rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Incentive contracts for
            environmental services and their potential in REDD
Implementation arrangements for Reducing
            Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Deforestation and Forest
            Degradation can be seen as contracts that could address some
            of the inherent problems with forest carbon credits that
            often lead to high transaction costs -- measuring,
            monitoring, and verification. Self-enforcing contracts,
            where it is in the best interest of the environmental
            service providers to comply with the contracts, may be one
            way to reduce these costs if providers have incentives to
            uphold their end of the contract. While the literature on
            Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Deforestation and
            Forest Degradation is extensive, there is little information
            available to guide policy makers or investors on what form
            such contracts should take. After providing an overview of
            the current status of Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions from
            Deforestation and Forest Degradation and its role as a tool
            for reducing carbon emissions on an international scale, the
            paper describes key issues regarding implementation and
            reviews the literature on contracts from the related area of
            Payments for Ecosystem Services programs, which face similar
            challenges. The remainder of the paper reviews various
            contractual mechanisms from agricultural and forestry
            related projects that have been proposed or are being used
            in practice and discusses the various implications
            associated with their design and implementation.
The impact of an adolescent girls
            employment program : the EPAG project in Liberia
This paper presents findings from the
            impact evaluation of the Economic Empowerment of Adolescent
            Girls and Young Women (EPAG) project in Liberia. The EPAG
            project was launched by the Liberian Ministry of Gender and
            Development in 2009 with the goal of increasing the
            employment and income of 2,500 young Liberian women by
            providing livelihood and life skills training and
            facilitating their transition to productive work. The
            analysis in this paper is based on data collected during two
            rounds of quantitative surveys in 2010 and 2011, the second
            of which was conducted six months after the classroom-based
            phase of the training program ended. Strong impacts are
            found on the employment and earnings outcomes of program
            participants, relative to a control group of
            non-participants. The EPAG program increased employment by
            47 percent and earnings by 80 percent. In addition, the
            impact evaluation documents positive effects on a variety of
            empowerment measures, including access to money,
            self-confidence, and anxiety about circumstances and the
            future. The evaluation finds no net impact on fertility or
            sexual behavior. At the household level, there is evidence
            of improved food security and shifting attitudes toward
            gender norms. These results reinforce the highly positive
            feedback received from focus group discussions with program
            participants. Finally, preliminary cost-benefit analysis
            indicates that the budgetary cost of the EPAG business
            development training for young women is equivalent to the
            value of three years of the increase in income among program
            beneficiaries. These preliminary results provide strong
            evidence for further investment and research into young
            women's livelihood programs in Liberia.
The impact of an adolescent girls
            employment program : the EPAG project in Liberia
WPS6832 Policy Research Working Paper 6832 The Impact of an Adolescent Girls Employment Program The EPAG Project in Liberia _Franck Adoho Shubha Chakravarty Dala T. Korkoyah, Jr. Mattias Lundberg Afia Tasneem_ The World Bank Africa Region Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Unit & Human Development Network Social Protection and Labor Unit April 2014
Fragmentation, incomes, and jobs :
            an analysis of European competitiveness
Increasing fragmentation of production
            across borders is changing the nature of international
            competition. As a result, conventional indicators of
            competitiveness based on gross exports are becoming less
            informative and new measures are needed. This paper proposes
            an ex-post accounting framework of the value added and
            workers that are directly and indirectly related to the
            production of final manufacturing goods. The framework
            focuses on manufactures global value chain income and
            manufactures global value chain jobs. The paper outlines
            these concepts and provides trends in European countries
            based on a recent multi-sector, input-output model of the
            world economy. The analysis finds that since 1995, revealed
            comparative advantage of the European Union 27 is shifting
            to activities related to the production of nonelectrical
            machinery and transport equipment. The workers involved in
            manufactures global value chains are increasingly in
            services, rather than manufacturing industries. The analysis
            also finds a strong shift toward activities carried out by
            high-skilled workers, highlighting the uneven distributional
            effects of fragmentation. The results show that a global
            value chain perspective is needed to inform the policy
            debates on competitiveness.
Pathways to the middle class in
            Turkey : how have reducing poverty and boosting shared
            prosperity helped
Turkey's poverty reduction
            performance in the 2000s has been remarkably consistent.
            Extreme and moderate poverty have fallen considerably since
            2003. Between 2002 and 2011, extreme poverty fell from 13
            percent to 5 percent, while moderate poverty halved from 44
            percent to 22 percent (respectively, defined using the World
            Bank's Europe and Central Asia regional poverty lines
            of 2.5 and 5 USD/PPP). Most of this poverty reduction (89
            percent) has been driven by growth, a performance consistent
            with most countries in Europe and Central Asia. This is
            substantially different form the recent performance of other
            regions, such as Latin America, where redistribution
            contributed to poverty reduction almost four times more than
            in Turkey. Turkey has also achieved sustained consumption
            growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population, even
            during the years of the world recession. Turkey's
            performance in poverty reduction and increased shared
            prosperity has been complemented by the systematic expansion
            of the middle class by 20 percentage points. This paper
            analyzes the main drivers of poverty reduction, shared
            prosperity, and changes in inequality in Turkey from 2002 to
            2011. The analysis shows that labor markets, demographics,
            pensions, and social assistance have played a critical role
            in this process. It further explores some of the mechanisms
            that have facilitated these changes.
