rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Transactional sex as a response to
            risk in western Kenya
Formal and informal commercial sex work
            is a way of life for many poor women in developing
            countries. Though sex workers have long been identified as
            crucial in affecting the spread of HIV/AIDS, particularly in
            Sub-Saharan Africa, the nature of sex-for-money transactions
            remains poorly understood. Using a unique panel dataset
            constructed from 192 self-reported sex worker diaries which
            include detailed information on sexual behavior, labor
            supply, and health shocks, the authors find that sex workers
            adjust their supply of risky, better compensated sex to cope
            with unexpected health shocks, exposing themselves to
            increased risk of HIV infection. In particular, women are
            3.1 percent more likely to see a client, 21.2 percent more
            likely to have anal sex, and 19.1 percent more likely to
            have unprotected sex on days in which a household member
            falls ill. Women also increase their supply of risky sex on
            days after missing work due to symptoms from a sexually
            transmitted infection. Given that HIV prevalence has been
            estimated at 9.8 percent in this part of Kenya, these
            behavioral responses entail significant health risks for sex
            workers and their partners, and suggest that sex workers are
            unable to cope with risk through other formal or informal
            consumption smoothing mechanisms.
Poverty decline, agricultural wages,
            and non-farm employment in rural India : 1983-2004
The authors analyze five rounds of
            National Sample Survey data covering 1983, 1987/8, 1993/4,
            1999/0, and 2004/5 to explore the relationship between rural
            diversification and poverty. Poverty in rural India declined
            at a modest rate during this period. The authors provide
            region-level estimates that illustrate considerable
            geographic heterogeneity in this progress. Poverty estimates
            correlate well with region-level data on changes in
            agricultural wage rates. Agricultural labor remains the
            preserve of the uneducated and also to a large extent of the
            scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. Although agricultural
            labor grew as a share of total economic activity over the
            first four rounds, it had fallen back to the levels observed
            at the beginning of the survey period by 2004. This
            all-India trajectory masks widely varying trends across
            states. During this period, the rural non-farm sector grew
            modestly, mainly between the last two survey rounds. Regular
            non-farm employment remains largely associated with
            education levels and social status that are rare among the
            poor. However, casual labor and self-employment in the
            non-farm sector reveal greater involvement by disadvantaged
            groups in 2004 than in the preceding rounds. The implication
            for poverty is not immediately clear - the poor may be
            pushed into low-return casual non-farm activities due to
            lack of opportunities in the agricultural sector rather than
            being pulled by high returns offered by the non-farm sector.
            Econometric estimates reveal that expansion of the non-farm
            sector is associated with falling poverty via two routes: a
            direct impact on poverty that is likely due to a pro-poor
            marginal incidence of non-farm employment expansion; and an
            indirect impact attributable to the positive effect of
            non-farm employment growth on agricultural wages. The
            analysis also confirms the important contribution to rural
            poverty reduction from agricultural productivity,
            availability of land, and consumption levels in proximate
            urban areas.
Welfare impacts of rural
            electrification : a case study from Bangladesh
Lack of access to electricity is one of
            the major impediments to growth and development of the rural
            economies in developing countries. That is why access to
            modern energy, in particular to electricity, has been one of
            the priority themes of the World Bank and other development
            organizations. Using a cross-sectional survey conducted in
            2005 of some 20,000 households in rural Bangladesh, this
            paper studies the welfare impacts of households' grid
            connectivity. Based on rigorous econometric estimation
            techniques, this study finds that grid electrification has
            significant positive impacts on households' income,
            expenditure, and educational outcomes. For example, the gain
            in total income due to electrification can be as much as 30
            percent and as low as 9 percent. Benefits go up steadily as
            household exposure to grid electrification (measured by
            duration) increases and eventually reach a plateau. This
            paper also finds that rich households benefit more from
            electrification than poor households. Finally, estimates
            also show that income benefits of electrification on an
            average exceed cost by a wide margin.
