rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Digital Platforms and the Demand for
            International Tourism Services
Tourism is an important source of
            foreign exchange and employment across developing economies.
            A scant literature has explored the relationship between
            tourism and the advent of the internet. This paper
            contributes to the tourism-trade literature and studies the
            empirical relationship between international tourism and the
            adoption of digital technologies that facilitate search
            about tourism opportunities across countries. It links
            foreign visits with the spread of the use of the internet in
            sending countries and the level of development of
            business-to-consumer digital tools in host countries. The
            paper estimates a well-specified gravity model of tourist
            arrivals between country pairs with panel data. The results
            indicate that frictions affecting bilateral tourism flows
            have been attenuated by the advent of digital tools. The
            absolute value of the effects of bilateral geographic
            distance, language differences, and border-contiguity seem
            to be reduced by the use of the internet by potential
            tourists and the business sector in host countries. The
            results are robust to alternative proxies for internet use
            for tourism search proxied by data from Google trends. The
            paper also presents simulations of the potential impacts of
            advances in the adoption of digital tools over time, linking
            the adoption process to mechanisms of technology adoption
            that are commonplace in the literature.
The Upstream Tariff Simulator (UTAS)
            : A Tool to Assess the Impact of Tariff Reform on Input
            Costs and Effective Protection across Sectors
Increased international production
            fragmentation implies that firms at home rely on imported
            intermediates for production. In this context, tariff policy
            design needs to consider the impact downstream of changes in
            tariffs upstream. Policy makers embarking on tariff reforms
            need to answer questions such as: what is the impact of
            tariff changes on production costs downstream? What are the
            key input tariffs that could be reduced to lower production
            costs in priority sectors considering sectors' backward
            linkages? Or how will a tariff rationalization plan that
            focuses on tariff reductions in raw materials and
            intermediates affect effective protection across sectors?
            This paper presents the Upstream Tariff Simulator, a simple
            Microsoft Excel–based tool designed to help policy makers
            answer these questions, by combining information on tariffs
            and input-output structures and allowing alternative
            sectoral aggregations, and alternative market structures for
            input markets. It provides the underlying conceptual
            framework and a range of examples that show the insights
            that the tool can provide to policy makers when analyzing
            the impact of tariff reforms.
Returns to Low-Skilled International
            Migration : Evidence from the Bangladesh-Malaysia Migration
            Lottery Program
Many economists believe that the returns
            to migration are high. However, credible experimental
            estimates of the benefits of migration are rare,
            particularly for low-skilled international migrants and
            their families. This paper studies a natural experiment in
            Bangladesh, where low-skilled male migrant workers to
            Malaysia were selected via a large-scale lottery program.
            This study tracked the households of lottery applicants and
            surveyed 3,512 lottery winners and losers. Five years after
            the lottery, 76 percent of the winners had migrated
            internationally compared with only 19 percent of the lottery
            losers. Using the lottery outcome as an instrument, the
            paper finds that the government intermediated migration
            increased the incomes of migrants by over 200 percent and
            their household per capita consumption by 22 percent.
            Furthermore, low-skilled international migration leads to
            large improvements in a wide array of household
            socioeconomic outcomes, including female involvement in key
            household decisions. Such large gains arise, at least in
            part, due to lower costs of government intermediation.
Structural Reforms to Set the Growth Ambition
The effect of structural reforms on
            growth in Europe and Central Asia is assessed by looking
            separately at each supply-side channel: capital, labor, and
            productivity, with the last estimated using the stochastic
            frontier approach. By controlling for the interaction with
            the economic cycle, the paper also investigates whether
            timing matters. Improvements in human capital, regulatory
            quality, and government effectiveness have the most impact
            on potential growth, along with financial development.
            European Union accession may also boost growth, mainly by
            encouraging capital deepening. However, changes in labor
            market regulation and tariffs may have ambiguous effects.
            Applying the results to Serbia, the analysis demonstrates
            that closing certain structural gaps with the frontier would
            help boost its potential.