Voter response to natural disaster
            aid : quasi-experimental evidence from drought relief
            payments in Mexico
The paper estimates the effects on
            presidential election returns in Mexico of a government
            climatic contingency transfer that is allocated through
            rainfall-indexed insurance. The analysis uses the
            discontinuity in payments that slightly deviate from a
            pre-established threshold, based on rainfall accumulation
            measured at local weather stations.  It turns out that
            voters reward the incumbent presidential party for
            delivering drought relief compensation. The paper finds that
            receiving indemnity payments leads to significantly greater
            average electoral support for the incumbent party of
            approximately 7.6 percentage points.  The analysis suggests
            that the incumbent party is rewarded by disaster aid
            recipients and punished by non-recipients. The paper
            contributes to the literature on retrospective voting by
            providing evidence that voters evaluate government actions
            and respond to disaster spending.
Toward economic diversification in
            Trinidad and Tobago
This paper contributes to the
            predominant diversification debate that has been ongoing in
            Trinidad and Tobago for more than three decades. The paper
            makes a determination of the key impediments to the
            country's attempts at diversification. Econometric
            techniques are applied on panel data to identify the most
            significant obstacles to economic diversification for a set
            of 183 countries. The results indicate that openness to
            foreign direct investment inflows is the most fundamental
            driver of diversification. The findings are then applied to
            the specific case of Trinidad and Tobago through a detailed
            analysis of the links in the trends followed by foreign
            direct investment and diversification between 1980 and 2011.
            Greater openness to foreign direct investment and improving
            the business climate appear to be key policies the
            twin-island republic could implement further in order to
            expand the range of activities of its economic structure.
Women's empowerment and
            socio-economic outcomes : impacts of the Andhra Pradesh
            rural poverty reduction program
The paper explores whether one of the
            largest programs in the world for women's empowerment
            and rural livelihoods, the Indira Kranti Patham in Andhra
            Pradesh, India, has had an impact on the economic and social
            wellbeing of households that participate in the program. The
            analysis usespanel data for 4,250 households from two rounds
            of a survey conducted in 2004 and 2008 in five districts.
            Propensity score matching was used to construct control
            groups and outcomes are compared with
            differences-in-differences. There are two major impacts.
            First, the Indira Kranti Patham program increased
            participants' access to loans, which allowed them to
            accumulate some assets (livestock and durables for the
            poorest and nonfarm assets for the poor), invest in
            education, and increase total expenditures (for the poorest
            and poor). Women who participated in the program had more
            freedom to go places and were less afraid to disagree with
            their husbands; the women participated more in village
            meetings and their children were slightly more likely to
            attend school. Consistent with the emphasis of the program
            on the poor, the impacts were stronger across the board for
            the poorest and poor participants and were more pronounced
            for long-term Scheduled Tribe participants. No significant
            differences are found between participants and
            nonparticipants in some maternal and child health
            indicators. Second, program participants were significantly
            more likely to benefit from various targeted government
            programs, most important the National Rural Employment
            Guarantee Scheme, but also midday meals in schools, hostels,
            and housing programs. This was an important way in which the
            program contributed to the improved wellbeing of program
            participants. The effects captured by the analysis accrue to
            program participants over and above those that may accrue to
            all households in program villages.
Growth, inequality, and social
            welfare : cross-country evidence
Social welfare functions that assign
            weights to individuals based on their income levels can be
            used to document the relative importance of growth and
            inequality changes for changes in social welfare. In a large
            panel of industrial and developing countries over the past
            40 years, most of the cross-country and over-time variation
            in changes in social welfare is due to changes in average
            incomes. In contrast, the changes in inequality observed
            during this period are on average much smaller than changes
            in average incomes, are uncorrelated with changes in average
            incomes, and have contributed relatively little to changes
            in social welfare.
Are there more female managers in
            the retail sector evidence from survey data in developing countries
This paper uses firm-level data for 87
            developing countries to analyze how the likelihood of a firm
            having female vs. male top manager varies across sectors.
            The service sector is often considered to be more favorable
            toward women compared with men vis-à-vis the manufacturing
            sector. Although the exploration of the data confirms a
            significantly higher presence of female managers in services
            vs. manufacturing, the finding is entirely driven by retail
            firms, with little contribution from other service sectors,
            such as wholesale, construction, and other services. The
            analysis also finds that the higher presence of female
            managers in the retail sector vs. manufacturing is much
            higher among the relatively small firms and firms located in
            the relatively small cities. These findings could serve as
            useful inputs for the design of optimal policy measures
            aimed at promoting gender equality in a country.
