rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Trade policy and redistribution when
            preferences are non-homothetic
This paper compares redistribution
            through trade restrictions versus domestic lump-sum
            transfers. When preferences are non-homothetic, even
            domestic lump-sum transfers affect relative prices. Thus,
            contrary to the conventional wisdom, domestic lump-sum
            transfers are not necessarily superior to distortionary
            trade policy. The paper develops this argument in the
            context of the food export bans imposed by many developing
            countries in the late 2000s.
Assessing the role of international
            organizations in the development of the social enterprise sector
This paper examines the contribution of
            international organizations to the development of the social
            enterprise sector worldwide, and assesses the types of
            programs and policies international organizations are using
            to promote this agenda globally. The results indicate that
            international organizations' support to the social
            enterprise sector has consisted primarily of providing
            financial resources, notably grants. However, international
            organizations' contributions to developing
            sector-specific policies have been limited. Furthermore,
            many programs that are supported by international
            organizations remain largely unassessed. The paper proposes
            a set of policy recommendations directed primarily to
            international organizations and the public administration,
            to improve and enhance the development of the social
            enterprise sector.
Challenges in assessing the costs of
            household cooking energy in lower-income countries
The paper discusses challenges in
            analyzing the costs of household cooking methods (fuels and
            associated stove technologies) in lower-income countries,
            and sources of divergence between observed and true social
            costs. The challenges in assessing social costs include
            valuation of household time, impacts of credit constraints
            on stove selection, preferences for stove characteristics,
            and the magnitude of health and environmental externalities.
            All these influences on cost require consideration of the
            local context.
Leaving, staying, or coming back
            migration decisions during the northern Mali conflict
This paper uses a unique data set to
            analyze the migration dynamics of refugees, returnees, and
            internally displaced people during the Northern Mali
            conflict. Individuals were interviewed monthly using mobile
            phones. The results cast light on the characteristics of
            these three groups before and after the crisis. In addition,
            the paper tests how employment status, security, and
            expectations affect people's willingness to go back
            home. The findings suggest that the decision to return is
            affected by a comparison of (opportunity) costs and
            benefits, but also by other factors. Individuals who are
            employed while displaced are less willing to go back to the
            North, as are better educated individuals or those receiving
            assistance. The opposite is true for those whose ethnicity
            is Songhai, as well as for those who originated from Kidal.
            The results show that higher educated individuals performed
            better when displaced and in case they decide to return,
            they find a job more easily.
Improving the resilience of
            Peru's road network to climate events
This paper proposes a methodology to
            prioritize interventions in Peru's road network. A
            network model is built, linking the country's economic
            and population centers through indicative corridors, which
            are defined as the least-cost routes to connect origins to
            destinations. The network's critical links are
            identified by systematically simulating disruptions and
            calculating the costs associated with them. The network is
            then overlaid with natural hazard layers. The average annual
            losses associated with the hazard disruptions of the
            critical links are calculated in many scenarios, including
            climate change uncertainty and different impacts and
            reconstruction times. A robust decision-making approach is
            then used to select interventions that decrease hazard
            disruption costs.
Can parental migration reduce petty
            corruption in education
The income generated from parental
            migration can increase funds available for children's
            education. In countries where informal payments to teachers
            are common migration could therefore increase petty
            corruption in education. This hypothesis is tested by
            investigating the effect of migration on educational inputs.
            An instrumental variables approach is used on survey data
            and matched administrative records from the World
            Bank's Open Budget Initiative (BOOST) from Moldova, one
            of the countries with the highest emigration rates. Contrary
            to the positive income effect, the strongest
            migration-related response in private education expenditure
            that is found is a substantial decrease in informal payments
            to public school teachers. Any positive income effect due to
            migration must hence be overcompensated by some
            payment-reducing effects. A number of potential explanations
            at the family level, school level or community level are
            discussed, several of these explanations ruled out and
            possible interpretations for future research highlighted.
The distributive impact of terms of
            trade shocks
The halving of oil prices, which
            happened in a short period between late 2014 and the first
            months of 2015, has generated major terms of trade losses
            for oil exporting countries. Even if the oil producing
            sector normally employs a small group of workers and oil
            export revenues tend to be concentrated in a few firms and
            in government accounts, these relative price changes have
            economy-wide effects and significant distributive impacts.
            This paper describes and quantifies the channels of
            transmission from the drop in oil prices, to changes in
            welfare distribution at the household level. Using a
            macro-micro simulation model, the paper assesses how this
            shock affects poverty, inequality, and shared prosperity for
            the case of the Russian Federation. The oil price reduction
            generates a reverse Dutch disease that impacts sectoral
            employment, factor returns, and consumption prices. It
            causes a contraction of employment and wages in more
            skill-intensive (non-tradable) sectors, and a reduction in
            consumption prices that is more pronounced for nonfood than
            for food goods. When these shifts are mapped to changes in
            incomes at the micro level, all households are affected.
