rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Effects of privatization and
            ownership in transition economies
The paper evaluates the effects of
            privatization in the post-communist economies and China. In
            post-communist economies privatization to foreign owners
            results in a rapid improvement in performance of firms,
            while performance effects of privatization to domestic
            owners are less impressive and vary across regions,
            coinciding with differences in policies and institutional
            development. In China relatively more estimates suggest that
            privatization to domestic owners improves the level of
            performance. Concentrated private ownership has a stronger
            positive effect on performance than dispersed ownership in
            the post-communist economies, but foreign joint ventures
            rather than wholly owned foreign firms have a positive
            effect in China. Worker or collective ownership does not
            have a negative effect. In the post-communist economies new
            firms are equally or more efficient than firms privatized to
            domestic owners, and foreign start-ups are more efficient
            than domestic ones. Privatization is not associated with
            lower employment. When accompanied by complementary reforms,
            privatization has a positive effect on economic growth.
            Three factors appear to drive the more positive effect of
            privatization to foreign than domestic owners. Domestic
            managers have more limited skills and access to world
            markets, domestically privatized firms have been more
            subject to tunneling and in some countries new large
            shareholders artificially decreased performance. The
            important policy implication is that privatization per se
            does not guarantee improved performance, at least not in the
            short- to medium-run. Type of private ownership, corporate
            governance, access to know-how and markets, and the legal
            and institutional system matter for firm performance.
Vocational schooling, labor market
            outcomes, and college entry
This paper examines the differentiated
            outcomes of vocational and general secondary academic
            education, particularly in terms of employment
            opportunities, labor market earnings, and access to tertiary
            education in Indonesia.  With data from a panel of two waves
            of the Indonesia Family Life Survey in 1997 and 2000, the
            paper tracks a cohort of high school students in 1997 to
            examine their schooling and employment status in 2000. The
            findings demonstrate that: (1) attendance at vocational
            secondary schools results in neither market advantage nor
            disadvantage in terms of employment opportunities and/or
            earnings premium; (2) attendance at vocational schools leads
            to significantly lower academic achievement as measured by
            national test scores; and (3) There is no stigma attached to
            attendance at vocational schools that results in a
            disadvantage in access to tertiary education; rather, it is
            the lower academic achievement associated with attendance at
            vocational school that lowers the likelihood of entering
            college. The empirical approach of this paper addresses two
            limitations of the existing literature in this area. First,
            it takes into account the observation censoring issue due to
            college entry when evaluating labor market outcomes of
            secondary school graduates. Second, using an instrumental
            variable approach, the paper also treats endogeneity of
            household choice of vocational versus academic track of
            secondary education, teasing out the net effect of secondary
            school choice on labor market and schooling outcomes.
Convergence in institutions and
            market outcome s: cross-country and time-series evidence
            from the business environment and enterprise performance
            surveys in transition economies
This paper uses firm-level data from the
            Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Surveys to
            study the process of convergence of transition countries
            with developed market economies. The study focuses on
            competition and market structure, finance and the structure
            of lending to firms, and how firms respond to the economic
            environment by restructuring. The authors find substantial
            evidence of convergence in a number of dimensions. The
            pattern of growth at the country, sector, and firm levels
            shows rapid growth of the new private sector and of the
            micro and small-firm sectors, with the size distribution of
            firms moving toward the pattern observed in the surveys of
            developed market economies. In finance, increasing reliance
            on retained earnings in transition countries reflects a
            maturation of the sector as new firms come to rely less on
            informal and family sources of finance. The authors find
            evidence of an inverse-U pattern, with the peak of
            restructuring activity taking place in 2002, the middle of
            the period analyzed. Throughout, the regional patterns
            suggest greater convergence in the transition countries that
            joined the European Union in 2004 than in the other,
            lower-income transition economies.
Cross-border purchases of health
            services : a case study on Austria and Hungary
This paper explores the structure of
            cross-border health purchasing between Austria and Hungary
            and determines the size of this phenomenon as well as the
            barriers to a further increase. Austrian patients may
            receive health care treatment in Hungary in three different
            ways. First, patients may receive benefits in the context of
            the European Community Regulations 1408/71 and 574/72
            (Category I patients). Second, outside those regulatory
            structures, Austrian patients travel to Hungary to receive
            medical treatment, especially dental treatment, and then
            seek reimbursement from their Austrian insurance (Category
            II patients). Third, some patients receive medical treatment
            in Hungary outside both schemes (Category III patients).
            There are about 42,500 Category I patients per year; and
            58,000 Category II patients world-wide per year. An unknown
            but supposedly greater number of patients travel to Hungary
            to receive mainly dental treatment and cosmetic surgery
            (Category III). Most health actors in both Austria and
            Hungary do not regard cross-border purchasing of health
            services as having cost-saving effects. They put forward
            major legal, institutional, political, and psychological
            barriers, which inhibit public and private Austrian
            providers, to facilitate trade in health care and which
            inhibit individual patients to realize cost savings through
            capitalizing on lower health care prices in Hungary.
            Therefore, for the time being, trade in health care and
            patient mobility between Austria and Hungary is a
            circumscribed phenomenon in terms of quantities, and it will
            most probably remain so in the near future.
