rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
The impact of export tax incentives
            on export performance : evidence from the automotive sector
            in South Africa
The original goal of the Motor Industry
            Development Program was to help the automotive industry in
            South Africa adjust to trade liberalization and become
            internationally competitive. In simple terms, it consists of
            an import/export complementation arrangement, whereby the
            local value-added of components or built-up vehicles
            exported earns credits that can be used to rebate import
            duties on components and vehicles. This study provides a
            first attempt at a quantitative analysis of the Motor
            Industry Development Program using the
            difference-in-difference methodology, in order to assess to
            what extent the program was effective in improving South
            Africa's automotive export performance during
            1996-2006. The authors take a two-tier approach. First, they
            perform a comparative study using different manufacturing
            sectors within South Africa; second, they apply this
            methodology to analyze South Africa and a number of
            comparator countries that are automotive producers and
            exporters. The analysis finds that the impact of the program
            on automotive exports in South Africa is positive and
            significant. In particular, (i) the largest response to the
            program in terms of improved manufacturing exports occurs
            with a delay after the adoption of the law, suggesting that
            exports need time to fully react to the incentives; and (ii)
            in turn, the effectiveness of the tax incentives fades in
            time, reaffirming the common belief that tax incentives may
            affect some business decisions particularly in the short
            run, but they are not a primary consideration for investors
            in the long run.
Information asymmetries and
            institutional investor mandates
The preference among foreign
            institutional investors for large firms is widely
            documented. This paper deepens our understanding of
            international investments by providing evidence that foreign
            institutional investors with broader investment scopes
            prefer to invest in firms where they are less prone to
            information disadvantages than more specialized ones. In
            other words, there is heterogeneity in how information
            asymmetries affect investors' portfolio choices.
            Theoretically, a model with costly information and
            short-selling constraints shows that the broader the
            investor's mandate, the smaller the incentives to
            gather and process costly information. Empirically, an
            analysis of the mutual fund industry in the United States
            supports this hypothesis.
Over the hedge : exchange rate
            volatility, commodity price correlations, and the structure
            of trade
A long empirical literature has examined
            the idea that, in the absence of hedging mechanisms,
            currency risk should have an adverse effect on the export
            volumes of risk averse exporters. But there are no clear
            conclusions from this literature, and the current consensus
            seems to be that there is at most a weak negative effect of
            exchange rate volatility on aggregate trade flows. However,
            most of this literature examines the impact of exchange rate
            volatility on aggregate trade flows, implicitly assuming a
            uniform impact of this volatility on exporters across
            sectors. This paper explots the fact that, if exchange rate
            volatility is detrimental for trade, firms exporting goods
            that offer a natural hedge against exchange rate
            fluctuations -- i.e. those whose international price is
            negatively correlated with the nominal exchange rate of the
            country where they operate -- should be relatively benefited
            in environments of high exchange rate volatility, and
            capture a larger share of the country's export basket.
            This hypothesis is tested using detailed data on the
            composition of trade of 132 countries at 4-digit SITC level.
            The results show that the commodities that offer natural
            hedge capture a larger share of a country's export
            basket when the exchange rate is volatile, but there is only
            weak evidence that the availability of financial derivatives
            to hedge currency risk reduces the importance of a
            sector's natural hedge.
Kenya's infrastructure: a
            continental perspective
In the past decade, infrastructure
            contributed 0.5 percentage points to Kenya's annual per
            capita GDP growth. Raising the countrys infrastructure
            endowment to that of Africa's middle-income countries
            could increase that contribution by 3 percentage points.
            Several accomplishments are notable. More than 90 percent of
            the population has access to GSM cell signals. A successful
            public-private partnership in air transport has made
            Kenya's airline a top carrier in the region and its
            international airport a key gateway to Africa. Institutional
            reforms in the power sector have reduced the burden of
            subsidies on the public by approximately 1 percent of GDP.
            But the power sector continues to pose Kenya's greatest
            infrastructure challenge. Over the next decade, current
            capacity will have to double. A second challenge is to
            improve the efficiency of operations at the Port of Mombasa.
