survey is used first to estimate the return to
            firms' innovation across many developing countries, in
            terms of sales and sales per worker. Then the return to
            innovation is compared across countries with different
            levels of institutional quality. In countries with lower
            institutional quality (specifically, rule of law, regulatory
            quality, property and patent right protection), the return
            to firms' innovation is lower. This suggests that poor
            institutional environment lowers firms' return to
            innovation and hence discourages them from investing in
            researching and adopting new products.
Bridging the gap : identifying what
            is holding self-employed women back in Ghana, Rwanda,
            Tanzania, the Republic of Congo, and Uganda
WPS6946 Policy Research Working Paper 6946

# Bridging the Gap

Identifying What Is Holding Self-Employed Women Back in Ghana, Rwanda, Tanzania, the Republic of Congo, and Uganda _Emily Nix Elisa Gamberoni Rachel Heath_ The World Bank Africa Region Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Unit June 2014
How should donors respond to
            resource windfalls in poor countries from aid to insurance
Natural resources are being discovered
            in more countries, both rich and poor. Many of the new and
            aspiring resource exporters are low-income countries that
            are still receiving substantial levels of foreign aid.
            Resource discoveries open up enormous opportunities, but
            also expose producing countries to huge trade and fiscal
            shocks from volatile commodity markets if their exports are
            highly concentrated. A large literature on the
            "resource curse" shows that these are damaging
            unless countries manage to cushion the effects through
            countercyclical policy. It also shows that the countries
            least likely to do so successfully are those with weaker
            institutions, and these are most likely to remain as clients
            of the aid system. This paper considers the question of how
            donors should respond to their clients' potential
            windfalls. It discusses several ways in which the focus and
            nature of foreign aid programs will need to change,
            including the level of financial assistance. The paper
            develops some ideas on how a donor like the International
            Development Association might structure its program of
            financial transfers to mitigate volatility. The paper
            outlines ways in which the International Development
            Association could use hedging instruments to vary
            disbursements while still working within a framework of
            country allocations that are not contingent on oil prices.
            Simulations suggest that the International Development
            Association could be structured to provide a larger degree
            of insurance if it is calibrated to hedge against large
            declines in resource prices. These suggestions are intended
            to complement other mechanisms, including self-insurance
            using Sovereign Wealth Funds (where possible) and the
            facilities of the International Monetary Fund.
Parallel systems and human resource
            management in India's public health services : a view
            from the front lines
There is building evidence in India that
            the delivery of health services suffers from an actual
            shortfall in trained health professionals, but also from
            unsatisfactory results of existing service providers working
            in the public and private sectors. This study focusses on
            the public sector and examines de facto institutional and
            governance arrangements that may give rise to
            well-documented provider behaviors such as absenteeism,
            which can adversely affect service delivery processes and
            outcomes. The paper considers four human resource management
            subsystems: postings, transfers, promotions, and
            disciplinary practices. The four subsystems are analyzed
            from the perspective of front line workers, that is,
            physicians working in rural health care facilities operated
            by two state governments. Physicians were sampled in one
            post-reform state that has instituted human resource
            management reforms and one pre-reform state that has not.
            The findings are based on quantitative and qualitative
            measurement. The results show that formal rules are
            undermined by a parallel modus operandi in which desirable
            posts are often determined by political connections and side
            payments. The evidence suggests an institutional environment
            in which formal rules of accountability are trumped by a
            parallel set of accountabilities. These systems appear so
            entrenched that reforms have borne no significant effect.
The environmental implications of
            Russia's accession to the world trade organization
This report investigates the
            environmental impacts of Russia's accession to the
            World Trade Organization. A 10-region, 30-sector model of
            the Russian economy is developed. The model is innovative
            and more accurate empirically in that it contains foreign
            direct investment, imperfectly competitive sectors, and
            endogenous productivity effects triggered by World Trade
            Organization accession along with environmental emissions
            data in Russia for seven pollutants that are tracked for all
            30 sectors in each of the 10 regions. The decomposition
            analysis shows that despite the fact that World Trade
            Organization accession allows Russia to import better
            technologies and reduce pollution from the "technique
            effect," on balance World Trade Organization accession
            alone will increase environmental pollution in Russia
            through a shift toward dirty industries (the
            "composition effect") and the expansion of output
            with its associated increase in pollution ("scale
            effect"). The paper assesses the costs of three types
            of environmental regulations to reduce carbon dioxide
            emissions by 20 percent. The paper simultaneously implements
            a central case scenario with each of the carbon dioxide
            emission reduction policy initiatives. The analysis finds
            that the welfare gains of World Trade Organization accession
            are large enough to pay for the costs of any of the three
            environmental abatement policies, while leaving a net
            welfare gain. But the political economy implications are
            that the non-market-based policies are more costly and the
            command and control policy, which is not well targeted, is
            very costly. Based on a constant returns to scale model, the
            estimated welfare gains are insufficient to finance the
            costs of environmental regulation.
