rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
How do ex ante simulations compare
            with ex post evaluations evidence from the impact of
            conditional cash transfer programs
This paper compares the ex ante
            simulation of the impacts of conditional cash transfer
            programs against the ex post estimates of impacts obtained
            from experimental evaluations. Using data on
            program-eligible households in treatment areas from the same
            baseline surveys that are used for experimental evaluations
            of conditional cash transfer programs in Mexico and Ecuador,
            the authors use a micro-simulation model to derive ex ante
            estimates of the impact of the programs on enrollment rates
            and poverty. The estimates reveal that ex ante predictions
            of certain impacts of conditional cash transfer programs
            match up well against the benchmark estimates of ex post
            experimental studies. The findings seem to support the use
            of this model to assess the potential impact and cost
            efficiency of a conditional cash transfer program ex ante,
            in order to inform decisions about how the program would be designed.
Intersubjective meaning and
            collective action in 'fragile' societies : theory,
            evidence and policy implications
The capacity to act collectively is not
            just a matter of groups sharing interests, incentives and
            values (or being sufficiently small), as standard economic
            theory predicts, but a prior and shared understanding of the
            constituent elements of problem(s) and possible solutions.
            From this standpoint, the failure to act collectively can
            stem at least in part from relevant groups failing to
            ascribe a common intersubjective meaning to situations,
            processes and events. Though this is a general phenomenon,
            it is particularly salient in countries characterized by
            societal fragility and endemic conflict. We develop a
            conceptual account of intersubjective meanings, explain its
            relevance to development practice and research, and examine
            its implications for development work related to building
            the rule of law and managing common pool resources.
Intersubjective meaning and
            collective action in 'fragile' societies : theory,
            evidence and policy implications
WPS5707 Policy Research Working Paper 5707 Intersubjective Meaning and Collective Action in ‘Fragile’ Societies Theory, Evidence and Policy Implications _Varun Gauri Michael Woolcock Deval Desai_ The World Bank Development Research Group Poverty and Inequality Team and Human Development and Public Services Team June 2011
The politics of power : the
            political economy of rent-seeking in electric utilities in
            the Philippines
This paper takes advantage of unique
            intra-country variation in the Philippines power sector to
            examine under what conditions politicians have an incentive
            to "capture" an electric utility and use it for
            the purposes of rent-seeking. The authors hypothesize that
            the level of capture is determined by the incentives of, and
            the interactions between, local and national politicians,
            where the concepts of "local" and
            "national" are context specific. A local
            politician is defined as one whose electoral jurisdiction
            lies within the utilitys catchment area; by contrast, a
            national politician is defined as one whose electoral
            jurisdiction includes two or more utility catchment areas.
            These jurisdictional differences imply different motivations
            for local and national politicians: because of
            "spillover" effects, local politicians have a
            greater incentive to use the utility for rent-seeking than a
            national politician as they capture only a portion of the
            political gains from utility performance improvements as
            some of the benefits of improved service will go to other
            electoral jurisdictions within the utilitys catchment area.
            The authors posit that three variables impact the magnitude
            of these incentives of local and national politicians: (i)
            the local economic context, specifically the scale of rents
            that can be extracted from an electricity cooperative (ii)
            the degree of competitiveness of local politics; and (iii)
            the political salience of an electricity cooperatives
            catchment area for national politicians. The authors
            illustrate this framework through case studies of specific
            power utilities, and suggest some policy implications.
Does female reservation affect
            long-term political outcomes Evidence from rural India
Although many studies have explored the
            impacts of political quotas for females, often with
            ambiguous results, the underlying mechanisms and long-term
            effects have received little attention. This paper uses
            nation-wide data from India spanning a 15-year period to
            explore how reservations affect leader qualifications,
            service delivery, political participation, local
            accountability, and individuals willingness to contribute
            to public goods. Although leader quality declines and
            impacts on service quality are often negative, gender quotas
            are shown to increase the level and quality of women's
            political participation, the ability to hold leaders to
            account, and the willingness to contribute to public goods.
