rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Table A1.1: Example of SSG Volume-Based Measure Notification

# - <u>Volume based Measure</u>

The following notification concerning the volume-based special safeguard ( **Table MA:3** ) was received from the delegation of the **United States** on 28 August 1998.

# **MARKET ACCESS:  United States**

Notification under Article 5 of the Agreement: special safeguard: volume-based ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––-

|1.|Description of product:|Sheep meat|
|---|---|---|
|2.||Tariff item numbers:<br>0204.21.00,<br>0204.22.40, 0204.23.40, 0204.41.00,<br>0204.42.40, 0204.43.40|
|3.||Trigger level: 9,335 MT|
|4.||Volume of imports entering<br>territory in current period: 1 January 1998<br>through 2 August 1998<br>10,865.569 MT|
|5.||Period of application:<br>From 10 August<br>1998 to 31 December 1998|
|Infor|mation required for the cal<br>1995:|culation of the Trigger Level:<br>Imports in the preceding years:<br>2,826 MT|
||1996:|9,787 MT|
||1997:|9,792 MT|
||Average:|7,468 MT|

Note: In accordance with paragraph 4 of Article 5 of the Agreement on Agriculture, the base trigger level was calculated as 125% of the 3-year average imports.

Source: WTO Document (G/AG/N/USA/18) 51
We also construct a transition matrix that relates the type of displacement to current occupational categories. Workers who experienced a plant closing and workers who were fired are equally likely to have a salaried job once they reenter the workforce. Table 3 shows that approximately 80 percent of those in either the plant closing or fired categories once they are employed again continue being salaried employees, and approximately 15 percent move into self-employment activities. Workers who voluntarily quit have slightly different transitions to those who were involuntarily separated (in either plant closing or fired categories). For example, 73.9 percent of the workers in the quit category are currently salaried workers, and 18.3 percent move into self-employment activities.

|**T**|**able 3: Type of**|**job displace**<br>|**ment and curren**<br>**Current em**<br>|**t employment stat**<br>**ployment status**<br>|**us**<br>|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|||**Employee**|**Employer**|**Self-employed **|**Unpaid worker**|
||**Plant**<br>**Closing**|79.9|3.0|15.6|1.5|
|**Type of job **|**Fired**|80.7|2.6|14.5|2.3|
|**displacement **|**Quit**|73.9|5.3|18.3|2.6|
||**business**<br>**Closed own**|58.5|8.5|29.9|3.2|

10
27 we often make is to not realize this limitation of the law, and try to over reach and direct society to some outcome that is not an equilibrium, and hence not sustainable. In such cases we end up with laws that do not get implemented<sup>23</sup> .

The second reason for non-implementation of the law is extremely important and pertains to a generic and somewhat open-ended problem of focal points—namely, that it is not evident what constitutes a focal point for different groups of people. The same signal may be picked up by one set of people to be focal and be ignored by another group. We know, for instance, that players sharing a common group identity find it easier to coordinate onto a focal point (Habyarimana, Humphreys, Posner and Weinstein, 2007; see, also, Boettke, Coyne and Leeson, 2008). This, in turn, implies that when a group of people have got reasonably used to a focal point, the presentation of a new focal point can actually make the coordination problem worse.

Thus suppose in the squares game, a society gets fairly used to choosing the top left square, that is, when two individuals are made to play this game, the player choosing between rows generally chooses the top most row, and the player choosing between columns tends to choose the left most column. In brief, this is the social norm that helps these people to frequently earn $1,000. Now suppose, to be helpful, someone places a yellow stone in some other square and asks people to play this game. It is entirely possible that coordination will now get worse with some expecting the square with the yellow stone to be focal whereas others assuming that the old custom of the north-western square being focal continuing to hold.

This is not as abstract an exercise as may seem at first sight. In an important paper, Kranton and Swamy (1999) discussed the agricultural credit market in colonial India. The market was an informal one which ran on norms. It worked but only moderately well, with defaults and consequent credit scarcity. To rectify this the British rulers of India created civil courts in the Bombay Deccan. The outcome was a worsening of the market’s functioning and diminution of efficiency. Drawing on historical records the authors show how farmers did not benefit by this. There can be many reasons for this including the piecemeal nature of reforms as Kranton and Swamy suggest. But it is also possible and in fact likely that when you try to replace custom and norms by law and courts, it is like having two focal points. Far from helping, it is likely to worsen matters, at least for some time, till a winner focal point emerges among the contenders and acquires salience<sup>24</sup> .

> 23 This is not worth laboring further since what I am arguing here is a line taken by the mechanism design literature (see, for instance, Myerson, 1983; Maskin and Sjostrom, 2002; Arunava Sen, 2007).