How regional integration and
            transnational energy networks have boosted FDI in Turkey
            (and may cease to do so): a case study: how geo-political
            alliances and regional networks matter
Turkey has historically struggled to
            attract foreign investors. This paper argues that not only
            macroeconomic and political stability, but also regional
            integration explains the upsurge in foreign direct
            investment observed since 2005. The analysis draws from a
            qualitative framework. It discusses how, contrary to the
            Customs Union Treaty for industrial products with the
            European Union, the official start of the European
            Union's accession to negotiations in 2005 encompassed a
            wide set of reforms in several chapters directly or
            indirectly affecting the business climate. The reforms
            helped to enhance foreign direct investment attraction in
            Turkey. However, it seems that the global economic slowdown
            starting in 2009 and increasing Euro-skepticism have already
            started to erode this effect. Only large foreign investment
            in the energy sector observed in 2009-13, explained by the
            energy security strategy of the European Union and the
            privatization agenda, has prevented the collapse of foreign
            direct investment inflows to Turkey.
How to assess agricultural water
            productivity looking for water in the agricultural
            productivity and efficiency literature
Given population and income growth, it
            is widely expected that the agricultural sector will have to
            expand the use of water for irrigation to meet rising food
            demand; at the same time, the competition for water
            resources is growing in many regions. As a response, it is
            increasingly recommended that efforts should focus on
            improving water productivity in agriculture, and significant
            public and private investments are being made with this goal
            in mind. Yet most public communications are vague on the
            meaning of agricultural water productivity, and on what
            should be done to improve it. They also tend to emphasize
            water as if it were the only input that mattered. This paper
            presents findings from a first attempt to survey the
            agricultural productivity and efficiency literature with
            regard to the explicit inclusion of water aspects in
            productivity and efficiency measurements, with the aim of
            contributing to the discussion on how to assess and possibly
            improve agricultural water productivity. The focus is on
            studies applying single-factor productivity measures, total
            factor productivity indices, frontier models, and deductive
            models that incorporate water. A key finding is that most
            studies either incorporate field- and basin-level aspects
            but focus only on a single input (water), or they apply a
            multi-factor approach but do not tackle the basin level. It
            seems that no study on agricultural water productivity has
            yet presented an approach that accounts for multiple inputs
            and basin-level issues. However, deductive methods do
            provide the flexibility to overcome many of the limitations
            of the other methods.
How useful is inequality of
            opportunity as a policy construct
The academic literature on equality of
            opportunity has burgeoned. The concepts and measures have
            begun to be used by policy institutions, including in
            specific sectors such as health and education. It is argued
            that one advantage of focusing on equality of opportunity is
            that policy makers are more responsive to that discourse
            than to equality of outcomes per se. This paper presents a
            critique of equality of opportunity in the policy context.
            Although the empirical analysis to which the literature has
            given rise is useful and is to be welcomed, current methods
            for quantifying and implementing the concept with a view to
            informing the policy discourse face a series of fundamental
            questions that remain unanswered. Without a full
            appreciation of these difficulties, the methods may prove to
            be misleading in the policy context.
Damming the commons : an empirical
            analysis of international cooperation and conflict in dam location
This paper examines whether countries
            consider the welfare of other nations when they make water
            development decisions. The paper estimates econometric
            models of the location of major dams around the world as a
            function of the degree of international sharing of rivers.
            The analysis finds that dams are more prevalent in areas of
            river basins upstream of foreign countries, supporting the
            view that countries free ride in exploiting water resources.
            There is weak evidence that international water management
            institutions reduce the extent of such free-riding.
Does FDI bring good jobs to host countries
Are jobs created by foreign investors
            good jobs? The evidence reviewed in this article is
            consistent with the view that jobs created by FDI are good
            jobs, both from the worker's and the country's
            perspective. From the worker's perspective, this is
            because such jobs are likely to pay higher wages than jobs
            in domestic firms, at least in developing countries, and
            because foreign employers tend to offer more training than
            local firms do. From the countrys perspective, jobs in
            foreign affiliates are good jobs because FDI inflows tend to
            increase the aggregate productivity of the host country.