rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Public sector "debt
            distress" in Argentina, 1988-89
Under the August 1988
            "Primavera" Plan and the July 1989 "Bunge y
            Born" Plan stabilization programs, the Argentine
            authorities sought to anchor the price level through an
            appreciated real exchange rate, which they sustained through
            policies that maintained high domestic interest rates.  The
            public sector's domestic debt was substantial, however,
            and the high interest rates drove the public sector's
            interest bill considerably above its non-interest surplus.
            The public sector could therefore cover its interest bill
            only by taking on additional debt.  Because the interest
            bill was so large, domestic debt grew rapidly.
            Hyperinflation resulted when the outstanding debt became
            larger than domestic financial markets could be persuaded to
            hold.  The Central Bank played a focal role in these
            processes.  It issued interest-bearing debt in the forms of
            remunerated bank reserves, "inaccesible deposits,"
            and Central Bank bills, to absorb money.  The interest bill
            on these liabilities generated mounting
            "quasi-fiscal" borrowing requirements, which the
            Central Bank financed through additional debt issues.  This
            debt was held mainly by commercial banks who financed
            themselves through high-yielding short-term deposits.
            Hyperinflationary pressure developed when depositors,
            perceiving that the Central Bank's debt accumulation
            was becoming excessive, withdrew and moved rapidly into
            foreign exchange, engendering heavy devaluation pressure.
Opening the capital account : a
            survey of issues and results
The increase in trade, the increasing
            internationalization of production and the improvements in
            communications, together with the legalization of foreign
            currency instruments in a growing number of countries, have
            led to a de facto liberalization of the capital account.  In
            line with the greater reliance on open goods markets and a
            de facto opening of the capital account, developing country
            governments are raising questions about fully opening the
            capital account.  As a background to answering these
            questions, this paper surveys the existing literature on
            opening up domestic capital markets, much of which was
            written prior to the debt crisis.  This survey begins with a
            brief summary of the costs and benefits of capital account
            liberalization, paying particular attention to the issue of
            the loss of policy effectiveness and noting the new theories
            of capital flows based on international portfolio
            diversification of risky assets, which raise the possibility
            of benefits from capital account liberalization that are not
            linked solely to higher investment rates.  The survey then
            reexamines the evidence on the results of open capital
            accounts.  Finally, the survey revisits the question of
            sequencing the liberalization of the current and capital
            accounts, to provide a background for programs to liberalize
            the capital account.
Intercommodity price transmittal :
            analysis of food markets in Ghana
This report expands on a dynamic model
            of market integration to investigate how information is
            transmitted across commodities.  The author investigates one
            property of an efficient market : the full use of available
            information.  Studies of spatial price integration
            simultaneously looks at the flow of information and
            commodities.  The author investigates the flow of
            information within a single spatial market and the
            relationship between prices in spatially separate markets.
            He studies intercommodity price transmittal from two
            perspectives. First, he asks whether the government can
            concentrate on a single commodity price, yet achieve policy
            objectives in a broader arena. This is important in Ghana
            because no single commodity dominates consumers' food
            budgets.  The author finds that price movements for the main
            cereal consumed in the country (maize) are fully transmitted
            to other regions. Second, he investigates the working of
            commodity markets in developing countries.  He notes
            imperfections in the way markets process information. There
            are several possible explanations for this market
            inefficiency.  Traders may set prices for other coarse
            grains in response to information about maize prices.
            Another possibility is that some traders may not deal in all
            grains and thus have different costs of acquiring
            information.  In short the author's dynamic model of
            price integration indicates functional efficiency in Ghana.