            Key effects persist beyond the reserved period and impacts
            on females often materialize only with a lag.
Crossing boundaries : gender, caste
            and schooling in rural Pakistan
Can communal heterogeneity explain
            persistent educational inequities in developing countries?
            The paper uses a novel data-set from rural Pakistan that
            explicitly recognizes the geographic structure of villages
            and the social makeup of constituent hamlets to show that
            demand for schooling is sensitive to the allocation of
            schools across ethnically fragmented communities. The
            analysis focuses on two types of social barriers: stigma
            based on caste affiliation and female seclusion that is more
            rigidly enforced outside a girl's own hamlet. Results
            indicate a substantial decrease in primary school enrollment
            rates for girls who have to cross hamlet boundaries to
            attend, irrespective of school distance, an effect not
            present for boys. However, low-caste children, both boys and
            girls, are deterred from enrolling when the most convenient
            school is in a hamlet dominated by high-caste households. In
            particular, low-caste girls, the most educationally
            disadvantaged group, benefit from improved school access
            only when the school is also caste-concordant. A policy
            experiment indicates that providing schools in low-caste
            dominant hamlets would increase overall enrollment by almost
            twice as much as a policy of placing a school in every
            unserved hamlet, and would do so at one-sixth of the cost.
Population, poverty, and sustainable
            development : a review of the evidence
There is a very large but scattered
            literature debating the economic implications of high
            fertility. This paper reviews the literature on three
            themes: (a) Does high fertility affect low-income
            countries' prospects for economic growth and poverty
            reduction? (b) Does population growth exacerbate pressure on
            natural resources? and (c) Are family planning programs
            effective at lowering fertility, and should they be publicly
            funded? The literature shows broad consensus that while
            policy and institutional settings are key in shaping the
            prospects of economic growth and poverty reduction, the rate
            of population growth also matters. Recent studies find that
            low dependency ratios (as fertility declines) create an
            opportunity for increasing productivity, savings and
            investment in future growth. They find that lower fertility
            is associated with better child health and schooling, and
            better health and greater labor-force participation for
            women. They also indicate that rapid population growth can
            constrain economic growth, especially in low-income
            countries with poor policy environments. Population growth
            also exacerbates pressure on environmental common property
            resources. Studies highlight the deep challenges to aligning
            divergent interests for managing these resources. However,
            part of the pressure on these resources can be mitigated by
            reducing the rate of population growth. Although family
            planning programs are only one policy lever to help reduce
            fertility, studies find them effective. Such programs might
            help especially in the Sub-Saharan African region, where
            high fertility and institutional constraints on economic
            growth combine to slow rises in living standards.
Development banks : role and
            mechanisms to increase their efficiency
Past performance of development banks,
            has generally been considered poor and the value of state
            ownership questioned. There are few institutions that
            achieve the optimum balance of effectively addressing a
            policy objective while being financially sustainable.
            Following the financial crisis, there is a renewed interest
            in the role development banks can play in weathering the
            crisis. The purpose of this paper is to highlight the
            lessons learned following the financial crisis and to
            present some of the best practices in development banking so
            that policy makers can be better informed should they be
            considering how to build strong state financial institutions
            to address current and future needs in their respective countries.
