rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
The growth aftermath of natural disasters
This paper provides a description of the
            macroeconomic aftermath of natural disasters. It traces the
            yearly response of gross domestic product growth - both
            aggregated and disaggregated into its agricultural and
            non-agricultural components - to four types of natural
            disasters - droughts, floods, earthquakes, and storms. The
            paper uses a methodological approach based on pooling the
            experiences of various countries over time. It consists of
            vector auto-regressions in the presence of endogenous
            variables and exogenous shocks (VARX), applied to a panel of
            cross-country and time-series data. The analysis finds
            heterogeneous effects on a variety of dimensions. First, the
            effects of natural disasters are stronger, for better or
            worse, on developing than on rich countries. Second, while
            the impact of some natural disasters can be beneficial when
            they are of moderate intensity, severe disasters never have
            positive effects. Third, not all natural disasters are alike
            in terms of the growth response they induce, and, perhaps
            surprisingly, some can entail benefits regarding economic
            growth. Thus, droughts have a negative effect on both
            agricultural and non-agricultural growth.  In contrast,
            floods tend to have a positive effect on economic growth in
            both major sectors. Earthquakes have a negative effect on
            agricultural growth but a positive one on non-agricultural
            growth.  Storms tend to have a negative effect on gross
            domestic product growth but the effect is short-lived and
            small. Future research should concentrate on exploring the
            mechanisms behind these heterogeneous impacts.
World Bank policy research : a
            historical overview
The World Bank is a leading intellectual
            institution on development.  It is a world leader in
            analytical studies in areas including poverty measurement,
            delivery of social services, impact evaluation, measurement
            of development outcomes, international trade and migration.
            It is also a leader in development data, including the
            Living Standard Measurement Surveys; the enterprise surveys,
            and the International Price Comparison Project.  World Bank
            research is resolutely empirical and policy oriented. By
            both learning from past policies and operations and thinking
            critically about future policies, research plays a critical
            role in the formulation of policy advice to developing
            countries. This paper reviews the intellectual and
            institutional forces that have shaped research at the World
            Bank since the latter started lending to developing
            countries in the early 1950s.  It provides an overview of
            the shifts in development economics that have influenced
            Bank research and briefly surveys the changes in research
            organization, structure and approach. The first section,
            after a short introduction, examines the shifts in positive
            and normative views about development during the past half
            century that have influenced Bank thinking.  The Bank itself
            has been an active participant in the rise and fall of
            long-lived development dogmas about the nature of
            development; the most appropriate policies and actions for
            achieving it; and the respective roles of government and
            markets. The second section examines how the World Bank has
            adapted its organization to keep abreast of emerging issues
            and produce relevant policy research of good quality. On the
            one hand, the Bank has experienced several reorganizations
            that have affected the research unit(s) as well as its
            relationship with operational units.  On the other hand, the
            Banks research units themselves have been reorganized at
            several junctures, leading to new priorities and new means
            of achieving them.
Trade finance in crisis : market
            adjustment or market failure
As world leaders have agreed to
            massively support trade finance, this paper discusses the
            singularity of the issues related to trade finance in the
            context of the global economic crisis. Why should
            international trade finance be a particular issue of concern
            in the current circumstances? Are there specific market or
            government failures associated with trade finance that
            justify a special and differential treatment of the issue by
            policymakers? If so, what would then be the most appropriate
            policy instruments to address those concerns? The paper
            cautions against the notion of a large trade finance
            "gap," yet highlights the possible rationales and
            conditions for an effective intervention in support of trade finance.
Implications for climate-change
            policy of research on cooperation in social dilemmas
The problem of climate change seems to
            be a tragedy of the commons: despite the global benefits of
            reducing green-house gas emissions, no individual has any
            incentive to reduce his or her own emissions. Yet many
            people are making efforts to reduce emissions and putting
            pressure on businesses and governments to do the same.