Exchange rate policy, the real
            exchange rate, and inflation : lessons from Latin America
Exchange rate policy is usually driven
            by two different, often conflicting, objectives: to support
            a competitive real exchange rate and to serve as a nominal
            anchor for low inflation. The author focuses on whether
            exchange rate policy can affect the real exchange rate in
            the longer run, and examines the trade-offs that typically
            arise between real depreciation and inflation. The author
            argues that exchange rate policy has only a limited ability
            to achieve durable real depreciation. Devaluations can be
            effective in the short run, but have a limited impact in the
            longer run, when the underlying factors affecting demand and
            the supply of foreign exchange dominate. As a rule of thumb,
            the author argues that maxi-devaluations are most effective
            in economies with low and moderate inflation (below twenty
            percent a year), especially when the underlying causes call
            for real depreciation. Latin America is a rich laboratory in
            which to study different exchange rate regimes. The real
            exchange rate varies over time in countries that have
            adopted the crawling peg (such as Colombia and Brazil) and
            in those that use the exchange rate more actively for
            disinflation. Colombia in the mid-1980s is an example of
            successful real depreciation. Colombia achieved a 40 percent
            real depreciation in two years with no significant increase
            in inflation. This was achieved by avoiding
            maxi-devaluations and by limiting the size of the desired
            real depreciation.
Sovereign debt : a primer
The troublesome debts of many developing
            countries have spawned much literature on why countries
            borrow, on what debt contributes to growth, on why countries
            repay, and on how to deal with existing debt. The author
            provides an analytical primer on the following aspects of
            sovereign debt : 1) the basic accounting concepts associated
            with debt and some data associated with external borrowing;
            2) debt as a component of an optimizing model of borrowing
            in a competitive loan market, when the borrower faces an
            intertemporal budget constraint; 3) debt as a component of
            recent models of endogenous growth; 4) problems arising from
            sovereign risk, including problems of liquidity,
            enforcement, and revenue-raising to finance repayment; 5)
            incentives to repay; 6) options available to a creditor
            whose debtor is unwilling to meet current debt-service
            obligations; and 7) debt buybacks. The author concludes that
            in the absence of any efficiency cost imposed by outstanding
            debt, how much a buyback benefits the borrower depends on
            how much buying back debt reduces what is available for
            repayment later. The author also concludes that if there are
            efficiency losses associated with debt, debt forgiveness can
            benefit both a debtor nation and its creditors. Contrary to
            claims in the literature, this outcome does not require that
            a reduction in the face value of debt raise its market
            value, and the debtor benefits even though the buyback
            raises the market price of the debt.
Sources of World Bank estimates of
            current mortality rates
The paper discusses the sources of the
            infant mortality rate (IMR) and life expectancy at birth for
            each of the 186 countries for which the Population and Human
            Resources Department at the World Bank makes demographic
            estimates and projections. Its purpose is to give some
            background on the derivation of mortality estimates used in
            the World Bank's demographic estimates and projections
            to provide users of the data with information on their
            recency and reliability. The paper does this through a
            general discussion of mortality projection methodology and a
            listing of the sources and assumptions used in constructing
            estimates for individual countries. The paper consists of
            two sections: the first section gives an overview of the
            sources, discusses their nature, and explains the projection
            methodology used to obtain current estimates; and the second
            section provides the documentation of mortality sources for
            each country, organized by region.
How the macroeconomic environment
            affects human resource development
Do inward-focused development strategies
            reduce competition in factor markets and incentives for more
            efficient skills development? Do outward-focused development
            strategies improve them? The authors compared vocational
            education and training systems in six developing countries
            in the 1980s. They found that an outward orientation
            encourages more efficient development of human resources.
            Protectionist trade regimes that shelter producers from
            global competition produce price distortions in domestic
            capital and labor markets that affect the efficient use of
            resources in skills development. Structural adjustment
            programs that address these distortions expand incentives
            for private training and for more efficient use of public
            resources in skills development.
The empty opportunity : local
            control of secondary schools and student achievement in the Philippines
Decentralization policies are at the
            heart of education reform efforts in many countries
            internationally.  Two important types of policies are those
            that: (a) remove barriers to private education; and (b)
            devolve authority and responsibility for schools from
            central level administrations to intermediate level
            organizations and ultimately to schools, relying more on
            local communities for financing, with an overall goal of
            improving effectiveness. While both types of policies are
            largely uninformed by empirical evidence regarding their
            impact on such education outcomes as student learning, in
            developing countries the evidence regarding the effects of
            local control is much weaker than that regarding private
            schools.  This paper extends the literature on the impact of
            private education on achievement, while providing the first
            evidence on the impact of local control on achievement in a
            developing county.  It analyzes data from 214 secondary
            schools in the Philippines to answer questions regarding:
            (a) the relative effectiveness of local, government and
            private secondary schools; and (b) the factors that account
            for observed differences.