            Poverty rates could increase by 1 to 4 percentage points,
            depending on the poverty line used. At the US$10 a day
            threshold, for example, 4.1 million additional people fall
            into poverty. Along the consumption distribution, richer
            people are affected more than those in the bottom 40
            percent. However, this minor progressive impact may be
            reversed due to increases in unemployment and cuts in social
            programs (transfers).
Gender-neutral inheritance laws,
            family structure, and women's status in India
This paper examines whether economic
            empowerment of women improves their autonomy within their
            marital household, and investigates the mechanism, by
            exploiting variation from a legal reform aimed at improving
            women's inheritance rights in India. Results suggest
            that the reform increased women’s participation in
            decision-making but at the expense of the older generation
            of household members and not at the expense of their
            husbands. Two channels are proposed to explain this
            phenomenon. First, this can be driven by a shift in the
            family structure from traditional joint families to nuclear
            households. Such a change is consistent both with the
            increase in women's decision-making authority, which
            they can exert to move out of the joint household, as well
            as with men's incentives, since men have weaker
            financial links with their parents post-reform. Second, even
            within joint families, the amendments empowered young
            couples at the expense of the older generation of household members.
Relief from usury : impact of a
            community-based microcredit program in rural India
The impact of micro-credit interventions
            on existing credit markets is theoretically ambiguous.
            Previous empirical work suggests the entry of a
            joint-liability lender may lead to a positive impact on the
            informal lending rate. This paper presents the first
            randomized controlled trial–based evidence on this question.
            Households in rural Bihar, India, were offered low-cost
            credit through a government-led self-help group program, the
            rollout of which was randomized at the panchayat level. The
            intervention led to a dramatic 14.5 percent decline in the
            use of informal credit, as households substituted to
            lower-cost self-help group loans. Due to the program, the
            average rate paid on recent loans fell from 69 to 58 percent
            per year overall. Rates on informal loans also declined
            slightly. Among landless households, informal lending rates
            fell from 65.5 to 63.2 percent, decreasing by 40 percent the
            gap in rates paid by landless versus landowning households.
            Two years after the initiation of the program, significant
            positive impacts on asset ownership among landless
            households were apparent. Impacts on various indicators of
            women's empowerment were mixed, and showed no clear
            direction when aggregated, nor was there any impact on
            consumption expenditures.
Savings, financial development, and
            economic growth in the Arab Republic of Egypt revisited
Private savings play a pivotal role in
            financing development and sustaining growth. Recently, there
            have been many theoretical developments that underpin key
            determinants of savings behavior, many of which merit
            empirical investigation. Understanding the dynamics of the
            determinants of savings is crucial to inform economic policy
            and devise reform programs. This paper builds on earlier
            work examining the stability of the long-run relationship
            between the real interest rate, financial saving, and total
            saving during 1960 to 1990. The paper extends the scope of
            the empirical investigation of the determinants of private
            savings behavior in the Arab Republic of Egypt, and
            considers the effect of financial development. The analysis
            uses quarterly data covering 1991–2010, adopting a vector
            error correction model. The key findings attest that private
            savings in Egypt follow the Life Cycle Model in the long
            term. Controlling for population growth, the analysis finds
            that the real interest rate and financial development are
            key determinates for real private savings in the long run.
            The negative long-run relation between the real interest
            rate and private savings holds under the proposed model
            structure as well as for that in the earlier work. However,
            in the short run, inflation and exchange rate movements are
            key determinants for private savings decisions. Robust
            economic policies, inclusive of  macroeconomic and monetary
            measures, are prerequisites for maximizing private savings
            and financing growth in Egypt.
Neighborhood effects in integrated
            social policies
When potential beneficiaries share their
            knowledge and attitudes about a policy intervention, their
            decision to participate and the effectiveness of both the
            policy and its evaluation may be influenced. This matters
            most notably in integrated social policies with several
            components. In this article, spillover effects on take-up
            behaviors are investigated in the context of a conditional
            cash transfer program in rural Mexico. These effects are
            identified using exogenous variations in the local frequency
            of beneficiaries generated by the program's randomized
            evaluation. A higher treatment density in the areas
            surrounding the evaluation villages is found to increase the
            take-up of scholarships and enrollment at the
            lower-secondary level. These cross-village spillovers
            operate exclusively within households receiving another
            component of the program, and do not carry over larger
            distances. While several tests reject heterogeneities in
            impact due to spatial variations in program implementation,
            evidence is found suggesting that spillovers stem partly
            from the sharing of information about the program among
            eligible households.
Sustainability of demand responsive
            approaches to rural water supply : the case of Kerala
This paper presents the findings of an
            impact evaluation to assess the performance and
            sustainability of the demand responsive community-based
            approach toward rural water supply in the state of Kerala,
            India. To achieve the study's objectives, conceptual
            definitions of the "performance" and
            "sustainability" of rural water supply schemes
            were first developed, as were indicators for their
            systematic measurement. Performance and sustainability
            indicators for demand responsive approaches were compared
            with the more conventional supply-based approach to rural
            water supply. The study found that participatory community
            driven water supply schemes were more successful in
            delivering adequate, regular, and quality water supply,
            experienced fewer breakdowns and water shortages, and
            enjoyed higher consumer satisfaction with the quality of
            service delivery. The success of the community-based
            approach demonstrates that people are willing to contribute
            toward the capital costs of the schemes and pay for the
            water they use for a better service delivery. The findings
            of this paper suggest that the community-based approach can
            be a superior alternative to traditional supply driven
            models in expanding and improving water service delivery in
            rural areas.