> 24 Posner (2000, p. 4) makes a similar observation when he writes, “The desirability of a proposed legal rule...does not depend only on the existence of a collective action problem on the one hand, and competently operated legal
outcomes were targeted for compensatory programs such as pre-primaries expansions), our estimates would also be biased.<sup>7</sup> We can tackle these potential threats to identification by extending the baseline specification to include department dummies interacted with a linear time trend term. These interactions account for changes in outcomes in departments over time that may bias the estimates obtained from the original specification. In this case, we estimate the following equation: where _t_ corresponds to years elapsed after 1995, _γd_ represents department (or municipality) indicator variables and, thus, the interaction would capture department-specific trends over time.

We additionally exploit data from the 1994 and 2002 Population Census on the prevalence of households with running water, concrete floor and whose heads have no education and are indigenous. Using these data we generate community-year covariates by linear extrapolation. We add these covariates to the baseline specification to control for observable changes at the community-level over time. The estimated model is: where _Xct_ is a vector of covariates defined at the community-year level.

In all specifications we apply trimming and propensity score re-weighting techniques in order to increase the similarity in observable dimensions of communities in the treatment and comparison groups. We implement this method by first predicting the probability, using a logit regression, that a pre-primary is opened in a community as a function of community characteristics. Then, we drop communities with probability of treatment above the 85th percentile or below the 15th percentile. Finally, we re-weight observations _<u>PScore</u>_ in the comparison group applying a factor of 1 _−PScore_<sup>where</sup><sup>_PScore_refers to the estimated</sup> probability of treatment, and estimate the basic specification in the trimmed and reweighted sample.<sup>8</sup> The specifications described above make it possible to estimate ITT parameters of the impact of opening pre-primaries in rural communities on primary school progression. To estimate the effect of attending a pre-primary – the treatment-on-the-treated (ToT) parameter – we compute the pre-primary take-up rate for each cohort at age six and use an instrumental variable approach to tackle the endogenous nature of this attendance rate.

> 7There are 22 departments and 332 municipalities in Guatemala.

> 8See online appendix for more details about the sample distribution when weighted and unweighted as well as robustness of results to different trimming and weighting specifications.

9
global warming, Dispensa and Brulle conducted a content analysis of three countries' newspaper articles and two international scientific journals in (2000, 2003). U.S. media portray global warming as controversial, whereas media portrayals in Finland and New Zealand are on par with presentations commonly found in the international scientific journals. They next compare media presentations in the United States, New Zealand and Finland with the country’s economy, industry and environment. Dispensa and Brulle conclude that in the US the fossil fuel industry, has a significant impact on the media coverage of global warming in comparison to New Zealand and Finland, where it does not.

Work on language and framing shapes the public perception of the seriousness of information, as well as whether or not there is anything that can be done. In a recent doctoral dissertation, John Sonnett (2006) notes differences in language representation between the scientific community, the news media and the oil industry: scientists speak of “climate change,” the news media of “global warming,” and the oil industry of “greenhouse gases.” Probably the most significant issue regarding news media framing of climate change concerns the coverage of scientific uncertainty. In the United States in particular, media are found to magnify the perception of uncertainty of climate scientists. Here a series of articles by Maxwell Boykoff, some co-authored with Jules Boykoff are centrally important. Boykoff describes how the journalistic norm of “balance” in which interview time or print space is provided to both sides of a controversial story in fact produces “biased” coverage. Journalists have provided space to both key climate scientists and climate skeptics. As a result, the scientific consensus regarding climate change is not translated to the public. Instead of providing balance, this norm magnifies the perception of uncertainty in the public mind, leading to a false appearance of uncertainty and debate. This perception of uncertainty has moved from the media into both public and policy discourse.

Boykoff has conducted a series of content analyses in both print and television media. For example in his analysis of television news coverage of climate change in United States network television and cable news from 1995 through 2004, Boykoff found that 70% of U.S. television news segments have provided ‘balanced’ coverage regarding anthropogenic contributions to climate change. Boykoff concludes that as a result of the journalistic norm of balanced reporting, United States television news coverage has “perpetrated an informational 40
in IPS. In Greece, the share of interest expenditures rose until 2011, then fell as debt was restructured so that its share is much lower now, below the level of 2000 and comparable to that of Spain whose debt ratio is about half. In terms of its impact on the economy however, Greece transfers 4% of GDP, as does Ireland. (Portugal transfers 5% and Spain, less.)

