rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Effects of land misallocation on
            capital allocations in India
Growing research and policy interest
            focuses on the misallocation of output and factors of
            production in developing economies. This paper considers the
            possible misallocation of financial loans. Using plant-level
            data on the organized and unorganized sectors, the paper
            describes the temporal, geographic, and industry
            distributions of financial loans. The focus of the analysis
            is the hypothesis that land misallocation might be an
            important determinant of financial misallocation (for
            example, because of the role of land as collateral against
            loans). Using district-industry variations, the analysis
            finds evidence to support this hypothesis, although it does
            not find a total reduction in the intensity of financial
            loans or those being given to new entrants. The analysis
            also considers differences by gender of business owners and
            workers in firms. Although potential early gaps for
            businesses with substantial female employment have
            disappeared in the organized sector, a sizeable and
            persistent gap remains in the unorganized sector.
Dual credit markets and household
            access to finance : evidence from a representative Chinese
            household survey
Using a new and representative data set
            of Chinese household finance, this paper documents household
            access to and costs of finance, along with their correlates.
            As in most developing countries, informal finance is a
            crucial element of household finance, and wealth tends to be
            associated with better access to formal and informal
            finance. Better financial knowledge shifts loan portfolios
            toward formal sources relative to informal ones. Connections
            to the Communist Party are associated with significantly
            better access to finance in rural areas but not in urban
            areas. A larger social network is positively associated with
            access to informal finance. Controlling for household
            characteristics, rural residents pay interest rates on loans
            similar to urban residents. Younger residents pay higher
            rates, while households on firmer economic footing face
            lower rates. Taking financial classes and college education
            is associated with higher interest rates for urban
            residents, suggesting perhaps that financial knowledge
            coincides with greater demand for credit in areas with more
            economic opportunity. Overall, the findings suggest that
            Chinese residents face dual credit markets, with the poor,
            young, those with poor financial knowledge, and those with
            larger family sizes relying much more on informal finance,
            while others are better able to access formal finance.
On the delegation of aid
            implementation to multilateral agencies
Some multilateral agencies implement aid
            projects in a broad range of sectors, with aid disbursements
            showing a strong overlap with those of bilateral donors. The
            question then arises of why do bilateral donors delegate
            sizable shares of their aid to non-specialized agencies for
            implementation? This paper develops a game theoretic model
            to explain this puzzle. Donors delegate aid implementation
            to the multilateral agency (ML) to strengthen the policy
            selectivity of aid, incentivizing policy improvements in
            recipient countries, in turn improving aid’s development
            effectiveness. Bilateral donors are better off delegating
            aid to ML even when they are purely altruistic but disagree
            on how aid should be distributed across recipients. Key for
            our result to hold is that ML searches some middle ground
            among disagreeing donors. Aid selectivity—in terms of both
            policy and poverty—emerges endogenously and is credible, as
            it is the solution to ML’s optimization problem. Moreover,
            the model shows that if one sufficiently large donor is
            policy selective in its aid allocations, there is no need
            for other donors to be policy selective. The World Bank’s
            aid program for lower-income countries, the International
            Development Association (IDA), is shown to fit the
            assumptions and predictions of the model. Specifically, IDA
            is a dominant donor in most of its recipient countries and
            is much more policy and poverty selective than bilateral
            aid. Donors view it as a public good, and contribution more
            to it when bilateral aid is less selective. Potential
            threats to IDA’s role as a dominant, policy-selective donor
            include the emergence of nontraditional donors, changes in
            voting shares, and traditional donors’ increasing use of
            earmarked contributions.
Bright Lights, Big Cities :
            measuring national and subnational economic growth in Africa
            from outer space, with an application to Kenya and Rwanda
This paper uses the night lights
            (satellite imagery from outer space) approach to estimate
            growth in and levels of subnational 2013 gross domestic
            product for 47 counties in Kenya and 30 districts in Rwanda.