Long-term financial incentives and
            investment in daughters : evidence from conditional cash
            transfers in north India
Since the early 1990s, several states in
            India have introduced financial incentive programs to
            discourage son preference among parents and encourage
            investment in daughters' education and health. This
            study evaluates one such program in the state of Haryana,
            Apni Beti Apna Dhan (Our Daughter, Our Wealth). Since 1994,
            eligible parents in Haryana have been offered a financial
            incentive if they give birth to a daughter. The incentive
            consists of an immediate cash grant and a long-term savings
            bond redeemable on the daughter's 18th birthday
            provided she is unmarried, with additional bonuses for
            education. Although no specific program participation data
            are available, we estimate early intent-to-treat program
            effects on mothers (sex ratio among live children, fertility
            preferences) and children (mother's use of antenatal
            care, survival, nutritional status, immunization, schooling)
            using statewide household survey data on fertility and child
            health, and constructing proxies for household and
            individual program eligibility. The results based on this
            limited data imply that Apni Beti Apna Dhan had a positive
            effect on the sex ratio of living children, but inconclusive
            effects on mothers' preferences for having female
            children as well as total desired fertility. The findings
            also show that parents increased their investment in
            daughters' human capital as a result of the program.
            Families made greater post-natal health investments in
            eligible girls, with some mixed evidence of improving health
            status in the short and medium term.  Further evidence also
            suggests that the early cohort of eligible school-age girls
            was not significantly more likely to attend school; however,
            conditional on first attending any school, they may be more
            likely to continue their education.
The current account as a dynamic
            portfolio choice problem
The current account can be understood as
            the outcome of investment decisions made by domestic and
            foreign investors. These decisions can be decomposed into a
            portfolio rebalancing and a portfolio growth component. This
            paper provides empirical evidence of the importance of
            portfolio rebalancing for the dynamics of the current
            account. The authors evaluate the predictions of a
            partial-equilibrium model of the current account with
            dynamic portfolio choices, in which portfolio rebalancing is
            driven by changes in investment opportunities. Using data
            for the United States and Japan, the authors find evidence
            supporting innovations in investment opportunities as an
            important mechanism to explain international capital flows.
Natural disasters and human capital accumulation
The author assesses empirically the
            relationship between natural disaster risk and investment in
            education. Although the results in the empirical literature
            tend to be inconclusive, using model averaging methods in
            the framework of cross-country and panel regressions, this
            paper finds an extremely robust negative partial correlation
            between secondary school enrollment and natural disaster
            risk. This result is exclusively driven by geological
            disasters. Natural disaster risk exposure is a robust
            determinant of differences in secondary school enrollment
            between countries, but not within countries, which implies
            that the effect can be interpreted as a long-run phenomenon.
Fiscal health of selected Indian cities
This paper provides an overview of the
            fiscal problems faced by five urban agglomerations in India,
            namely, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Chennai, and Pune. It
            analyzes the fiscal health of the five urban agglomerations,
            quantifies their revenue capacities and expenditure needs,
            and draws policy recommendations on the means to reduce the
            gaps between revenue raising capacities and expenditure
            needs. The main findings suggest that, except for five small
            urban local bodies in Hyderabad, the others are not in a
            position to cover their expenditure needs by their present
            revenue collections. All the urban agglomerations have
            unutilized potential for revenue generation; however, with
            the exception of Hyderabad, they would fail to cover their
            expenditure needs even if they realized their revenue
            potential. Except in Chennai, larger corporations are more
            constrained than smaller urban local bodies. The paper
            recommends better utilization of "own revenue"
            through improved administration of property taxes,
            implementation of other taxes, and collection of user
            charges. It recommends that state governments should explore
            the option of allowing local bodies to piggyback a small
            proportion on their value-added tax collections. Another way
            to reduce the fiscal gap would be to earmark a portion of
            the sales proceeds from land and housing by state
            governments sold through their development agencies for
            improvements in urban infrastructure. The paper also
            recommends that the State Finance Commissions should develop
            appropriate norms for estimating expenditure needs, based on
            which transfers from the state to local governments can be decided.
