rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
The impact of the investment climate
            on employment growth : does Sub-Saharan Africa mirror other
            low-income regions
Using survey data from 86,000
            enterprises in 104 countries, including 17,000 enterprises
            in 31 Sub-Saharan African countries, this paper finds that
            average enterprise-level employment growth rates are
            remarkably similar across regions. This is true despite
            significant differences in the quality of the investment
            climate in which these enterprises operate. Objective
            measures of investment climate conditions (including the
            number of outages, the share of firms with bank loans, and
            others) indicate that conditions are most challenging within
            Sub-Saharan Africa, as well as for smaller enterprises.
            However, enterprises employment in Sub-Saharan Africa is
            less sensitive to changes in access to infrastructure and
            finance relative to other low-income regions. This can be
            understood by looking at non-linear effects by firm size --
            and the finding that these size effects are particularly
            strong within Sub-Saharan Africa.  Although unreliable
            infrastructure services and inadequate access to finance
            generally hamper growth, in Sub-Saharan Africa they are
            actually associated with higher employment growth rates
            among micro enterprises. Although employment growth is good
            news in Sub-Saharan Africa, that much of the expanded
            employment is in small, labor-intensive, less productive
            enterprises raises longer-run concerns about the efficiency
            of the allocation of resources and aggregate productivity
            growth in the region.
The impact of economic shocks on
            global undernourishment
This paper estimates the impact of the
            2008 food price spike and the 2009 contraction in global
            growth on undernourishment rates. The analysis is based on a
            methodology that uses a calorie-income relationship and
            income distribution data. The authors find that the 2008
            global food price spike may have increased global
            undernourishment by about 6.8 percent, or 63 million people.
            Moreover, they show that the sharp slowdown in global growth
            in 2009 could have contributed to 41 million more
            undernourished people compared with what would have happened
            if the economic crisis had not occurred.
Estimating the fiscal multiplier in Argentina
Argentina's government has resorted
            to fiscal policy as a countercyclical tool to mitigate the
            negative impact of the current economic downturn on
            aggregate demand. Empirical results based on a vector error
            correction model suggest, however, that the fiscal
            multiplier is relatively small and short-lived. This could
            reflect a number of factors, including the higher propensity
            of households to save during the economic downturn, the
            implementation lag of public expenditures, particularly of
            capital expenditures, and the narrow tax base that limits
            the impact of countercyclical revenue measures on domestic demand.
Argentina : trade patterns and
            challenges ahead
Argentinean export growth was impressive
            during the recent economic boom (2003-2007). However,
            decomposing export growth reveals that the extensive margin
            (increases in exports of existing products to existing
            markets) dominates, while the intensive margin (increases in
            exports of new products or new markets) contributes little
            to export growth. Argentina's trade product
            concentration has increased in the past 10 years, and the
            main export products remain overwhelmingly natural-resource
            intensive. The little diversification of non-primary exports
            limits the countrys ability to weather a decline in export
            commodity prices. The country has had some success finding
            new export markets, especially in Latin America, but should
            seek to develop deeper trade relationships with high GDP
            export destinations such as the European Union and the
            United States. Another challenge going forward is the
            relatively low sophistication of exports and limited
            integration into the global production chains, falling
            behind regional competitors such as Brazil. This calls for
            policy measures to improve the ability of existing firms to
            innovate and compete successfully in global markets.
What explains stock markets'
            vulnerability to the 2007-2008 crisis
This paper examines the determinants of
            stock markets' vulnerability to the 2007-2008 crisis.
            Given that the United States (US) was the crisis epicenter,
            the authors analyze the factors driving the co-movement
            between US returns and stock returns in 83 countries. The
            analysis distinguishes between the period before and after
            the collapse of Lehman Brothers. The findings indicate that
            the main channel of transmission was financial. There is
            also evidence of a "wake-up call" or
            "demonstration effect" in the first stage of the
            crisis, because countries with vulnerable banking and
            corporate sectors exhibited higher co-movement with the US
            market. However, despite a collapse in trade across
            countries, the analysis does not find support for this
            channel of transmission.