Strengthening the Bank's
            population work in the nineties
This paper argues that the Bank should
            give renewed priority to population matters and accelerate
            the current upward trend in lending for family planning
            programs in the 1990s. It is timely for two reasons. First,
            the need for bank action in population will increase in the
            1990s as a result of growing unmet demand for family
            planning and stagnant bilateral assistance levels. Second,
            there is evidence that the initial effects of the 1987 World
            Bank reorganization have been to strengthening the potential
            for population work by integrating it more fully with
            economic analysis and overall country programming, but some
            further adjustments would assure that the potential could be
            realized. As the largest and most influential international
            development organization, there is an important leadership
            role for the Bank in promoting population policy analysis,
            dialogue, and in financing family planning programs.
How conflicting definitions of
            "manufactures" distort output and trade statistics
This paper argues that the definition of
            "manufactures" used in compiling production data
            for industrial and developing countries is far broader than
            the definition used for trade statistics. This limits the
            analytical utility of output and trade data for studies
            using, say, apparent consumption or import penetration
            ratios. International agencies also use different
            definitions of manufactures when compiling trade statistics.
            For some countries, these definitional changes produce major
            differences in the value and share of manufactures exports
            and imports. The author assesses the analytical implications
            of six different definitions by comparing results when each
            is used to tabulate exports of the "manufactures"
            of 72 developing countries. Sensitivity tests show that five
            or six products - especially refined petroleum and some
            processed food products - are responsible for the main
            discrepancies. These items are included in the UNIDO (trade)
            and most agencies' output definitions but are excluded
            from the trade definition used by UNCTAD, GATT, and the
            World Bank. Clearly, international organizations must
            resolve these inconsistencies in definitions of output and
            trade statistics.
Framework for macroeconomic analysis
            applied to Kenya
The authors develop a macroeconomic
            model for Kenya that projects detailed national, fiscal,
            monetary, and private sector accounts, and the balance of
            payments. With no changes in its logical structure, the
            model also calculates the magnitude of policy adjustments
            that would eliminate external and internal imbalances. Their
            approach emphasizes transparency and user-friendliness,
            which they achieve in two ways. First, historical data - the
            basis for projections, and second, key behavioral
            assumptions and targets are entered in a clearly designated
            worksheet. This worksheet also accommodates coefficients for
            the import and export price and income elasticities by major
            commodity groups; the interest and income elasticities of
            private investment; and the impact of inflation, income
            growth, and changes in interest rates on the demand for
            currency, demand deposits, and time deposits. The targets
            include domestic inflation and sectoral growth rates.
Wages and employment in the
            transition to a market economy
This report focuses on the implications
            for wage bargaining and policy of inherited ownership
            arrangements and rules about wage setting during the
            transition of socialist economies. The authors discuss the
            strong tendency toward overemployment and wage drift in
            socialist systems. They focuses on the market-based
            transitional economy, exemplified by Poland since 1990,
            setting up a series of models capturing the behavior of
            worker-controlled firms. They develop a simple policy game
            in which government policy is conditioned on output, through
            a subsidy instrument. This reflects the problem typically
            faced by reforming governments of whether to enforce a hard
            budget constraint or whether to resort to subsidies and
            associated departments from fiscal targets. Finally, they
            emphasize the way wage tax rules can affect employment and
            wage and how critical is their design. The authors conclude
            that because of the inherited ownership structure and the
            uncertainty associated with reform, market-based regimes
            will continue to need centralized controls over wages in
            worker-controlled firms (the socialized sector).
            Unemployment and an expanding private sector alone are
            unlikely to provide a sufficient restraining mechanism for wages.