            Other concerns include low levels of access to household
            services, underfunding of road maintenance, and negative
            progress on the Millennium Development Goals for water
            supply and sanitation. Addressing Kenya's
            infrastructure deficit will require sustained expenditures
            of approximately $4 billion per year (20 percent of GDP)
            over the next decade. As of 2006, Kenya needed and
            additional $2.1 billion per year (11 percent of GDP) to meet
            that funding goal. The gap could be halved through the use
            of more efficient technologies to meet infrastructure
            targets in the transport and WSS sectors. If Kenya is unable
            to increase infrastructure spending, it could nevertheless
            meet infrastructure targets in 18 years by eliminating
            existing inefficiencies in infrastructure sectors.
Malawi's infrastructure: a
            continental perspective
Infrastructure contributed 1.2
            percentage points to Malawi's annual per capital GDP
            growth over the past decade. Raising the country's
            infrastructure endowment to that of the regions
            middle-income countries could increase that contribution by
            3.5 percentage points. Malawi's successes in
            infrastructure development include reaching the Millennium
            Development Goals for water and making GSM telephone signals
            widely available without public subsidy. Challenges include
            improving the reliability and sustainability of the power
            sector, raising funding for road maintenance, preventing
            overengineering of roads, enhancing market access in
            agricultural areas, and lowering the cost of information and
            communications services. The latter goal may be achievable
            by securing competitive access to the new submarine
            infrastructure on the East African coast.Addressing
            Malawi's infrastructure deficit would require sustained
            expenditures of almost $600 million per year over the decade
            2006-15. During the mid-2000s, the country spent close to
            $200 million per year, about half of which went to the
            transport sector. Because of widespread inefficiencies --
            underpricing of power, improperly maintained roads, and
            utility distribution losses --about $200 million is wasted
            each year. But even if those inefficiencies were eliminated,
            Malawi would still face an annual infrastructure funding gap
            of almost $300 million. That gap could be cut to $100
            million by engaging in regional trade of electricity, using
            lower-cost technologies in water and sanitation, and
            adopting less-ambitious road-building technologies. If
            inefficiencies were eliminated and recent spending levels
            sustained, Malawi could reach its infrastructure targets
            within 16 years.
Would freeing up world trade reduce
            poverty and inequality the vexed role of agricultural distortions
Trade policy reforms in recent decades
            have sharply reduced the distortions that were harming
            agriculture in developing countries, yet global trade in
            farm products continues to be far more distorted than trade
            in nonfarm goods. Those distortions reduce some forms of
            poverty and inequality but worsen others, so the net effects
            are unclear without empirical modeling. This paper
            summarizes a series of new economy-wide global and national
            empirical studies that focus on the net effects of the
            remaining distortions to world merchandise trade on poverty
            and inequality globally and in various developing countries.
            The global LINKAGE model results suggest that removing those
            remaining distortions would reduce international inequality,
            largely by boosting net farm incomes and raising real wages
            for unskilled workers in developing countries, and would
            reduce the number of poor people worldwide by 3 percent. The
            analysis based on the Global Trade Analysis Project model
            for a sample of 15 countries, and nine stand-alone national
            case studies, all point to larger reductions in poverty,
            especially if only the non-poor are subjected to increased
            income taxation to compensate for the loss of trade tax revenue.