Does the Internet Reduce Gender
            Gaps? : The Case of Jordan
This article investigates the link
            between digital technologies and female labor market
            outcomes in a country with one of the largest gender
            disparities. It exploits the massive roll-out of mobile
            broadband technology in Jordan between 2010 and 2016 to
            identify the effect of internet adoption on labor force
            participation. Using panel data at the individual level with
            rich information on labor market outcomes, internet use and
            gender-biased social norms, the article finds that internet
            adoption increases female labor force participation but has
            no effect on male labor force participation. The increase in
            online job search explains some -- but not all -- of the
            total increase in female labor force participation. Only
            older and skilled women experience an increase in employment
            in response to having internet access. The internet also
            reduces the prevalence of gender-biased social norms, early
            marriage and fertility.
What are the Empirical Determinants
            of International Tourist Arrivals and Expenditures : An
            Empirical Application to the Case of Sao Tome and Principe
The link between tourism and growth is
            very important for some countries, especially small island
            countries like São Tomé and Príncipe. This paper
            investigates the empirical determinants of tourism outcomes
            (tourist arrivals and expenditures) and uses the findings to
            assess the performance of the tourism sector in São Tomé and
            Príncipe. The paper confirms most of the results found in
            the literature on the general determinants of tourism.
            Tourist arrivals increase with the gross domestic product
            and exports of the host country, as well as with increased
            air connectivity. Real exchange rate variations affect
            tourist decisions, and tourism outcomes have a persistent
            effect. The paper also finds that a positive attitude toward
            acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people
            increases tourist arrivals. Unfortunately, the relationship
            between digital presence and tourism outcomes could not be
            tested. The paper shows that São Tomé and Príncipe can do
            better in tourist arrivals, but it already has good
            performance on expenditures per tourist. Improving air
            connectivity is key to attracting more tourists, and demand
            for tourism is not very price sensitive, implying that the
            strategy to focus on high-spending tourists is the correct one.
Customary Land Conversion and the
            Formation of the African City
As cities grow and spatially expand,
            agricultural land is converted into residential land. In
            many developing countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa,
            this process is accompanied by a change in land tenure,
            whereby plots held under traditional customary arrangements
            are sold to new urban residents, possibly with formal
            property rights. This paper studies joint land-use and
            land-tenure conversion in an urban economics model in which
            intermediaries purchase agricultural land from customary
            owners and attempt to transform it into residential plots
            with statutory property rights. The spatial equilibrium
            includes a mix of land uses and rights where statutory and
            non-statutory residential plots coexist with customary land
            that is mainly used for agriculture. Because customary
            ownership is subject to uncertainty (because of tenure
            insecurity), the conversion process includes a potential
            information asymmetry between customary owners and
            intermediaries. The analysis shows that a market failure may
            emerge whereby some customary owners prefer to continue
            farming their land rather than participate in the urban
            residential land market, which results in a city that is too
            small. Empirical analysis using Malian data validates the
            key features of the model captured by land price gradients,
            as well as the ranking and the variance of land prices, and
            is suggestive of the presence of information asymmetry.
The Relationship between Female
            Labor Force Participation and Violent Conflicts in South Asia
This paper explores the link between the
            prevalence of violent conflicts and extremely low female
            labor force participation rates in South Asia. The Labor
            Force Surveys from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, India, and
            Pakistan are merged with the Global Terrorism Database to
            estimate the relationship between terrorist attacks and
            female labor supply. Geographical data on exposure to
            violence are used to compare administrative units exposed to
            attacks with those not exposed. The analysis finds that one
            additional attack reduces female labor force participation
            rates by about 0.008 percentage point, on average. Violence
            has less impact on male labor participation, thus widening
            the gender labor participation gap. The paper tests the
            added -- worker effect theory -- which posits that violence
            might increase female labor force participation as women try
            to make up for lost household income—and finds mixed
            evidence: greater prevalence of attacks may encourage
            married women to work more hours, but when the environment
            gets more risky, all women work fewer hours. The paper also
            finds that violence decreases female labor participation
            less where it was already higher and has a progressively
            greater impact on lowering female labor participation where
            the number of attacks is higher.