            Although the size of these efforts is unclear, their very
            existence might seem puzzling. The efforts are consistent,
            however, with some theoretical and empirical evidence about
            the extent of cooperation in other social dilemmas. This
            evidence does not imply that greenhouse-gas emissions will
            be reduced to desirable levels, but it does suggest that the
            potential for voluntary cooperation should not be ignored.
            It also suggests that cooperation can be promoted by (i)
            allowing cooperators to punish defectors without withdrawing
            their own cooperation; (ii) publicly emphasizing the social
            benefits and extent of cooperation and the social norms that
            require it; and (iii) improving the quantity and timeliness
            of public information about cooperation and defection.
Credit constraints and investment
            behavior in Mexico's rural economy
This paper uses two recently completed
            surveys of individual entrepreneurs (farmers and
            microentrepreneurs) and registered enterprises (agricultural
            and nonagricultural) operating in Mexicos rural sector to
            provide new evidence about the factors influencing the
            incidence of credit constraints and investment behavior. To
            measure the incidence of credit constraints, the authors use
            self-reported information on whether economic agents have a
            demand for loans, separating formal and informal markets.
            They define credit constraints as a situation where rural
            agents report an unsatisfied demand for loans (formal or
            informal), which originates from rural agents having
            projects that are too risky or from impediments hindering
            the ability of rural agents and lenders to reduce
            information asymmetries. The authors find that the
            self-reported demand for loans is low. Nevertheless, the
            incidence of credit constraints is pervasive, especially
            among individual entrepreneurs. The low use of loans has
            consequences for the amount of investments that occur in the
            rural economy, posing a major obstacle to Mexicos
            convergence towards its NAFTA partners. The empirical
            analysis, which includes proxies of business prospects and
            creditworthiness, shows that improving the availability of
            loans to credit constrained agents would increase the number
            of agents making investments and their investment to capital ratios.
International grain reserves and
            other instruments to address volatility in grain markets
In the long view, recent grain price
            volatility is not anomalous. Wheat, rice, and maize are
            highly substitutable in the global market for calories, and
            when aggregate stocks decline to minimal feasible levels,
            prices become highly sensitive to small shocks, consistent
            with storage models. In this decade, stocks have declined
            due to high income growth and biofuels mandates. Recently,
            shocks including the Australian drought and biofuels demand
            boosts due to the oil price spike were exacerbated by a
            sequence of trade restrictions by key exporters beginning in
            the thin global rice market in the fall of 2007, which
            turned market anxiety into panic. To protect vulnerable
            consumers, countries intervened in storage markets and, if
            they were exporters, to limit trade access. Recognizing
            these realities, vulnerable countries are building strategic
            reserves. The associated expense and negative incentive
            effects can be controlled if reserves have quantitative
            targets related to the consumption needs of the most
            vulnerable, with distribution to the latter only in severe
            emergencies. More-ambitious plans manipulate world prices
            via buffer stocks or naked short speculation to keep prices
            consistent with fundamentals. Past interventions of either
            kind have been expensive, ineffective, and generally
            short-lived. Further, there is no significant evidence that
            prices do not reflect fundamentals, including export market access.
The long and the short of emerging
            market debt
Emerging economies have tried to promote
            long-term debt because it reduces maturity mismatches and
            the probability of crises. This paper uses unique evidence
            from the leading case of Chile to study to what extent there
            is domestic demand for long-term instruments. The authors
            analyze monthly asset-level portfolios of Chilean
            institutional investors (mutual funds, pension funds, and
            insurance companies) and compare their maturity structure to
            that of US bond mutual funds. Despite being thought to
            invest long term, Chilean asset-management institutions
            (mutual and pension funds) hold large amounts of short-term
            assets relative to US mutual funds and Chilean insurance
            companies. Short-termism is not driven by lack of instrument
            availability or tactical behavior. Instead, it seems to be
            explained by the desire to minimize inflation risk and, more
            importantly, by manager incentives that tilt demand toward
            short-term instruments. Extending the maturity of emerging
            market debt may require reducing risk and reshaping investor incentives.