            Estimating subnational gross domestic product is
            consequential for three reasons. First, there is strong
            policy interest in how growth can occur in different parts
            of countries, so that communities can share in national
            prosperity and not get left behind. Second, subnational
            entities want to understand how they stack up against their
            neighbors and competitors, and how much they contribute to
            national gross domestic product. Third, such information
            could help private investors to assess where to undertake
            investments. Using night lights has the advantage of seeing
            a new and more accurate estimation of informal activity, and
            being independent of official data. However, the approach
            may underestimate economic activity in sectors that are
            largely unlit notably agriculture. For Kenya, the results of
            the analysis affirm that Nairobi County is the largest
            contributor to national gross domestic product. However, at
            13 percent, this contribution is lower than commonly
            thought. For Rwanda, the three districts of Kigali account
            for 40 percent of national gross domestic product,
            underscoring the lower scale of economic activity in the
            rest of the country. To get a composite picture of
            subnational economic activity, especially in the context of
            rapidly improving official statistics in Kenya and Rwanda,
            it is important to estimate subnational gross domestic
            product using standard approaches (production, expenditure, income).
The additionality impact of a
            matching grant program for small firms : experimental
            evidence from Yemen
Matching grants are one of the most
            common types of private sector development programs used in
            developing countries. But government subsidies to private
            firms can be controversial. A key question is that of
            additionality: do these programs get firms to undertake
            innovative activities that they would not otherwise do, or
            merely subsidize activities that would take place anyway?
            Randomized controlled trials can provide the counterfactual
            needed to answer this question, but efforts to experiment
            with matching grant programs have often failed. This paper
            uses a randomized controlled trial of a matching grant
            program for firms in the Republic of Yemen to demonstrate
            the feasibility of conducting experiments with well-designed
            programs, and to measure the additionality impact. In the
            first year, the matching grant is found to have led to more
            product innovation, firms upgrading their accounting
            systems, marketing more, making more capital investments,
            and being more likely to report their sales grew.
Can intense exposure to hand-washing
            and hygiene information campaigns affect children's
            socio-emotional skills evidence from Senegal
Hygiene information and practices play a
            critical role in preventing diseases, particularly among
            children. Hygiene behaviors practiced in the household have
            been linked to development outcomes such as socio-emotional
            skills. This paper exploits data from impact evaluation
            surveys of a hygiene information campaign conducted in
            Senegal, where the randomized design suffered from
            contamination between comparison groups. The variations in
            exposure and intensity to hygiene information campaigns
            captured in the surveys were used to understand
            contamination biases. Such variations were interacted with
            the presence of household communication assets to explore
            potential effects on children’s socio-emotional scores. In
            the presence of contamination biases, the study exploited
            the longitudinal sample of children in the surveys to reduce
            time-dependent biases. For robustness, statistical matching
            was applied between the impact evaluation surveys and
            Demographic and Health Surveys conducted in 2008 and 2011.
            Socio-emotional outcomes were the imputed into Demographic
            and Health surveys to expand sample sizes. By applying
            matching techniques and imputing outcomes into a larger
            sample, impacts were non-negligible. Double-difference
            estimates showed that children’s socio-emotional scores were
            higher when intervention status was interacted with the
            presence of communication assets within households. Without
            the presence of communication assets in the households the
            impacts were close to zero. Evaluating the effect of hygiene
            campaigns on children’s socio-emotional skills is
            challenging because of the biases from contamination that
            exist when information flows between comparison groups.
            Targeted hygiene information to the poorest households is
            relevant for reducing risks of recurrent infections and
            enables better conditions for socio-emotional development of children.
Climate change impacts on rural
            poverty in low-elevation coastal zones
This paper identifies the low-elevation
            coastal zone populations and developing regions most
            vulnerable to sea-level rise and other coastal hazards, such
            as storm surges, coastal erosion, and salt-water intrusion.