Digital Trade in MENA : Regulatory
            Readiness Assessment
A strong regulatory framework can
            provide essential tools for remote transactions and improve
            trust in digital trade. Yet, regulations can also introduce
            restrictions that hamper the conditions for digital markets.
            Based on a database of 20 Middle East and North Africa
            countries and 20 comparator countries around the world, this
            paper shows that the Middle East and North Africa region is
            falling behind in establishing a modern governance framework
            for the digital economy. The analysis focuses on a set of
            regulatory areas, including electronic documentation and
            signature, online consumer protection, data governance,
            cybersecurity, and intermediary liability regulations. It
            assesses each country's domestic regulatory framework
            in light of recent international trends and regulatory
            models. The study shows that regulation of digital markets
            in countries in the region is still in its infancy, being
            mostly governed by general laws that were not originally
            intended for the digital era. Some countries have tried to
            support an export-oriented information technology sector by
            keeping an updated regulatory framework. However, regulation
            in most countries in the region, regardless of their level
            of development, still features some major loopholes that can
            limit consumer trust in digital markets or reduce certainty
            -- and increase costs -- for digital businesses.
Are Inflows of FDI Good for Russian Exporters
This study examines whether foreign
            direct investment inflows facilitate upgrading of export
            quality in host countries. The analysis focuses on the
            Russian Federation and uses customs data merged with
            firm-level information from Orbis. The results show a
            positive relationship between the quality of products
            exported by domestic firms and the presence of foreign
            affiliates in the upstream (input-supplying) industries.
            This relationship is present irrespective of export
            destination or foreign direct investment origin. The results
            are robust to using different proxies to measure product quality.
Leader Value Added : Assessing the
            Growth Contribution of Individual National Leaders
Previous literature suggests that
            leaders matter for growth in general. This paper asks which
            leaders matter and develops a methodology to estimate the
            growth contribution of individual leaders and calculate its
            precision. The findings show that few leaders have
            statistically significant contributions; it is difficult to
            know who is good for growth and who is not. The paper also
            finds that the most intuitive estimate of a leader's
            contribution -- the average growth rate during tenure -- is
            largely useless for measuring his or her true contribution.
            Consequently, many leaders with statistically significant
            growth effects are surprises. Moreover, leaders in
            non-democratic countries are no more likely to be
            statistically significant than leaders in democratic ones.
Estimating Poverty among Refugee
            Populations : A Cross-Survey Imputation Exercise for Chad
Household consumption surveys do not
            typically cover refugee populations, and poverty estimates
            for refugees are rare. This paper tests the performance of
            cross-survey imputation methods to estimate poverty for a
            sample of refugees in Chad, by combining United Nations High
            Commissioner for Refugees survey and administrative data.
            The proposed method offers poverty estimates based on
            administrative data that fall within a 95 percent margin of
            poverty estimates based on survey consumption data. This
            result is robust to different poverty lines, sets of
            regressors, and modeling assumptions of the error term. The
            method outperforms common targeting methods, such as proxy
            means tests and the targeting method currently used by
            humanitarian organizations in Chad.
How Does the World Bank Influence
            the Development Policy Priorities of Low-Income and
            Lower-Middle Income Countries
This study investigates the World
            Bank's use of lending and non-lending instruments to
            affect the policy priorities of developing countries. In a
            typical year, the World Bank lends more than $30 billion to
            its client countries. It also spends approximately $200
            million on the provision of analytical and advisory products
            each year. However, insufficiently granular data on the
            nature, timing, and distribution of these analytical and
            advisory products and the policy priorities of client
            countries has made it difficult for policymakers and
            scholars to understand which World Bank instruments are most
            useful for effectuating change in the direction of
            government policy. With new data on the delivery of
            analytical and advisory products and micro-level survey data
            from 1,244 public sector officials in 121 developing
            countries, this study demonstrates that the organization’s
            non-lending instruments are more effective than its lending
            instruments at influencing the policy priorities of client
            countries. The World Bank's analytical and advisory
            products not only affect the direction of government policy,
            but also its design and implementation.