**Figure 9: General government expenditure by function as a share of total general government expenditure, %**

**Figure 9.a: Social transfers Figure 9.b: Compensation of employees**

<!-- Start of picture text --> 45 45<br>40 40<br>35 35<br>30 30<br>25 25<br>20 20<br>15 15<br>2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014<br>Greece Ireland Portugal Spain Greece Ireland Portugal Spain<br>9.c: Capital expenditures Figure 9.d: Interest payments<br>20 20<br>15 15<br>10 10<br>5 5<br>0 0<br>2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014<br>Greece Ireland Portugal Spain Greece Ireland Portugal Spain<br><!-- End of picture text --> Source: Eurostat for all data. ESA 2010 definitions _<u>Changing tax structures and rising tax rates.</u>_ In an effort to reduce deficits in the face of lower tax revenues and high expenditures, GIPS’ tax structures and rates have been changed in all countries. GIPS raised VAT rates, excise taxes and personal income taxes to bolster revenues, with Spain having the largest adjustment in the VAT rate and Ireland a large adjustment in the PIT over time. Ireland and Spain did not alter their corporate tax rates, but Greece and Portugal did. Ireland’s rate continues to be far lower than that of the others (Figures 10a‐c). Ireland, with a smaller government and better tax collection, has much lower income tax rates than the others; its VAT rates are comparable to those of the others. Greece stands out again for its non‐monotonic behavior with respect to tax policy. The Greek government reduced the corporate and personal income tax rates in 2010, only to raise them substantially as the crisis hit them later. Implicit tax rates on labor increased in all countries after 2009 (Eurostat estimation). Personal income tax rates fell shortly thereafter again, while corporate taxes rose by 2013. Importantly, in order to improve taxation related incentives that bolster asset price cycles, property taxes were changed too. For example, Ireland had abolished the residential property tax in 1978, and since 2013 has adopted a residential property tax (Slack and Bird, 2014).<sup>36</sup> Spain restored the wealth tax. Portugal completed a

> 36 In 2006 an OECD report recommended the introduction of a property tax. The absence of a property tax, apart from stamp duty on purchases of second‐hand homes, the halving of capital gains tax to 20%, significant tax incentives which favored

20
Maasoumi, E. & Mahmoudi, V. (2013). Robust growth-equity decomposition of change in poverty: The case of Iran (2000–2009). _The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance_ , 53(3), pp. 268-276.

Mahmoudi, V. (2011). Poverty Changes during the Three Recent Development Plans in Iran (1995-2007). _African and Asian Studies_ , 10, pp.157-179. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156921011X587013 Meyer, B. D. & James X. S. (2009), "Five Decades of Consumption and Income Poverty," NBER Working Papers 14827.

Ravallion, Martin (1998), Poverty Lines in Theory and Practice, Living Standards Measurement Study Working Paper 133, World Bank, Washington DC.

Salehi-Isfahani, D. (2009). Poverty, inequality, and populist politics in Iran _. Journal of Economic Inequality_ , 7, pp. 5–28.

World Bank (2008). Islamic Republic of Iran. Spatial Patterns of Poverty and Economic Activity. Washington, DC: World Bank.

23
models. Finally, we perform the Diebold and Mariano (1995) test to assess whether differences between competing forecasts are statistically significant or simply due to sampling variability.<sup>6</sup>

# **3 Electricity Demand Measurement, Data and the Forecast Horizon**

The ultimate goal of this study is to forecast electricity demand, i.e., the total final consumption.<sup>7</sup> However, in many developing countries, particularly in South Asia and Sub-saharan Africa regions, these data are either not available or available for a relatively short time frame due to difficulties with an accurate accounting of electricity at the end use level.<sup>8</sup> In light of these limitations, we have to rely on the more accurate electricity production (output) data for forecasting purposes. As electricity is a nonstorable and poorly tradable commodity, the output is a reasonable proxy for the total final consumption. However, we have to acknowledge that using electricity output data may lead to biased forecasts in a handful of developing countries with high exposure to electricity trade.

As regards data sources, the electricity generation (output) data come from the OECD/IEA Extended World Energy Balances database (IEA, 2016). The data on population and real GDP come from Penn World Tables, version 8 (Feenstra et al., 2013). The resulting dataset covers 106 developing countries over the period between 1960 and 2012.

Finally, we have to specify the within sample forecast horizons for assessing the accuracy of the forecasting methods. These are set to five and ten years, conditional on at least ten observations in the forecast validation sample. Additionally, we report out of sample forecasts over the period 2013-2022. For each country in the dataset, the out of sample forecasts are chosen based on the fore-

> 6For a more detailed description of the Diebold and Mariano (1995) test please refer to appendix section A.3.

> 7Bhattacharyya and Timilsina (2010) point out that the reliance on consumption data for the demand forecasting implies that only the satisfied demand is captured the suppressed demand is not taken into consideration. This problem can be potentially important in the presence of electricity market distortions and, correspondingly, unrealized demand (e.g., load shedding). As estimating unrealized demand typically requires high-quality micro-level panel data of enterprises and households, which are typically not available, addressing this problem is beyond the scope of this paper.