Who uses bottled gas evidence from
            households in developing countries
Household surveys in Guatemala, India,
            Indonesia, Kenya, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka were analyzed
            using a two-stage Heckman model to examine the factors
            influencing the decision to use liquefied petroleum gas
            (stage 1) and, among users, the quantity consumed per person
            (stage 2). In the first stage, liquefied petroleum gas
            selection in all six countries increased with household
            expenditure and the highest level of education attained by
            female and male household members. Electricity connection
            increased, and engagement in agriculture and increasing
            household size decreased, liquefied petroleum gas selection
            in five countries; urban residence increased selection in
            four countries; and rising firewood and kerosene prices
            increased selection in three countries each. In the second
            stage, the quantity of liquefied petroleum gas consumed
            increased with rising household expenditure and decreasing
            price of liquefied petroleum gas in every country. Urban
            residence increased and engagement in agriculture decreased
            liquefied petroleum gas consumption. Surveys in Albania,
            Brazil, Mexico, and Peru, which did not report quantities,
            were also examined by calculating quantities using national
            average prices. Although fuel prices faced by individual
            households could not be tested, the findings largely
            supported those from the first six countries. Once the
            education levels of men and women were separately accounted
            for, the gender of the head of household was not
            statistically significant in most cases across the ten
            countries. Where it was significant (five equations), the
            sign of the coefficient was positive for men, possibly
            suggesting that female-headed households are burdened with
            unmeasured economic disadvantages, making less cash
            available for purchasing liquefied petroleum gas.
Civil society, public action and
            accountability in Africa
This paper examines the potential role
            of civil society action in increasing state accountability
            for development in Sub-Saharan Africa. It further develops
            the analytical framework of the World Development Report
            2004 on accountability relationships, to emphasize the
            underlying political economy drivers of accountability and
            implications for how civil society is constituted and
            functions. It argues on this basis that the most important
            domain for improving accountability is through the political
            relations between citizens, civil society, and state
            leadership. The evidence broadly suggests that when
            higher-level political leadership provides sufficient or
            appropriate powers for citizen participation in holding
            within-state agencies or frontline providers accountable,
            there is frequently positive impact on outcomes. However,
            the big question remaining for such types of interventions
            is how to improve the incentives of higher-level leadership
            to pursue appropriate policy design and implementation. The
            paper argues that there is substantial scope for greater
            efforts in this domain, including through the support of
            external aid agencies. Such efforts and support should,
            however, build on existing political and civil society
            structures (rather than transplanting "best
            practice" initiatives from elsewhere), and be
            structured for careful monitoring and assessment of impact.
Measuring aversion to debt: an
            experiment among student loan candidates
This paper reports the results of an
            experiment designed to test for the presence of debt
            aversion. The population who participated in the experiment
            were recent financial aid candidates and the experiment
            focused on student loans. The goal is to shed new light on
            different aspects of the perceptions with respect to debt.
            These perceptions can prevent agents from choosing an
            optimal portfolio or from undertaking attractive investment
            opportunities, such as in education. The study design
            disentangles two types of debt aversion: one that is studied
            in the previous literature, which encompasses both framing
            and labeling effects, and another that controls for framing
            effects and identifies only what we denote labeling debt
            aversion. The results suggest that participants in the
            experiment exhibit debt aversion, and most of the debt
            aversion is due to labeling effects. Labeling a contract as
            a "loan"' decreases its probability of being
            chosen over a financially equivalent contract by more than 8
            percent. The analysis also provides evidence that students
            are willing to pay a premium of about 4 percent of the
            financed value to avoid a contract labeled as debt.
Does parental disability matter to
            child education evidence from Vietnam
This paper examines the effect of
            parental disability on school enrollment and educational
            performance for children in the 2006 Vietnam Household
            Living Standards Survey. Results from instrumental-variables
            regressions indicate that children of parents with a
            disability have a lower enrollment rate in primary and
            secondary school of about 8 percentage points: 73 percent
            compared with 81 percent. However, the association of
            parental disability with educational performance is small
            and not statistically significant. The conclusion of the
            paper is that to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of
            universal primary school as well as increased coverage of
            secondary education, the government should have policies and
            programs that either directly support the education of
            children with disabled parents and/or have policies that
            support disabled adults, thus lessening the incentive for
            their children not to attend school.