Demand-Driven Youth Training
            Programs : Experimental Evidence from Mongolia
The effectiveness of a demand-driven
            vocational-training program for disadvantaged youth in
            Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia is assessed
            through a randomized controlled trial. Mongolia, a
            transitional country whose economic structure shifted from a
            Communist, centrally planned economy to a free-market
            economy over a relatively short period, offers a new setting
            in which to test the effectiveness of market-based
            active-labor-market policies. Results show short-term
            positive impacts on self-employment and skills match, while
            positive but uncertain effects emerge for employment and
            earnings. Substantial heterogeneity emerges as relatively
            older, richer, and better-educated individuals drive these
            positive effects. A second intervention, in which
            participants were randomly assigned to receive newsletters
            with information on market returns to vocational training,
            shows statistically meaningful effects on the length of
            exposure to the program (i.e., number of training days
            attended). These positive impacts, however, do not lead to
            higher employment or greater earnings.
Migration and Asset Accumulation in
            South India : Comparing Gains to Internal and International
            Migration from Kerala
This study examines the asset gains to
            households in Kerala, India, from two types of labor
            migration: moving overseas versus moving within India for
            employment. It draws on panel data from waves of a
            representative household survey conducted in 1998 and 2003.
            Migrant households as a whole experienced higher asset gains
            than non-migrant families over this five-year period.
            Contrary to theoretical expectations, asset gains were
            similar for households with an overseas migrant and those
            with a domestic migrant. Although less educated individuals
            tend to venture overseas, a wage premium over non-migrants
            enables them to earn as much in low-skill jobs abroad as
            more educated workers relocating within India can.
When Face-to-Face Interactions
            Become an Occupational Hazard : Jobs in the Time of COVID-19
There is a crisis of demand brewing
            around the globe as social distancing becomes the norm to
            counter the COVID-19 outbreak. So, which parts of the
            economy are most in the line of fire? Looking at jobs that
            can be done at home or that require a high degree of
            face-to-face interactions with consumers can capture
            complementary but distinct mechanisms to assess this
            vulnerability. This paper uses data on 900 job titles from
            the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) database for
            the United States to demonstrate that there is substantial
            heterogeneity in vulnerability across industries, income
            groups, and gender. First, industries vary in whether they
            emphasize face-to-face interactions and home-based work and
            the two do not always go hand-in-hand. Second, occupations
            that are less amenable to home-based work are largely
            concentrated among the lower wage deciles. Third, a larger
            share of women's employment is accounted for by
            occupations that are intensive in face-to-face interactions.
The Transformative Effects of
            Privatization in China : A Natural Experiment Based on
            Politician Career Concern
The serious implications of privatizing
            state-owned enterprises for politicians, managers, and
            investors make such decisions highly contingent on firm
            characteristics and past performance, complicating the
            identification of the privatization effects. A unique
            opportunity for this identification arises from a rule of
            promotion of local politicians based on age requirements in
            China. This paper finds that Chinese cities whose top
            officials were older than age 58 were 20 percent less likely
            to privatize local state-owned enterprises during the wave
            of state-owned enterprise restructuring starting in the late
            1990s. Relying on the regression discontinuity design, the
            analysis finds that privatizations led to productivity gains
            of more than 170 percent, an order of magnitude larger than
            the traditional estimates based on the firm fixed effect
            specification (including its random-growth variant). The
            paper further finds that the privatization effects are
            significantly larger when the government is less involved in
            the affairs of local firms. The findings underscore the need
            to deal with the time-varying selectivity of privatizations
            and highlight the crucial role that state-owned enterprise
            privatizations played in China's economic takeoff.