Global distortions to agricultural
            markets : new indicators of trade and welfare impacts, 1955
            to 2007
Despite recent reforms, world
            agricultural markets remain highly distorted by government
            policies. Traditional indicators of those price distortions
            can be poor guides to the policies' economic effects.
            Recent theoretical literature provides indicators of trade
            and welfare-reducing effects of price and trade policies
            which this paper builds on to develop more-satisfactory
            indexes. The authors exploit a new Agricultural Distortion
            database to generate estimates of them for developing and
            high-income countries over the past half century. These
            better approximations of the trade and welfare effects of
            sector policies are generated without a formal model of
            global markets or even price elasticity estimates.
Energy demand models for policy
            formulation : a comparative study of energy demand models
This paper critically reviews existing
            energy demand forecasting methodologies highlighting the
            methodological diversities and developments over the past
            four decades in order to investigate whether the existing
            energy demand models are appropriate for capturing the
            specific features of developing countries. The study finds
            that two types of approaches, econometric and end-use
            accounting, are used in the existing energy demand models.
            Although energy demand models have greatly evolved since the
            early 1970s, key issues such as the poor-rich and
            urban-rural divides, traditional energy resources, and
            differentiation between commercial and non-commercial energy
            commodities are often poorly reflected in these models.
            While the end-use energy accounting models with detailed
            sector representations produce more realistic projections
            compared with the econometric models, they still suffer from
            huge data deficiencies especially in developing countries.
            Development and maintenance of more detailed energy
            databases, further development of models to better reflect
            developing country context, and institutionalizing the
            modeling capacity in developing countries are the key
            requirements for energy demand modeling to deliver richer
            and more reliable input to policy formulation in developing countries.
A review of regulatory instruments
            to control environmental externalities from the transport sector
This study reviews regulatory
            instruments designed to reduce environmental externalities
            from the transport sector. The study finds that the main
            regulatory instruments used in practice are fuel economy
            standards, vehicle emission standards, and fuel quality
            standards. Although industrialized countries have introduced
            all three standards with strong enforcement mechanisms, most
            developing countries have yet to introduce fuel economy
            standards. The emission standards introduced by many
            developing countries to control local air pollutants follow
            either the European Union or United States standards. Fuel
            quality standards, particularly for gasoline and diesel,
            have been introduced in many countries mandating 2 to 10
            percent blending of biofuels, 10 to 50 times reduction of
            sulfur from 1996 levels, and banning lead contents. Although
            inspection and maintenance programs are in place in both
            industrialized and developing countries to enforce
            regulatory standards, these programs have faced several
            challenges in developing countries due to a lack of
            resources. The study also highlights several factors
            affecting the selection of regulatory instruments, such as
            countries' environmental priorities and institutional capacities.
Wind power development : economics
            and policies
This study reviews the prospects of wind
            power at the global level. Existing studies indicate that
            the earth's wind energy supply potential significantly
            exceeds global energy demand. Yet, only 1 percent of the
            global electricity demand is currently derived from wind
            power despite 40 percent annual growth in wind generating
            capacity over the past 25 years. More than 98 percent of
            total current wind power capacity is installed in the
            developed countries plus China and India. It has been
            estimated that wind power could supply 7 to 34 percent of
            global electricity needs by 2050. However, wind power faces
            a large number of technical, economic, financial,
            institutional, market, and other barriers. To overcome these
            barriers, many countries have employed various policy
            instruments, including capital subsidies, tax incentives,
            tradable energy certificates, feed-in tariffs, grid access
            guarantees and mandatory standards. Besides these policies,
            climate change mitigation initiatives resulting from the
            Kyoto Protocol (e.g., CO2-emission reduction targets in
            developed countries and the Clean Development Mechanism in
            developing countries) have played a significant role in
            promoting wind power.