Measuring the economic gain of
            investing in girls : the girl effect dividend
Although girls are approximately half
            the youth population in developing countries, they
            contribute less than their potential to the economy. The
            objective of this paper is to quantify the opportunity cost
            of girls' exclusion from productive employment with the
            hope that stark figures will lead policymakers to reconsider
            the current underinvestment in girls. The paper explores the
            linkages between investing in girls and potential increases
            in national income by examining three widely prevalent
            aspects of adolescent girls' lives: early school
            dropout, teenage pregnancy and joblessness. The countries
            included in the analysis are: Bangladesh, Brazil, Burundi,
            China, Ethiopia, India, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Paraguay,
            Senegal, South Africa, Tanzania, and Uganda. The authors use
            secondary data to allow for some comparability across
            countries. They find that investing in girls so that they
            would complete the next level of education would lead to
            lifetime earnings of today's cohort of girls that is
            equivalent to up to 68 percent of annual gross domestic
            product. When adjusting for ability bias and labor demand
            elasticities, this figure falls to 54 percent, or 1.5
            percent per year. Closing the inactivity rate between girls
            and boys would increase gross domestic product by up to 5.4
            percent, but when accounting for students, male-female wage
            gaps and labor demand elasticities, the joblessness gap
            between girls and their male counterparts yields an increase
            in gross domestic product of up to 1.2 percent in a single
            year. The cost of adolescent pregnancy as a share of gross
            domestic could be as high as 30 percent or as low as 1
            percent over a girl's lifetime, depending on the
            assumptions used to calculate the losses.
The mechanics and regulation of
            variable payout annuities
This paper discusses the mechanics and
            regulation of participating and unit-linked variable payout
            annuities. These annuities offer benefits that are not fixed
            in either nominal or real terms but depend on the
            performance of the fund or funds in which the underlying
            reserve assets are invested, their profit sharing features,
            and the treatment of longevity risk. The paper focuses on
            the treatment of investment and longevity risks by different
            types of these annuities and underscores the challenge of
            establishing a robust and effective framework of regulation
            and supervision for these products. The paper also addresses
            the exposure of annuitants to integrity risk and places
            special emphasis on the need for a high level of meaningful transparency.
Environmental and gender impacts of
            land tenure regularization in Africa : pilot evidence from Rwanda
Although increased global demand for
            land has led to renewed interest in African land tenure, few
            models to address these issues quickly and at the required
            scale have been identified or evaluated. The case of
            Rwanda's nation-wide and relatively low-cost land
            tenure regularization program is thus of great interest.
            This paper evaluates the short-term impact (some 2.5 years
            after completion) of the pilots undertaken to fine-tune the
            approach using a geographic discontinuity design with
            spatial fixed effects. Three key findings emerge from the
            analysis. First, the program improved land access for
            legally married women (about 76 percent of married couples)
            and prompted better recordation of inheritance rights
            without gender bias. Second, the analysis finds a very large
            impact on investment and maintenance of soil conservation
            measures. This effect was particularly pronounced for female
            headed households, suggesting that this group had suffered
            from high levels of tenure insecurity, which the program
            managed to reduce. Third, land market activity declined,
            allowing rejection of the hypothesis that the program caused
            a wave of distress sales or widespread landlessness by
            vulnerable people. Implications for program design and
            policy are discussed.
Municipal solid waste management in
            small towns : an economic analysis conducted in Yunnan, China
Municipal solid waste management
            continues to be a major challenge for local governments in
            both urban and rural areas across the world, and one of the
            key issues is their financial constraints. Recently an
            economic analysis was conducted in Eryuan, a poor county
            located in Yunnan Province of China, where willingness to
            pay for an improved solid waste collection and treatment
            service was estimated and compared with the project cost.
            This study finds that the mean willingness to pay is about 1
            percent of household income and the total willingness to pay
            can basically cover the total cost of the project. The
            analysis also shows that the poorest households in Eryuan
            are not only willing to pay more than the rich households in
            terms of income percentage in general, but also are willing
            to pay no less than the rich in absolute terms where no
            solid waste services are available; the poorest households
            have stronger demand for public solid waste management
            services while the rich have the capability to take private
            measures when public services are not available.