The complementarity of MDG
            achievements : the case of child mortality in Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper analyzes complementarities
            between different Millennium Development Goals, focusing on
            child mortality and how it is influenced by progress in the
            other goals, in particular two goals related to the
            expansion of female education: universal primary education
            and gender equality in education. The authors provide
            evidence from eight Sub-Saharan African countries using two
            rounds of Demographic and Health Surveys per country and
            applying a consistent micro-econometric methodology. In
            contrast to the mixed findings of previous studies, for most
            countries the findings reveal strong complementarities
            between mothers educational achievement and child
            mortality. Mothers schooling lifts important demand-side
            constraints impeding the use of health services. Children of
            mothers with primary education are much more likely to
            receive vaccines, a crucial proximate determinant of child
            survival. In addition, better educated mothers tend to have
            longer birth intervals, which again increase the chances of
            child survival. For the variables related to the other
            goals, for example wealth proxies and access to safe
            drinking water, the analysis fails to detect significant
            effects on child mortality, a finding that may be related to
            data limitations. Finally, the study carries out a set of
            illustrative simulations to assess the prospects of
            achieving a reduction by two-thirds in the under-five
            mortality rate. The findings indicate that some countries,
            which have been successful in the past, seem to have used
            their policy space for fast progress in child mortality, for
            example by extending vaccination coverage. This is the main
            reason why future achievements will be more difficult and
            explains why the authors have a fairly pessimistic outlook.
Exchange rate and output
            fluctuations in the small open economy of Mauritius
The authors estimate a VAR and compute
            generalized impulse response to analyze the joint dynamics
            of four key macroeconomic variables in the small open
            economy of Mauritius. Results suggest that nominal exchange
            rate and interest rate have limited ability to impact output
            growth over the medium-run. Large error bands hinder
            analysis of the inflation output trade-off, but evidence
            points to a weak relationship in the short run as well.
            These findings are used to shed some light into the policy
            response to the current worldwide economic slowdown
            affecting Mauritius.
The power of exports
The authors systematically document
            remarkably high degrees of concentration in manufacturing
            exports for a sample of 151 countries over a range of 3,000
            products. For every country manufacturing exports are
            dominated by a few "big hits" which account for
            most of the export value and where the "hit"
            includes both finding the right product and finding the
            right market. Higher export volumes are associated with
            higher degrees of concentration, after controlling for the
            number of destinations a country penetrates. This further
            highlights the importance of big hits. The distribution of
            exports closely follows a power law, especially in the upper
            tail. These findings do not support a "picking
            winners" policy for export development; the power law
            characterization implies that the chance of picking a winner
            diminishes exponentially with the degree of success.
            Moreover, given the size of the economy, developing
            countries are more exposed to demand shocks than rich ones,
            which further lowers the benefits from trying to pick winners.
Who survives the impact of
            corruption, competition and property rights across firms
Size, age, sector, and productivity are
            commonly cited as factors determining a firms survival.
            However, there are several dimensions of the investment
            climate in which the firm operates that affect whether it
            continues in business or exits. This paper uses new panel
            data from 27 Eastern European and Central Asian countries to
            test the importance of five areas of the business climate on
            firm exit: the efficiency of government services, access to
            finance, the extent of corruption or cronyism, the strength
            of property rights, and the degree of competition. The paper
            finds that weaknesses in these areas do affect the
            probability of firm exit  largely in ways that undermine
            the Schumpeterian cleansing role of exit in raising overall
            productivity. Greater costs and regulatory burdens raise the
            probability that more productive firms exit, while less
            developed financial and legal institutions mitigate forces
            that would otherwise push less productive firms to exit.