How structure of production
            determines the demand for human capital
On the issue of women's status, the
            objectives of this paper are twofold. First, it attempts to
            make precise some of the claims and allegations regarding
            the existence of bias against females in the allocation of
            resources within the household.  The idea is to formulate
            these questions explicitly, so that it is possible to
            identify whether and to what degree there is evidence of
            this bias.  Second, it identifies causes of this bias with
            the objective of isolating key factors that can be used for
            policy.  In contrast to earlier studies that attempt to
            account for male-female differences in human capital, the
            authors do not assume any discrimination against females
            either at home (in the parent's utility function) or in
            the market (in the returns to human capital).  It is
            assumed, however, that women have a comparative advantage in
            working in some sectors of the economy.  Thus, increases in
            the shares of these sectors will increase the demand for
            female human capital.  This explicit attention to factors
            that can be used as policy instruments -- and the relative
            neglect of factors reflecting gender bias in tastes -- is
            the point of departure from earlier literature.  This paper
            develops the theory, tests the hypotheses, and concludes
            with a discussion of the policy implications.
Fiscal issues in adjustment : an introduction
Adjustment to the macroeconomic crises
            of the eighties was least successful on the fiscal front.
            The authors, in this introduction to a symposium on fiscal
            issues in adjustment, summarize the issues raised by papers
            in the symposium.  Those papers deal with various aspects of
            the fiscal crisis that many developing countries faced in
            the eighties.  After a brief introduction on the magnitude
            of the crisis, the authors summarize issues discussed in
            three areas.  On the macroeconomics of adjustment, they
            discuss the size of fiscal adjustment, the impact of deficit
            reductions, and the methods of reducing the deficit.  On
            fiscal system reform, they survey reforms occasioned by the
            fiscal crisis:  choice of spending cuts and reform of the
            tax system.  They close with a discussion of new directions
            for research:  the growth effects of fiscal policy and the
            political economy of fiscal policy.
The outlook for commercial bank
            lending to sub-Saharan Africa
Since its peak in 1980-82, medium- and
            long-term commercial bank lending to sub-Saharan Africa has
            been declining - partly because of many banks'
            perception that lending to the African market represents
            high risks unjustified by the available returns.  The
            prospects for an appreciable increase in such lending are
            not promising.  Despite some progress under economic
            adjustment programs, banks are skeptical about sub-Saharan
            African governments' ability and willingness to
            continue with reform.  And in a time of tight regulation,
            most banks have ample opportunities in other parts of the
            world.  The purpose of this paper is to identify and examine
            key issues involved in the future of long-term commercial
            bank lending to Africa.  It presents the historical record
            and briefly reviews the nature of commercial bank lending
            and the changing profile of foreign commercial bank
            presences in the region.  It examines the constraints to and
            opportunities for increased commercial bank lending as
            perceived by a representative sampling of commercial banks
            in the United States, Europe, and Japan.  Finally, the paper
            presents a scope for action, a pulling together of ideas
            that could help remove constraints to lending to a select
            number of sub-Saharan African markets in the short-term,
            with a view to stimulation of lending to the entire region
            in the long-term.
Education and adjustment : a review
            of the literature
Many recent studies evaluate the effects
            of adjustment on economic growth and on the poor, but few
            assess the specific impacts of adjustment on the education
            sector.  The author assesses what is known about how
            adjustment affects education.  He concludes that reliable
            evidence is limited.  Most critics of adjustment programs
            say little about education directly and do not distinguish
            the effects of adjustment measures from the effects of
            internal recession, fiscal constraints, or structural
            problems.  Early adjustment programs ignored education
            issues - but adjustment lasted longer than expected, so the
            Bank has broadened its approach to protect education from
            the negative effects of adjustment.  Relevant data are
            scarce and of poor quality. The most common indicators -
            aggregate financing and enrollment indicators - are
            difficult to interpret.  Moreover, analyses may compare
            indicators between two before-and-after points but say
            nothing about how or why indicators change.  The effects of
            changes in financing on coverage, quality, and equity of
            education are by no means obvious.  Education has a long
            gestation period, so the impacts of adjustment may not yet
            be evident.  Country studies are probably the best framework
            for analyzing the adjustment process.  The database of key
            education indicators must be improved.