> 8These difficulties include the inaccurate recording of electricity consumption due to the poor technical capacity of electric utilities (Jamasb 2006), the absence of reliable electricity meters (Victor and Heller 2007), and large unaccounted losses from electricity theft (Smith 2004, Joseph 2010).

9
Complex Decisions between Care and Paid Work: A Qualitative Study on the Demand for Childcare Services in Mexico City<sup>1</sup> Miriam Muller<sup>2</sup> and Martha Jaen<sup>3</sup> JEL Classification: J13, J16, J22 Keywords: childcare, gender, labor force participation, unpaid work, Mexico

> `1` <mark>The opinions, interpretations, and conclusions expressed herein do not necessarily reflect the views of the World Bank, its Board of Executive Directors, or the Governments they represent. The authors gratefully acknowledge contributions from a large team, especially Briceidee Torres Cantu, Rafael Hernández and Cesar Cisneros who led data collection and processing and provided critical reflections during the analysis process. Our thanks to the staff of childcare services for opening their doors to communicate their experiences in children's centres, and to Marisol Barrios Ylán for accompanying the recruitment process and interviews, and the psychological center CAT (Knowledge, Alliance and Transcendence) Texcoco for providing the physical space for conducting interviews. The team received very valuable inputs and guidance throughout the entire research process from Gabriela Inchauste and Aylin Isik-Dikmelik. The team worked under the general guidance of William Wiseman and Ximena Del Carpio. The team benefitted from comments received from Carmen de Paz, Lourdes Chamussy and Kiyomi Cadena. Finally, our deepest gratitude to the key informants and to the women and men who shared their personal stories with us.</mark>

> 2 <mark>World Bank. E-mail: mmuller1@worldbank.org</mark>

3 E-mail: marthajaent@gmail.com
**Page** 12

**Livestock Insurance in Mongolia**

enough to keep herders engaged in purchasing<sup>theinsurance.</sup> corresponds to the 80 th percentile.

A 1 in 5 year Clearly two extreme years stand out in<sup>thesheepmortalitydatafor</sup> Saintsagaan sum: 1971 at 34% and 2000 at 41%.<sup>The80h percentile beginsata</sup> more modest mortality rate of 6.5%, which occurred<sup>in1981.Thedata appear below</sup> for the 80 th percentile and above. This contract<sup>wouldpay only for valuesabovethe</sup> 8 0<sup>th percentile,thus only values above6.5%mortalitywould triggera payment.Any</sup> number of contract designs can be considered.<sup>Someofthesewillbepursuedin</sup> another section.

|Percentile<br>|Mortality<br>|Year<br>|
|---|---|---|
|80%|6.5|1981|
|83%|6.8|1994|
|87%|7.9|1980<br>|
|90%|10.8<br>|1977<br>|
|93%|12.4|1993<br>|
|97%<br>|33.8<br>|1971<br>|
|100%|40.6|2000|

A contract that would simply pay the mortality<sup>rate timesthevalueof</sup> liability purchased would have an average payout<sup>overthe30yearsofabout3.7%</sup> (the sum of the positive numbers above 6.5%<sup>divided bythe totalnumberofyears</sup> 30). This is a very straightforward way to calculate<sup>premiumrates. Morecomplex</sup> methods would need to be implemented should<sup>aprogrambeconstructed.These</sup> methods would rely on putting more structure<sup>intotheassumptionsabout theshape</sup> of the parent distribution. Several tests were<sup>performedonvarious sumdatasets.</sup> The smoothed distribution that is presented below<sup>is anexample of thetype of work</sup> that is needed. This distribution is fitted with special non-parametric<sup>kernel</sup> estimators. More importantly, one should consider<sup>fittingthesetypeof distributions</sup> by sum and then using spatial procedure to smooth<sup>thefitted distributionsacross</sup> space.

Given that this is an index contract that pays based<sup>only on thedata for thesum5, the</sup> question of insurable risk becomes the only significant<sup>underwritingconcernfor the</sup> individual herder. Even here it would not create<sup>significant problemsif herderswere</sup> allowed to purchase liability values that are greater<sup>thanthevalueof theirherd.Use</sup> of an example will make the issues clear. Let's<sup>assumethat a herderhas500sheep.</sup> The value of an average sheep at the end of 2000<sup>wasaboutTg22,000.Thus,this</sup> herder might purchase an insurance policy<sup>withavalueof Tg11million.Ifthe</sup> policy were rated at 4%, the herder would pay Tg<sup>440,000.</sup>

> _5_ One local sum leader from Undurshireet liked<sup>the concept very much.However,he insisted that their data</sup> was good enough to offer such insurance at the bag level<sup>and rightlyunderstoodthat offeringthe policyat</sup> that level would offer superior risk protection<sup>tothe individualherder.The discussion quicklyturned to</sup> difference in mortality rates among the four bag<sup>in Undurshireetfor the2000 dzud.</sup>