            The focus is on the rural poor in the low-elevation coastal
            zone, as their economic livelihoods are especially
            endangered directly by coastal hazards and indirectly
            through the impacts of climate change on key coastal and
            near-shore ecosystems. Using geo-spatially referenced
            malnutrition and infant mortality data for 2000 as a proxy
            for poverty, this study finds that just 15 developing
            countries contain over 90 percent of the world’s
            low-elevation coastal zone rural poor. Low-income countries
            as a group have the highest incidence of poverty, which
            declines somewhat for lower-middle-income countries, and
            then is much lower for upper-middle-income economies. South
            Asia, East Asia and the Pacific, and Sub-Saharan Africa
            account for most of the world’s low-elevation coastal zone
            rural poor, and have a high incidence of poverty among their
            rural low-elevation coastal zone populations. Although
            fostering growth, especially in coastal areas, may reduce
            rural poverty in the low-elevation coastal zone, additional
            policy actions will be required to protect vulnerable
            communities from disasters, to conserve and restore key
            coastal and near-shore ecosystems, and to promote key
            infrastructure investments and coastal community response capability.
Social protection in the face of
            climate change : targeting principles and financing mechanisms
Climate risk is an important driver of
            long-term poverty dynamics, especially in rural regions.
            This paper builds a dynamic, multi-generation household
            model of consumption, accumulation, and risk management to
            draw out the full consequences of exposure to climate risk.
            The model incorporates the long-term impacts of consumption
            shortfalls, induced by the optimal “asset smoothing” coping
            behavior of the vulnerable, on the human capital and
            long-term wellbeing of families. The analysis shows that the
            long-term level and depth of poverty can be improved by
            incorporating elements of “vulnerability-targeted social
            protection” into a conventional system of social protection.
            The paper also explores the degree to which
            vulnerability-targeted social protection can be implemented
            through a subsidized insurance mechanism. The analysis shows
            that insurance-based vulnerability-targeted social
            protection dominates (in economic growth and poverty
            reduction measures) both in-kind transfer mechanisms and
            vulnerability-targeted protection paid for using a public
            budget. The relative gains brought about by this scheme of
            insurance-augmented social protection increase—at least for
            a while—under climate change scenarios. However, if climate
            change becomes too severe, then even this novel form of
            social protection loses its ability to stabilize the extent
            and depth of poverty.
Social protection and disaster risk
            management in the Philippines : the case of typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan)
This paper evaluates how the Philippines
            utilize social protection systems and programs to help
            households better manage disaster risk. Exposure and
            vulnerability to natural disasters and the effects of
            climate change are particularly high in the Philippines. At
            the same time, the Philippines has developed one of the most
            advanced social protection systems in the East Asia Pacific
            region. The Department of Social Welfare and Development is
            prominently integrated into the national disaster risk
            management framework of the Philippines, taking the lead
            coordinating role in disaster response activities.
            Consequently, social protection programs are on the
            frontlines of disaster response in the Philippines. This
            paper focuses specifically on the devastating impact of
            Typhoon Yolanda, which struck the country in November 2013,
            as a case study against which the Philippines’ social
            protection response can be assessed.
Nighttime lights revisited : the use
            of nighttime lights data as a proxy for economic variables
The growing availability of free or
            inexpensive satellite imagery has inspired many researchers
            to investigate the use of earth observation data for
            monitoring economic activity around the world. One of the
            most popular earth observation data sets is the so-called
            nighttime lights from the Defense Meteorological Satellite
            Program. Researchers have found positive correlations
            between nighttime lights and several economic variables.
            These correlations are based on data measured in levels,
            with a cross-section of observations within a single time
            period across countries or other geographic units. The
            findings suggest that nighttime lights could be used as a
            proxy for some economic variables, especially in areas or
            times where data are weak or unavailable. Yet, logic
            suggests that nighttime lights cannot serve as a good proxy
            for monitoring the within-in country growth rates all of
            these variables. Examples examined this paper include
            constant price gross domestic product, non-agricultural
            gross domestic product, manufacturing value added, and
            capital stocks, as well as electricity consumption, total
            population, and urban population. The study finds that the
            Defense Meteorological Satellite Program data are quite
            noisy and therefore the resulting growth elasticities of
            Defense Meteorological Satellite Program nighttime lights
            with respect to most of these socioeconomic variables are
            low, unstable over time, and generate little explanatory
            power. The one exception for which Defense Meteorological
            Satellite Program nighttime lights could serve as a proxy is
            electricity consumption, measured in 10-year intervals. It
            is hoped that improved data from the recently launched Suomi
            National Polar-Orbiting Partnership satellite will help
            expand or improve these outcomes. Testing this should be an
            important next step.