Professional services and
            development : a study of Mozambique
Professional skills are scarce in
            Mozambique, even by the standards of low-income countries.
            The solution, however, is not necessarily to create more
            Mozambican training institutions but to address
            market-specific problems. Where skills are already the
            binding constraint (for example, in auditing and
            engineering), policy action is indeed needed to remedy
            supply-side problems: capital market imperfections that
            inhibit investment in training institutions by entrepreneurs
            and in education by individuals; weakness in upstream school
            education, which handicaps Mozambican students in their
            pursuit of higher education; inadequacies in professional
            education and training, including curricula not attuned to
            industry needs; and a fragmentation of the regional
            education market by regulatory and language differences that
            prevent the emergence of regional institutions that can
            exploit economies of scale.Where skills may be limited but
            are not yet the binding constraint, the priority is to
            stimulate demand for appropriate skills. In this respect,
            the emergence of professional guilds offers opportunities,
            but also creates risks. The guilds can design, with
            government support, a regulatory framework, for example, in
            accounting and basic engineering, which is more attuned to
            the needs of Mozambican firms. They can also help make firms
            more aware of the benefits of professional help, for
            example, in accounting and information technology. The risk
            is that guilds will create unnecessary regulatory barriers
            to entry, particularly for foreign or foreign-trained
            professionals. Greater coherence between policies affecting
            professional services and international migration policy can
            help deal with both supply-side and demand-side problems.
Wage subsidy and labor market
            flexibility in south Africa
In this paper, the authors use a highly
            disaggregate general equilibrium model to analyze the
            feasibility of a wage subsidy to unskilled workers in South
            Africa, isolating and estimating its potential employment
            effects and fiscal cost. They capture the structural
            characteristics of the labor market with several labor
            categories and substitution possibilities, linking the
            economy-wide results on relative prices, wages, and
            employment to a micro-simulation model with occupational
            choice probabilities in order to investigate the poverty and
            distributional consequences of the policy. The impact of a
            wage subsidy on employment, poverty, and inequality in South
            Africa depends greatly on the elasticities of substitution
            of factors of production, being very minimal if unskilled
            and skilled labor are complements in production. The desired
            results are attainable only if there is sufficient
            flexibility in the labor market. Although the impact in a
            low case scenario can be improved by supporting policies
            that relax the skill constraint and increase the production
            capacity of the economy especially towards labor-intensive
            sectors, the gains from a wage subsidy are still modest if
            the labor market remains very rigid.
Small businesses in south Africa :
            who outsources tax compliance work and why
The authors use firm-level survey data
            on 998 small and medium enterprises registered for tax in
            South Africa regarding tax compliance costs to investigate
            the use of outsourcing to complete tax compliance tasks.
            Overall, about 43 percent of the enterprises do all their
            tax compliance work in-house, 11 percent outsource all their
            tax compliance work, and the remaining 46 percent use a
            combination of both ("partial outsourcing"). The
            data display an inverted-U shape for outsourcing of tax
            compliance tasks: the smallest firms (those under R 300,000
            turnover or well under US$50,000) tend not to outsource, due
            to a combination of relatively higher cost-burden and less
            complexity. Relatively larger firms (those with more than R
            14 million turnover or about US$2 million) report that they
            have sufficient in-house capacity and therefore do not need
            to outsource. Those in the middle are most likely to
            outsource at least some of their tax compliance work, mostly
            because tax is a specialist field and they presumably lack
            sufficient capacity in-house. The survey data show that the
            costs of tax compliance are clearly the highest for those
            who engage in partial outsourcing, as it appears there is
            likely duplication of effort. Most such firms could reduce
            their tax compliance costs (and probably minimize the
            incidence of post-filing problems) by moving from partial to
            full outsourcing of all tax compliance work.