Large devaluations, foreign direct
            investment and exports : a speculative note
One side-effect of the Global Financial
            Crisis of 2008-09 was the resurgence of a debate over
            exchange rates. The conventional wisdom dictates that
            real-exchange rate adjustments are needed in order to bring
            about changes in trade balances across countries. However,
            the literature on the effect of exchange rate fluctuations
            and currency under-valuations on exports is surprisingly
            ambiguous. This note explores for the first time the
            potential role of foreign direct investment as an
            intermediate variable in the process of trade adjustment
            after large real-exchange rate changes. Real-exchange rate
            devaluations might result in increases in foreign direct
            investment inflows, as investors can take advantage of
            changes in the foreign-currency value of domestic assets. If
            so, the response of exports will depend to some extent on
            the nature of such foreign direct investment inflows, with
            inflows motivated by "horizontal" foreign direct
            investment associated with negligible changes in export
            growth after devaluation. The author utilizes quarterly data
            on real effective exchange rates, foreign direct investment
            inflows and exports to explore the effects of large
            devaluations (defined as the largest observed quarterly real
            effective exchange rate devaluation) on foreign direct
            investment and exports from 1990 to 2010. The admittedly
            speculative evidence suggests that there were heterogeneous
            experiences regarding the timing and magnitude of subsequent
            changes in foreign direct investment and exports, but on
            average foreign direct investment inflows tended to precede
            export surges within two year horizons.
School inputs, household
            substitution, and test scores
Empirical studies of the relationship
            between school inputs and test scores typically do not
            account for the fact that households will respond to changes
            in school inputs. This paper presents a dynamic household
            optimization model relating test scores to school and
            household inputs, and tests its predictions in two very
            different low-income country settings -- Zambia and India.
            The authors measure household spending changes and student
            test score gains in response to unanticipated as well as
            anticipated changes in school funding. Consistent with the
            optimization model, they find in both settings that
            households offset anticipated grants more than unanticipated
            grants. They also find that unanticipated school grants lead
            to significant improvements in student test scores but
            anticipated grants have no impact on test scores. The
            results suggest that naïve estimates of public education
            spending on learning outcomes that do not account for
            optimal household responses are likely to be considerably
            biased if used to estimate parameters of an education
            production function.
Diagnosing development bottlenecks :
            China and India
Although it had a a lower income level
            than India in 1980, China's 2006 per capita gross
            domestic product stands more than twice that of
            India's. This paper investigates the role of the
            business environment in explaining China's productivity
            advantage using recent firm-level survey data. The analysis
            finds that China has better infrastructure, more skilled
            workers, and more labor-hiring flexibility than India, but a
            worse access to finance and higher regulatory burden.
            Infrastructure appears to be a key constraint for India: it
            lags significantly behind China, yet it has important
            indirect effects for the effectiveness of labor flexibility.
            Labor flexibility is also likely a major constraint for
            India, as evident in the predominance of small firms, the
            importance of firm size in accounting for India's
            disadvantage in productivity, and the complementarity of
            proxies of labor flexibility with infrastructure and access
            to finance. Interestingly, regulatory uncertainty has
            adverse effects in India but not in China. The empirical
            analysis suggests that it is important to consider
            country-specific growth bottlenecks and the indirect effects
            of policy reforms.
Governance in the health sector: a
            strategy for measuring determinants and performance
Many different strategies have been
            proposed to improve the delivery of health care services,
            from capacity building to establishing new payment
            mechanisms. Recent attention has also asked whether
            improvements in the way health care services are governed
            could make a difference. These approaches ask which factors
            -- such as rules and institutions -- influence the behavior
            of the system in ways that are associated with better
            performance and outcomes. This paper reviews the concept of
            governance as it is used in the literature on private firms,
            public administration, international development and health.
            It distinguishes between indicators that measure governance
            determinants from those that measure governance performance
            in order to propose a framework that is analytically
            coherent and empirically useful. The framework shows how
            these indicators can be used to test hypotheses about which
            governance forms are more useful for improving health system
            performance. The paper concludes by proposing specific
            measures of governance determinants and performance and
            describes the instruments available to collect and interpret them.
Success and failure of African exporters
Using a novel dataset with transactions
            level exports data from four African countries (Malawi,
            Mali, Senegal and Tanzania), this paper uncovers evidence of
            a high degree of experimentation at the extensive margin
            associated with low survival rates, consistent with high and
            middle income country evidence. Consequently, the authors
            focus on the questions of what determines success and
            survival beyond the first year and find that survival
            probability rises with the number of firms exporting the
            same product to the same destination from the same country,
            pointing towards the existence of cross-firm synergies.