Fungibility and the impact of
            development assistance: evidence from Vietnam's health sector
How can the impact of aid be estimated
            in the presence of fungibility? And how far does fungibility
            reduce its benefits? These questions are analyzed in a
            context where a donor wants to target its efforts on a
            specific sector and specific geographic areas. A traditional
            differences-in-differences method comparing the change in
            outcomes between the target and nontarget areas before and
            after the project risks misestimating the project's
            benefits. The paper develops an alternative estimation
            method in which intersectoral fungibility reduces project
            benefits insofar as government spending has a smaller impact
            in the sector to which the funds leak than in the target
            sector, while intrasectoral fungibility reduces benefits
            insofar as the donor is able to leverage productivity
            increases in government spending in the target areas. The
            methods are applied to two contemporaneous World Bank health
            projects that set out to target assistance on approximately
            one-half of Vietnam's provinces. Aid is not apparently
            fungible between Vietnam's health sector and other
            sectors, but is fungible across provinces within the health
            sector. Differences-in-differences yield an insignificant
            impact on infant mortality, while the use of the new method
            yields a statistically significant impact of around 4 per
            1000 live births. The results, however, are ambiguous on the
            costs associated with intrasectoral fungibility.
Firms' productive performance
            and the investment climate in developing economies : an
            application to MENA manufacturing
Drawing on the World Bank Investment
            Climate Assessment surveys, this paper investigates the
            relationship between firm-level technical efficiency and the
            investment climate for 22 developing economies and eight
            manufacturing industries. The authors first propose three
            measures of firms' productive performance: labor
            productivity, total factor productivity, and technical
            efficiency. They show that, on average, enterprises in the
            Middle East and North Africa have performed poorly compared
            with other countries in the sample. The exception is
            Morocco, whose various measures of firm-level productivity
            rank close to the ones of the most productive economies. The
            analysis also reveals that the competitiveness of countries
            in the region has been handicapped by high unit labor cost,
            compared with main competitors like China and India. The
            empirical results show then? that the investment climate
            matters for firms' productive performance. This is true
            (depending on the industry) for the quality of various
            infrastructure, the experience and education level of the
            labor force, the cost of and access to financing, as well as
            different dimensions of the government-business relation.
            The analysis reveals that some industries, more exposed to
            international competition, are more sensitive to investment
            climate deficiencies. For some industries, this is also true
            for small and medium domestic enterprises that do not have
            the possibility to influence their investment climate or
            choose their location. These findings bear clear policy
            implications by showing that increasing firms' size and
            improving the investment climate (in particular of small and
            medium firms and industries more exposed to international
            competition) could constitute a powerful means of industrial
            development and competitiveness, in the Middle East and
            North Africa region in particular.
Multilateral debt relief through the
            eyes of financial markets
The economic benefits of debt relief for
            recipient countries have been the subject of arduous debate,
            at least partly motivated by the difficulty of identifying
            the causal effect of debt relief on economic
            performance-given that performance itself may drive the
            decision to grant relief. This paper conducts an event study
            to assess the economic consequences of multilateral debt
            relief for recipient countries that is robust to these
            reverse causality issues. It estimates the response of the
            stock prices of South African multinationals with
            subsidiaries in those countries to the announcement of debt
            relief initiatives, and shows that stock prices exhibit a
            significant increase above those of other firms, especially
            around the launching of the recent Multilateral Debt Relief
            Initiative. The improvement in financial markets'
            assessment of the value of these multinationals is
            consistent with lower expected levels of future taxation in
            the recipient countries. Overall, the results are consistent
            with the "debt overhang" argument for debt relief.
Economic modeling of income,
            different types of capital and natural disasters
This paper provides empirical estimates
            of the impacts of natural disasters on different forms of
            capital (with a focus on human and intangible capital and
            natural capital), and on real gross domestic product per
            capita. The types of disaster considered are droughts,
            earthquakes, floods, and storms and their impacts are
            measured in terms of the number of people affected or people
            affected per capita. The authors find statistically
            significant reductions on the values of human and intangible
            capital and land capital as a consequence of the disasters,
            and these reductions are greater when the impacts last for
            longer periods. Based on the assumption that natural
            disasters indirectly affect the level of income via losses
            in capital, the authors estimate a Cobb-Douglas production
            function using the different forms of capital as inputs. The
            losses in income are found to vary across different
            countries and the type of natural disaster studied. However,
            a common finding is that the losses in income depend
            generally on two factors: the relative magnitude of impacts
            of a natural disaster and the values of different forms of
            capital. The estimates in this paper are national level
            figures and cannot be useful in predicting the cost of
            damages at the local level, where much larger amounts can be
            experienced per capita. Nevertheless, the estimates provide
            some indication of magnitudes for different disasters and
            for different groups of countries. More work and more data
            are needed to get a dynamic profile for the losses of
            capital and income. But given the study's results, the
            time profile is estimated to range typically between two and
            five years.