What’s left for the WTO
Suppose that when addressing the
            question of “what’s left for the WTO?,” tariff negotiators
            relied not on the agenda established in 2001 but instead on
            the terms-of-trade theory of trade agreements to identify
            negotiating priorities. This paper uses the lens of the
            terms-of-trade theory to investigate three areas in which it
            is frequently alleged that currently applied tariffs remain
            “too high”; the implication being that the WTO’s job
            performance to date is incomplete. This includes applied
            tariffs for countries that are not members of the WTO,
            applied MFN tariffs for WTO members that are unbound, and
            applied MFN tariffs for WTO members set in the presence of
            large amounts of tariff binding overhang. These are almost
            exclusively the domain of developing countries’ own trade
            policies and they are collectively important; 3.5 billion
            people currently live in countries in which the WTO has had
            minimal effect for one of these three reasons. This paper
            builds upon recent developments in the empirical literature
            to present evidence—some direct, some indirect—that sheds
            light on each area. It then identifies specific needs for
            additional research to clarify policy implications for the
            future role of the WTO in the ever-changing international
            trading system.
Structural transformation and
            productivity growth in Africa : Uganda in the 2000s
Uganda’s economy underwent significant
            structural change in the 2000s whereby the share of
            non-tradable services in aggregate employment rose by about
            7 percentage points at the expense of the production of
            tradable goods. The process also involved a
            12-percentage-point shift in employment away from small and
            medium enterprises and larger firms in manufacturing and
            commercial agriculture mainly to microenterprises in retail
            trade. In addition, the sectoral reallocation of labor on
            these two dimensions coincided with significant growth in
            aggregate labor productivity. However, in and of itself, the
            same reallocation could only have held back, rather than
            aid, the observed productivity gains. This was because labor
            was more productive throughout the period in the tradable
            goods sector than in the non-tradable sector. Moreover, the
            effect on aggregate labor productivity of the reallocation
            of employment between the two sectors could only have been
            reinforced by the impacts on the same of the rise in the
            employment share of microenterprises. The effect was also
            strengthened by a parallel employment shift across the age
            distribution of enterprises that raised sharply the
            employment share of established firms at the expense of
            younger ones and startups. Not only was labor consistently
            less productive in microenterprises than in small and medium
            enterprises and larger enterprises across all industries
            throughout the period, it was also typically less productive
            in more established firms than in younger ones.
Inequality in China : an overview
This paper provides an overview of
            research on income inequality in China over the period of
            economic reform. It presents the results of two main sources
            of evidence on income inequality and, assisted by various
            decompositions, explains the reasons income inequality has
            increased rapidly and the Gini coefficient is now almost
            0.5. This paper evaluates the degree of income inequality
            from the perspectives of people's subjective well-being
            and government concerns. It poses the following question:
            has income inequality peaked? It also discusses the policy
            implications of the analysis. The concluding comments of
            this paper propose a research agenda and suggest possible
            lessons from China's experience that may be useful for
            other developing countries.
China: west or east wind -- getting
            the incentives right
With rapid development of wind power in
            China, the following three issues have become barriers for
            further scale-up: 1) concentration of wind farms in the
            Three-North region, which became significantly underutilized
            because of a limited capability of local power grids to
            off-take and consume wind-generated electricity and because
            of a lack of coordinated development of long-distance
            transmission lines to deliver electricity to load centers in
            the South and East regions; 2) increasing subsidies and,
            thus, a burden on final consumers; and 3) resistance of
            local authorities to develop new projects because the new
            value added tax policy reform. How to deal with these issues
            will have significant impact on the future development of
            wind in China. This note proposes a methodology to enhance a
            comprehensive approach by taking both generation and
            transmission into account in crafting the development plan
            and formulating the incentive policies, which may be useful
            in addressing these issues.