            Accordingly the evidence is consistent with the hypothesis
            that those synergies may be driven by information
            spillovers. More intuitively and consistently with
            multi-product firms models, the analysis also finds that
            firms more diversified in terms of products, but even more
            in terms of markets, are more likely to be successful and
            survive beyond the first year.
Cape Verde's infrastructure : a
            continental perspective
Cape Verde stands out in West Africa as
            a country whose economic geography poses major and unique
            challenges for infrastructure development. Its small
            population of half a million people is spread across a
            nine-island archipelago. The islands need complementary
            infrastructure in terms of roads, water, transport, ports,
            power, and ICT. Cape Verde already has well-developed
            infrastructure networks. Road density is relatively high,
            and most of the national network is paved. Almost all
            islands have port and airport facilities. Around 70 percent
            of the population has power and utility water. Indicators
            for ICT coverage -- penetration, bandwidth, submarine cable,
            private sector participation -- are relatively good.
            Nevertheless, prices for all services are exceptionally
            high. The quality of services is often deficient. At least
            half of the national road network is in poor condition;
            power supply is unreliable; and half of the population
            receives water from standposts. Cape Verde devotes around
            $147 million per year to infrastructure (almost 15 percent
            of GDP), among the highest levels of infrastructure spending
            on the continent. Some $50 million of that is lost each year
            to operations inefficiencies and underpricing. The
            country's main challenges are to improve infrastructure
            management and reduce high costs of services.
Deconstructing herding : evidence
            from pension fund investment behavior
Pension funds have been expected to
            invest in a wide range of securities and provide liquidity
            to domestic capital markets since they are the most
            sophisticated investors, with plenty of resources to gather
            private information and manage portfolios professionally.
            However, by analyzing unique, monthly asset-level data from
            the pioneer case of Chile, this paper shows that pension
            funds tend to herd. This is consistent with pension funds
            copying each other in their investment strategies as a way
            to extract information, boost returns, and reduce risk. The
            authors compute measures of herding across asset classes
            (equities, government bonds, and private sector bonds) and
            at different pension fund industry levels. The results show
            that pension funds herd more in assets for which they have
            less market information and when risk increases. Moreover,
            herding is more prevalent across funds that narrowly compete
            with each other, that is, when comparing funds of the same
            type across pension fund administrators. There is much less
            herding within pension fund administrators and across
            pension fund administrators as a whole. This herding pattern
            is consistent with incentives for managers to be close to
            industry benchmarks, which might be driven by both market
            forces and regulation.
From flying Geese to leading Dragons
            : new opportunities and strategies for structural
            transformation in developing countries
Economic development is a process of
            continuous industrial and technological upgrading in which
            any country, regardless of its level of development, can
            succeed if it develops industries that are consistent with
            its comparative advantage, determined by its endowment
            structure. The secret winning formula for developing
            countries is to exploit the latecomer advantage by building
            up industries that are growing dynamically in more advanced
            fast growing countries that have endowment structures
            similar to theirs. By following carefully selected lead
            countries, latecomers can emulate the leader-follower,
            flying-geese pattern that has served well successfully
            catching-up economies since the 18th century. The emergence
            of large middle-income countries such as China, India, and
            Brazil as new growth poles in the world, and their dynamic
            growth and climbing of the industrial ladder, offer an
            unprecedented opportunity to all developing economies with
            income levels currently below theirs --including those in
            Sub-Saharan Africa. Having itself been a "follower
            goose," China is on the verge of graduating from
            low-skilled manufacturing jobs and becoming a "leading
            dragon." That will free up nearly 100 million
            labor-intensive manufacturing jobs, enough to more than
            quadruple manufacturing employment in low-income countries.
            A similar trend is emerging in other middle-income growth
            poles. The lower-income countries that can formulate and
            implement a viable strategy to capture this new
            industrialization opportunity will set forth on a dynamic
            path of structural change that can lead to poverty reduction
            and prosperity.