Heterogeneous technology diffusion
            and Ricardian trade patterns
Migration and trade are often linked
            through ethnic networks boosting bilateral trade. This study
            uses migration to quantify the importance of Ricardian
            technology differences for international trade. The
            framework provides the first panel estimates connecting
            country-industry productivity and exports, and the study
            exploits heterogeneous technology diffusion from immigrant
            communities in the United States for identification. The
            latter instruments are developed by combining panel
            variation on the development of new technologies across US
            cities with historical settlement patterns for migrants from
            countries. The instrumented elasticity of export growth on
            the intensive margin with respect to the exporter's
            productivity growth is between 1.6 and 2.4, depending upon
            weighting. This provides an important contribution to the
            trade literature of Ricardian advantages, and it establishes
            a connection of migration to home country exports beyond
            bilateral networks.
Re-evaluating microfinance :
            evidence from propensity score matching
This paper evaluates effectiveness of
            microfinance using Propensity Score Matching (PSM) method
            applied to data collected in a recent randomized control
            trial. This method allows one to answer an additional set of
            questions not answered by the original study and provide
            more nuanced evidence by comparing Microfinance Institution
            (MFI) borrowers to those without any loans and those with
            prior loans from other sources. It is argued that this
            unique setting with two comparison groups allows us to shed
            light on the unobservable entrepreneurial spirit bias and
            provides upper and lower bounds on the true microfinance
            impact. The results suggest that microfinance can make a
            modest difference for some households in several expenditure categories.
Arithmetics and politics of domestic
            resource mobilization
The 2015 United Nations resolution on
            Financing for Development stresses the importance of
            effective resource mobilization and use of domestic
            resources to pursue sustainable development. The first
            Sustainable Development Goal is to eradicate extreme poverty
            for all people everywhere by 2030. This paper proposes an
            accounting exercise to assess whether it is feasible for
            countries to eliminate poverty using only domestic
            resources, in other words, by mere redistribution. Moreover,
            the paper argues that the concentration of resources in the
            hands of fewer individuals in the society may hinder the
            feasibility of implementing effective fiscal policies (from
            the revenue side and the social spending side) to reduce
            poverty. The paper provides a new tool to assess the
            capacity of countries to eliminate poverty through
            redistribution, and a new tool to approximate the
            concentration of political influence in a country. The new
            methodologies are applied to the most recent surveys
            available for more than 120 developing countries. The
            findings show that countries with the same fiscal capacity
            to mobilize resources for poverty eradication differ widely
            in the political feasibility of such redistribution policies.
Leveraging the potential of the
            services sector to support accelerated growth in Senegal
Services play a major role in the
            Senegalese economy, accounting for 66 percent of economic
            activity and contributing nearly three-quarters of gross
            domestic product growth between 2006 and 2013. During the
            period, the private sector contributed 71 percent of
            services and accounted for 84 percent of its contribution to
            growth. The dynamism of private services is driven primarily
            by telecommunications and financial services: while the two
            sub-sectors made up 21 percent of private services, they
            accounted for nearly half (48 percent) of the contributions
            of private services to growth during the period. These
            trends are projected to improve in the future. Available
            data on employment and credit confirm the critical
            importance of services. In 2013, over 50 percent of credit
            to the economy was devoted to services, and 55 percent of
            the labor force was employed in the services sector,
            including 36 percent of the rural workforce and as much as
            80 percent of the urban workforce.
Implications of minimum wage
            increases on labor market dynamics lessons for emerging economies
This paper offers evidence on the
            relationship between the minimum wage and unemployment and
            informal employment, and identifies some of the lessons
            learned on the potential effects of increasing the minimum
            wage. Most of the evidence suggests that sizable increases
            in the minimum wage are likely to exacerbate unemployment
            and the prevalence of informal employment, which could have
            negative consequences for labor productivity and businesses
            as a result of reduced investment in employee training and
            loss of productive workers. This outcome occurs when
            businesses adopt the main channels available for absorbing
            increased labor costs. The majority of the empirical
            evidence suggests that the effects of minimum wage increases
            on unemployment and the demand for labor are unclear. The
            outcome depends in large part on the specific
            characteristics of the labor markets and the degree of
            compliance with the minimum wage law. Most of those affected
            by minimum wage increases are less qualified workers. In
            Latin American and Asia, differences in the effects of
            minimum wage increases depend largely on the size and type
            of firms. In countries with high levels of informal
            employment, minimum wage increases can increase informal
            employment, since the formal workers who lose their jobs are
            absorbed by the informal sector of the economy. In general,
            businesses have five mechanisms for absorbing the added
            labor costs. Given the characteristics of the labor market
            in emerging economies, it is likely that businesses faced
            with increased labor costs will resort to less than optimal
            channels, which will tend to affect their productivity and
            the labor market in general.