What drives the high price of road
            freight transport in Central America
In Central America, like many other
            developing regions, high transport costs are cited as an
            impediment to trade and economic growth. Prices for road
            freight transport -- a key mode of transport comprising a
            significant share of total transport costs for intra- and
            extra-regional trade, are particularly high. Averaging 17
            cents per ton-kilometer on main trading routes, these rates
            stand out even relative to other inefficient developing
            country markets (e.g., central and west Africa). However,
            the policy and other factors associated with increased
            prices have not been well understood. This paper uses data
            from a survey of trucking companies operating on the
            region's main trade corridors to analyze the
            determinants of firms' costs of providing service, as
            well as the effect of market structure and competition on
            prices. The analysis finds that whereas improved cost
            efficiencies could reduce prices by 3 cents per
            ton-kilometer, increased competition on national routes --
            those entirely within a nation's borders -- would
            reduce prices by significantly more. Although there are many
            trucking companies, including small and somewhat informal
            operators, the degree of competition varies by route because
            of domestic restraints on competition and the prohibition on
            international competition on national routes. The paper
            shows empirically that imperfect competition accounts for at
            least 35 percent of mean prices on national routes. In
            addition, a lack of competition is likely to explain the
            persistence of an inefficient market structure, as well as a
            lack of innovation to reduce costs and enhance the quality
            of service.
Co-movement of major commodity price
            returns : time-series assessment
This paper provides a comprehensive
            analysis of the degree of co-movement among the nominal
            price returns of 11 major energy, agricultural and food
            commodities based on monthly data between 1970 and 2013. A
            uniform-spacings testing approach, a multivariate dynamic
            conditional correlation model and a rolling regression
            procedure are used to study the extent and the
            time-evolution of unconditional and conditional
            correlations. The results indicate that (i) the price
            returns of energy and agricultural commodities are highly
            correlated; (ii) the overall level of co-movement among
            commodities increased in recent years, especially between
            energy and agricultural commodities and in particular in the
            cases of maize and soybean oil, which are important inputs
            in the production of biofuels; and (iii) particularly after
            2007, stock market volatility is positively associated with
            the co-movement of price returns across markets.
Risks and opportunities of
            participation in global value chains
This is a background paper to the 2014
            World Development Report. Risk is inherent to the pursuit of
            opportunity. This paper surveys the recent literature and
            looks at the risks and opportunities firms and their workers
            face in the global value chains. First, it examines the
            risk-sharing mechanisms that firms provide from the national
            and global perspectives; second, it takes a closer look at
            the new opportunities and challenges for firms and
            individuals in the global arena; third, it discusses the
            role of economic upgrading and social upgrading; and finally
            it sheds light on how the government can help people manage
            risks and reap the benefits in the participation of global
            value chains.
Is Uruguay more resilient this time
            distributional impacts of a crisis similar to the 2001/02
            Argentine crisis
The 2001/02 Argentine crisis had a
            profound impact on Uruguay's economy. Uruguay's
            gross domestic product shrank by 17.5 percent and the
            proportion of people living below the poverty line doubled
            in just two years. It took almost 10 years for the poverty
            rate to recover to its pre-crisis level. This paper uses a
            macro-micro simulation technique to simulate the impact of a
            similar crisis on the current Uruguayan economy. The
            simulation exercise suggests that Uruguay would now be in a
            better place to weather such a severe crisis. The impact on
            poverty would be considerably lower, inequality would not
            change significantly, and household incomes would be 8
            percent lower than in the absence of a crisis (almost 9
            percent lower for those households in the bottom 40 percent
            of the income distribution). Young individuals,
            female-headed households, those living in Montevideo, and
            those who do not have complete secondary education are more
            vulnerable to falling into poverty were the crisis to strike.
Fiscal policy as an instrument of
            investment and growth
This paper investigates the role of
            fiscal guarantees in promoting infrastructure investment.
            Infrastructure is a critical driver of economic growth, but
            infrastructure entails significant up-front costs that yield
            benefits after a time lag. Investors hesitate to put their
            money down on private infrastructure ventures because of the
            long lag and governments do not give guarantees for reasons
            of fiscal prudence. The paper argues that governments and
            large investment guarantee agencies can in many situations
            give suitably-calibrated guarantees to private projects by
            exploiting the fact that a guarantee on one project can
            reduce the risk of another one failing. The paper works out
            the architecture of such guarantees, which can be fiscally
            prudent and yet boost investment, especially in
            infrastructure, and thereby promote growth.
Which World Bank reports are widely read
Knowledge is central to development. The
            World Bank invests about one-quarter of its budget for
            country services in knowledge products. Still, there is
            little research about the demand for these knowledge
            products and how internal knowledge flows affect their
            demand. About 49 percent of the World Bank's policy
            reports, which are published Economic and Sector Work or
            Technical Assistance reports, have the stated objective of
            informing the public debate or influencing the development
            community. This study uses information on downloads and
            citations to assesses whether policy reports meet this
            objective. About 13 percent of policy reports were
            downloaded at least 250 times while more than 31 percent of
            policy reports are never downloaded. Almost 87 percent of
            policy reports were never cited.  More expensive, complex,
            multi-sector, core diagnostics reports on middle-income
            countries with larger populations tend to be downloaded more
            frequently. Multi-sector reports also tend to be cited more
            frequently. Internal knowledge sharing matters as cross
            support provided by the World Bank's Research
            Department consistently increases downloads and citations.