            Thus, the more productive firms stand to gain the most from
            improvements in the investment climate, whether that is
            lowering transaction costs or improving market mechanisms.
            This holds both within countries and across countries. The
            impact of a particular investment climate measure can also
            differ significantly by type of firm, with the focus given
            to firm size. The differential impact on size can be
            significant at a size cutoff of 10 or more employees. As
            these are the firms that are near the threshold of many
            regulatory requirements, the implications are not just with
            regard to whether a firm remains in operation, but whether
            it does so in the formal sector.
Social impacts of climate change in
            Peru : a district level analysis of the effects of recent
            and future climate change on human development and inequality
This paper uses district level data to
            estimate the general relationship between climate, income
            and life expectancy in Peru. The analysis finds that both
            incomes and life expectancy show hump-shaped relationships,
            with optimal average annual temperatures around 18-20ºC.
            These estimated relationships were used to simulate the
            likely effects of both past (1958-2008) and future
            (2008-2058) climate change. At the aggregate level, future
            climate change in Peru is estimated to cause a small
            reduction in average life expectancy of about 0.2 years.
            This average, however, hides much larger losses in the
            already hot areas as well as substantial gains in currently
            cold areas. Similarly, the average impact on incomes is a
            modest reduction of 2.3 percent, but with some districts
            experiencing losses of up to 20 percent and others gains of
            up to 13 percent. Future climate change is estimated to
            cause an increase in poverty (all other things equal), but
            to have no significant effect on the distribution of incomes.
Impacts of policy instruments to
            reduce congestion and emissions from urban transportation :
            the case of Sao Paulo, Brazil
This study examines impacts on net
            social benefits or economic welfare of alternative policy
            instruments for reducing traffic congestion and atmospheric
            emissions in São Paulo, Brazil. The study shows that
            expanding road networks, subsidizing public transit, and
            improving automobile fuel economy may not be as effective as
            suggested by economic theories because these policies could
            cause significant rebound effects. Although pricing
            instruments such as congestion tolls and fuel taxes would
            certainly reduce congestion and emissions, the optimal level
            of these instruments would steeply increase the monetary
            cost of travel per trip and are therefore politically
            difficult to implement. However, a noticeable finding is
            that even smaller tolls, which are more likely to be
            politically acceptable, have substantial benefits in terms
            of reducing congestion and emissions. Among the various
            policy instruments examined in the study, the most socially
            preferable policy option for São Paulo would be to introduce
            a mix of congestion toll and fuel taxes on automobiles and
            use the revenues to improve public transit systems.
Breaking the waves does education
            mediate the relationship between youth bulges and political violence
Much of the developing world has
            experienced a decline in mortality, while fertility often
            has remained high. This has produced youthful populations in
            many countries, generally referred to as "youth
            bulges." Recent empirical research suggests that youth
            bulges may be associated with increased risks of political
            violence and conflict. This paper addresses ways that
            education may serve as a strategy to reduce the risk of
            political violence, particularly in the context of large
            cohorts of young males. The authors use a new education
            dataset measuring educational attainment. The dataset is
            constructed using demographic back-projection techniques,
            and offers uninterrupted time-series data for 120 countries.
            The empirical analysis finds evidence that large, young male
            population bulges are more likely to increase the risk of
            conflict in societies where male secondary education is low.
            The effect on conflict risk by low education and large youth
            populations is particularly strong in low and middle-income
            countries. This is especially challenging for Sub-Saharan
            Africa, the region facing the youngest age structure and the
            lowest educational attainment levels. Although quantitative
            studies generally find a strong relationship between
            indicators of development and conflict risk, the results
            suggest that poor countries do have some leverage over
            reducing conflict potential through increased educational
            opportunities for young people. There is further evidence
            that the interaction of large youth cohorts and low
            education levels may be mediated by structural economic
            factors. The study supports broad policy interventions in
            education by relaxing concerns about the consequences of
            rapid educational expansion.