Estimating the import content of
            Argentine exports
Despite recent efforts toward collecting
            evidence of vertical specialization for developed economies,
            scarce work has been dedicated to developing economies and
            to Argentina, in particular. The key contribution of this
            paper is to provide comparable estimates of vertical
            specialization as reflected in the imported content of
            exports in Argentina. Drawing on the 1997 input-output
            matrix for Argentina, the authors estimate that the imported
            content of the countrys exports is about 14.5 percent of
            total exports, lower than for other emerging economies. They
            also provide estimates of imported content for more
            disaggregated product categories.
Productivity, welfare and
            reallocation : theory and firm-level evidence
A considerable literature has focused on
            the determinants of total factor productivity (TFP),
            prompted by the empirical finding that TFP accounts for the
            bulk of long-term growth. This paper offers a deeper reason
            for such focus: the welfare of a representative consumer is
            summarized by current and anticipated future Solow
            productivity residuals. The equivalence holds for any
            specification of technology and market structure, as long as
            the representative household maximizes utility while taking
            prices parametrically. This result justifies total factor
            productivity as the right summary measure of welfare, even
            in situations where it does not properly measure technology,
            and makes it possible to calculate the contributions of
            disaggregated units (industries or firms) to aggregate
            welfare using readily available data. Based on this finding,
            the authors compute firm and industry contributions to
            welfare for a set of European countries (Belgium, France,
            Great Britain, Italy, Spain) using industry-level and
            firm-level data. With additional assumptions about
            technology and market structure (specifically, that firms
            minimize costs and face common factor prices), the authors
            show that welfare change can be further decomposed into
            three components that reflect, respectively, technical
            change, aggregate distortions, and allocative efficiency.
            Then, using the appropriate firm-level data, they assess the
            importance of each of these components as sources of welfare
            improvement in the same set of European countries.
Intellectual property rights and the
            TRIPS agreement : an overview of ethical problems and some
            proposed solutions
The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects
            of Intellectual Property Rights negotiated in 1986 under the
            auspices of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the
            institutional predecessor of the World Trade Organization,
            incorporated substantial and uniform protections of
            intellectual property rights into the international trade
            system. A large body of contemporary academic literature
            suggests that intellectual property rights on socially
            valuable goods such as essential medicines give rise to a
            number of ethical problems. This review paper seeks to give
            an overview of these problems. Moreover, it offers an
            outline and discussion of a number of proposals as to how
            these problems might be alleviated. The paper is primarily
            descriptive in character. This means that although a
            personal perspective is sometimes offered, the primary
            ambition of the paper is not to argue for, and defend, a
            particular solution to the issues discussed. The aim is
            rather to highlight, explain and put into perspective a
            number of important arguments in the debate on the ethical
            nature of intellectual property rights so that policy-makers
            and other stakeholders are relatively well-equipped to make
            up their own mind on the issue.
Financial transactions tax :
            panacea, threat, or damp squib
Attempts to raise a significant
            percentage of gross domestic product in revenue from a
            broad-based financial transactions tax are likely to fail
            both by raising much less revenue than expected and by
            generating far-reaching changes in economic behavior.
            Although the side-effects would include a sizable
            restructuring of financial sector activity, this would not
            occur in ways corrective of the particular forms of
            financial overtrading that were most conspicuous in
            contributing to the crisis.