Local sources of financing for
            infrastructure in Africa : a cross-country analysis
With the exception of South Africa,
            local financial markets in sub-Saharan Africa remain
            underdeveloped and small, with a particular dearth of
            financing with maturity terms commensurate with the medium-
            to long-term horizons of infrastructure projects. But as
            financial market reforms gather momentum, there is growing
            awareness of the need to tap local and regional sources.
            Drawing on a comprehensive new database constructed for the
            purpose of this research, the paper assesses the actual and
            potential role of local financial systems for 24 African
            countries in financing infrastructure. The paper concludes
            that further development and more appropriate regulation of
            local institutional investors would help them realize their
            potential as financing sources, for which they are better
            suited than local banks because their liabilities would
            better match the longer terms of infrastructure projects.
            There are clear signs of positive change: private pension
            providers are emerging in Africa, there is a shift from
            defined benefit toward defined contribution plans, and
            African institutional investors have begun taking a more
            diversified portfolio approach in asset allocation. Although
            capital markets remain underdeveloped, new issuers in
            infrastructure sectors-particularly of corporate bonds-are
            coming to market in several countries, in some cases
            constituting the debut issue. More than half of the
            corporate bonds listed at end-2006 on these countries'
            markets were by companies in infrastructure sectors. More
            cross-border listings and investment within the region-in
            both corporate bonds and equity issues-including by local
            institutional investors, could help overcome local capital
            markets' impediments and may hold significant promise
            for financing cross-country infrastructure projects.
Economic and social impacts of
            self-help groups in India
Although there has been considerable
            recent interest in micro-credit programs, rigorous evidence
            on the impacts of forming self-help groups to mobilize
            savings and foster social empowerment at the local level is
            virtually non-existent, despite a large number of programs
            following this pattern. The authors use a large household
            survey to assess the economic and social impacts of the
            formation of self-help groups in India. They find positive
            impacts on empowerment and nutritional intake in program
            areas overall and heterogeneity of impacts between members
            of pre-existing and newly formed groups, as well as
            non-participants. Female social and economic empowerment in
            program areas increased irrespective of participation
            status, suggesting positive externalities. Nutritional
            benefit was more pronounced for new participants than for
            members of pre-existing groups. Evidence of higher
            consumption - but not income or asset formation - by
            participants suggests that at the time of the survey, the
            program's main economic impact had been through
            consumption smoothing and diversification of income sources
            rather than exploitation of new income sources. Evaluation
            of such programs in ways that allow heterogeneity of program
            impact can yield highly policy-relevant insights.
Longer-term economic impacts of
            self-help groups in india
Despite the popularity and unique nature
            of women's self-help groups in India, evidence of their
            economic impacts is scant. Based on two rounds of a 2,400
            household panel, the authors use double differences,
            propensity score matching, and pipeline comparison to assess
            economic impacts of longer (2.5-3 years) exposure of a
            program that promoted and strengthened self-help programs in
            Andhra Pradesh in India. The analysis finds that longer
            program exposure has positive impacts on consumption,
            nutritional intake, and asset accumulation. Investigating
            heterogeneity of the impacts suggests that even the poorest
            households were able to benefit from the program.
            Furthermore, overall benefits would exceed program cost by a
            significant margin even under conservative assumptions.
Implications of WTO disciplines for
            special economic zones in developing countries
Many developing countries operate
            geographically delineated economic areas in the form of
            export processing zones, special industrial zones, or free
            trade zones. This paper provides an overview of the
            application of World Trade Organization disciplines to
            incentive programs typically employed by developing
            countries in connection with such special economic zone
            programs. The analysis finds that the disciplines under the
            Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures have the
            most immediate relevance for middle-income World Trade
            Organization members that are not exempt for certain
            "grandfathered" programs, but will also concern
            other developing countries in the future, as their exemption
            expires or their per-capita income passes a threshold of
            US$1,000. Incentives related to special economic zones can
            be broadly grouped into three categories: (i) measures that
            are consistent with the World Trade Organization, notably
            exemptions from duties and taxes on goods exported from
            special economic zones; (ii) measures that are prohibited or
            subject to challenge under World Trade Organization law,
            notably export subsidies and import substitution or domestic
            content subsidies; and (iii) and measures where World Trade
            Orgainzation consistency depends on the facts of the
            particular case. The paper provides a set of recommendations
            on how to eliminate questionable incentives. The single most
            important zone policy reform to achieve World Trade
            Organization compliance is to remove all requirements to
            export and permit importation of goods manufactured in
            special economic zones into the national customs territory
            without any restrictions other than the application of
            import duties and taxes.
Including financial services in
            preferential trade agreements : lessons of international
            experience for China
The objective of this paper is to
            address the main considerations for China of including
            financial services in its preferential trade agreements. The
            paper briefly reviews China's financial liberalization
            process and the state of its domestic financial system,
            discusses the main considerations of including financial
            services in China's preferential trade agreements,
            compares and contrasts the different
            'architectural' approaches that have been used by
            countries to include financial services in such agreements,
            and identifies good practices in preparing for financial
            services negotiations. Particular emphasis is placed on
            lessons from Latin American preferential trade agreements,
            given their more frequent and extensive coverage of
            financial services compared with other regions.