A closer look at child mortality
            among Adivasis in India
The authors use data from the National
            Family Health Survey 2005 to present age-specific patterns
            of child mortality among India's tribal (Adivasi)
            population. The analysis shows three clear findings. First,
            a disproportionately high number of child deaths are
            concentrated among Adivasis, especially in the 1-5 age group
            and in those states and districts where there is a high
            concentration of Adivasis. Any effort to reduce child
            morality in the aggregate will have to focus more squarely
            on lowering mortality among the Adivasis. Second, the gap in
            mortality between Adivasi children and the rest really
            appears after the age of one. In fact, before the age of
            one, tribal children face more or less similar odds of dying
            as other children. However, these odds significantly reverse
            later. This calls for a shift in attention from infant
            mortality or in general under-five mortality to factors that
            cause a wedge between tribal children and the rest between
            the ages of one and five. Third, the analysis goes contrary
            to the conventional narrative of poverty being the primary
            factor driving differences between mortality outcomes.
            Instead, the authors find that breaking down child mortality
            by age leads to a much more refined picture. Tribal status
            is significant even after controlling for wealth.
Rethinking market discipline in
            banking : lessons from the financial crisis
The main objective of this paper is to
            rethink the use of market discipline for prudential purposes
            in light of lessons from the financial crisis. The paper
            develops the main building blocks of a market discipline
            framework, and argues for the need to take an expansive view
            of the concept. It also illustrates using actual  bank case
            studies from the United States its apparent failures in the
            crisis, particularly the failure to prevent the buildup of
            systemic, as opposed to idiosyncratic, risks. However, while
            the role of market discipline in the design of
            macro-prudential regulation appears to be largely
            constrained, more can be done on the micro-prudential side
            to promote clearer market signals of bank riskiness and to
            encourage their use in the supervisory process.
Assessing the financial
            vulnerability to climate-related natural hazards
National governments are key actors in
            managing the impacts of extreme weather events, yet many
            highly exposed developing countries -- faced with exhausted
            tax bases, high levels of indebtedness, and limited donor
            assistance -- have been unable to raise sufficient and
            timely capital to replace or repair damaged infrastructure
            and restore livelihoods after major disasters. Such
            financial vulnerability hampers development and exacerbates
            poverty. Based on the record of the past 30 years, this
            paper finds many developing countries, in particular small
            island states, to be highly financially vulnerable, and
            experiencing a resource gap (net disaster losses exceed all
            available financing sources) for events that occur with a
            probability of 2 percent or higher. This has three main
            implications. First, efforts to reduce risk need to be
            ramped-up to lessen the serious human and financial burdens.
            Second, contrary to the well-known Arrow-Lind theorem, there
            is a case for country risk aversion implying that disaster
            risks faced by some governments cannot be absorbed without
            major difficulty. Risk aversion entails the ex ante
            financing of losses and relief expenditure through calamity
            funds, regional insurance pools, or contingent credit
            arrangements. Third, financially vulnerable (and generally
            poor) countries are unlikely to be able to implement
            pre-disaster risk financing instruments themselves, and thus
            require technical and financial assistance from the donor
            community.  The cost estimates of financial vulnerability --
            based on today's climate --  inform the design of
            "climate insurance funds" to absorb high levels of
            sovereign risk and are found to be in the lower billions of
            dollars annually, which represents a baseline for the
            incremental costs arising from future climate change.
Corporate governance and public corruption
Corporate governance in the private
            sector and corruption are important for economic development
            and private sector development. This paper investigates how
            corporate governance in private-sector media companies can
            affect public corruption. The analytical framework, based on
            models of corporate governance, identifies two channels
            through which media ownership concentration affects
            corruption: an owner effect, which discourages corruption
            and a competition-for-control effect that enhances it. When
            the ownership structure of a newspaper has a majority
            shareholder, the first effect dominates and corruption
            decreases as ownership becomes more concentrated in the
            hands of majority shareholders. Without majority
            shareholders, the competition-for-control effect dominates
            and corruption increases with the concentration of ownership
            of the media company. Thus, the paper shows that cases of
            intermediate media-ownership concentration are the worst at
            promoting public accountability, while extreme situations,
            where the ownership is completely concentrated or widely
            held, can result in similar and lower levels of corruption.
Benefit incidence analysis : are
            government health expenditures more pro-rich than we think
It is generally accepted that government
            health expenditures should disproportionately benefit the
            poor. And yet in most developing countries the opposite is
            the case. This paper examines the implications of a central
            assumption of benefit incidence analysis, namely that the
            unit cost of a government-provided service bears no relation
            to the out-of-pocket payments paid by the patient. It argues
            that a more plausible assumption is that larger
            out-of-pocket payments for a given unit of utilization
            reflect more (or more costly) services being delivered. The
            paper compares -- theoretically and empirically -- the
            standard constant-cost assumption with two alternatives,
            namely that the cost of care in a specific episode of
            utilization is (a) proportional to or (b) linearly related
            to the amount of money paid out-of-pocket by the patient. An
            interesting special case of the linear relationship is where
            subsidies are focused on a basic unit of care and additional
            costs are met dollar-for-dollar by additional fees. The
            paper shows that if fees are more pro-rich than utilization,
            government spending will be least pro-rich under the
            constant-cost assumption and most pro-rich under the
            proportionality assumption. The linear assumption results in
            a concentration index for subsidies that lies between these
            two extremes. These results are borne out in an analysis of
            the incidence of government health spending in Vietnam (a
            country where fees are more pro-rich than utilization);
            indeed, under the constant-cost assumption, subsidies are
            pro-poor while they are pro-rich under the proportionality
            assumption. The paper also considers the biases created by
            not allowing for insurance reimbursements.
Incomplete markets and fertilizer
            use : evidence from Ethiopia
While the economic returns to using
            chemical fertilizer in Africa can be large, application
            rates are low. This study explores whether this is due to
            missing and imperfect markets. Results based on a panel
            survey of Ethiopian farmers suggest that while fertilizer
            markets are not altogether missing in rural Ethiopia, high
            transport costs, unfavorable climate, price risk, and
            illiteracy present formidable hurdles to farmer
            participation. Moreover, the combination of factors that
            promote or impede effective fertilizer markets differs among
            locations, making it difficult to find a single production
            technology that is uniformly profitable -- perhaps
            explaining the inconsistency between field studies finding
            large returns to fertilizer use in Ethiopia and survey-based
            studies finding fertilizer use to be uneconomic. The results
            suggest that households with greater stores of wealth, human
            capital and authority can overcome these hurdles. The
            finding offers some encouragement, but also implies a
            self-enforcing link between low agricultural productivity
            and poverty, since low-asset households are less able to
            overcome these problems. The study suggests that the
            provision of extension services can be effective and that
            lowering transport costs can raise the intensity of
            fertilizer use by lowering the cost of fertilizer and
            boosting the farmgate value of output.
The ethnicity distraction political
            credibility and partisan preferences in Africa
Much of the research on ethnicity,
            development and conflict implicitly assumes that ethnic
            groups act collectively in pursuit of their interests.
            Collective political action is typically facilitated by
            political parties able to make credible commitments to
            pursue group interests. Other work, however, emphasizes the
            lack of political credibility as a source of adverse
            development outcomes. Evidence presented here uses partisan
            preferences across 16 Sub-Saharan African countries to
            distinguish these positions. The evidence is inconsistent
            with the credibility of party commitments to pursue
            collective ethnic interests: ethnic clustering of political
            support is less widespread than expected; members of
            clustered ethnic groups exhibit high rates of partisan
            disinterest and are only slightly more likely to express a
            partisan preference; and partisan preferences are more
            affected by factors, such as gift-giving, often associated
            with low political credibility. These findings emphasize the
            importance of looking beyond ethnicity in analyses of
            economic development.
Of floods and droughts : the
            economic and financial crisis of 2008
This paper provides an overview of the
            period prior to the recent global crisis, and the policies
            that were adopted around the world in response to the
            crisis. It highlights a number of key issues regarding
            economic and financial policies that governments have faced
            both globally and nationally. These are related to the
            management of boom and bust episodes that deserve more
            attention in policy circles in the future.