rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Fiscal decentralization and
            intergovernmental finances in the Republic of Albania
Economic decentralization emerged as an
            issue in Albania following the first election of a
            noncommunist government in Albania in 1992.  It is one of
            many challenges in creating a fiscal system that supports
            reform.  Decentralization has begun with the central
            government's transferring spending responsibilities
            primarily for some local infrastructure services to local
            governments.  But, given Albania's small size, it is
            unclear whether "people" services such as
            education and health care need to be delegated to local
            governments.  Although the destruction of local health and
            education facilities accompanying the demise of the old
            regime argues for giving communities a greater sense of
            ownership of these facilities, they should not be handed
            down without mechanisms to ensure uniform service standards.
            Draft laws focus on the transfer of assets (schools and
            clinics) to local jurisdictions but are vague about
            responsibilities for recurrent spending.  And because local
            spending responsibilities are expanding, local governments
            need increased revenues to finance them.  Providing an
            adequate social safety net is vital in Albania - the poorest
            of the economies in transition - and the government has
            taken steps to ensure that parts of it are locally
            administered, though centrally funded. The key to a
            well-designed intergovernmental financial system is to
            clearly define spending responsibilities so that a revenue
            system can be designed to accommodate them.  Such a system
            would combine revenue-sharing, own-source revenues, and
            intergovernmental transfers.  Tax-sharing of central
            government revenues based on district of origin cannot be
            the only means of local finance in Albania, as most revenues
            are collected in only a few districts.  To meet financial
            needs, local governments need some authority over
            significant own-source revenues (such as user charges and
            property and vehicle taxes).  Privatization revenues can
            also help local governments but only in the short run, as
            they are nonrecurrent.  Matching grants with spillover
            effects may be appropriate.  And for low-income regions
            incapable of meeting their spending needs alone, a
            transparent, equalizing transfer system should be developed.
            Albania's draft laws allow for this possibility, having
            established constituent and independent budgets for the
            local level.
Administrative charges in pensions
            in Chile, Malaysia, Zambia, and the United States
The author offers a framework for an
            international comparison of charges in mandatory and private
            pension systems, and in state-run and privately managed
            systems. Such comparisons make it possible to determine
            which combinations of quality and cost make the most sense
            in pension services. He finds that: 1) Charges in the
            private annuity industry are much higher than other
            components of the pension package, and much higher than
            publicly provided annuities in the US; 2) comparing the
            collection function in different countries is difficult. In
            Chile, Malaysia and Zambia, the pension system must collect
            contributions on its own. In the US, the Social Security
            Administration piggybacks off the collection of federal
            income tax. A mandatory pension system could be used as a
            base for organizing other services, such as mandatory health
            care contributions and widely based income taxes, at a low
            marginal cost; 3) in the US, there is no reliable
            information on the cost of the active-life portion of social
            security; 4) Chilean AFPs (Administradoras de Fondos de
            Pensiones) charge slightly more for the active life portion
            of pension services than the international average for
            similar services, but appear to offer better quality
            service; and 5) marketing costs for Chilean AFPs -- which
            arise because of workers' freedom to select providers
            -- were just 6 percent of lifetime charges in 1991.
The evolution of trade treaties and
            trade creation : lessons for Latin America
The author examines the main distinction
            between trade liberalization under the General Agreement on
            Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and under regional trading
            agreements. Under the GATT, trade liberalization is based on
            the most-favored-nation principle. Under regional trade
            agreements, it is based on preferential trade. Establishing
            regional trade agreements does not necessarily lead to
            greater regional integration. The European Economic
            Community has been an exception, and with greater
            integration, regional trade has grown steadily. The
            Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) has been a
            weak association, but trade among ASEAN members has
            increased rapidly because member countries have undertaken
            multilateral trade liberalization. The efforts of Latin
            American countries to create regional trade associations in
            the 1960s, based on protectionist policies, reduced trade
            not only regionally, but with the rest of the world. In
            contrast, the Latin American regional trading agreements of
            the 1980s and 1990s have liberalized trade among the groups.
            Proper regional trading agreements must conform to Article
            XXIV of the GATT, but nearly all the countries that have
            created regional integration schemes have not followed it.
            These regional trading agreements have not increased
            protection, but neither has there been across-the-board
            trade liberalization. Regional trading agreements carry with
            them the danger of trade diversion (when imports that used
            to come from third countries at lower prices become costlier
            because of preferential access granted to a higher-cost
            regional source). How can Latin American countries reduce
            trade diversion in their regional trading agreements? : 1)
            keep protection low in the first place; 2) have open
            regional trade associations (so that it is easy for new
            partners to join); 3) continue liberalizing trade with the
            rest of the world, following the most-favored-nation
            principle; 4) establish common markets rather than free
            trade areas (because rules of origin create new barriers,
            including bureaucracies); 5) coordinate regulatory and
            competition policies (eliminate laws that limit competition
            and adopt common external tariffs); and 6) improve roads,
            ports, and means of communications.
The economics of cash shortage
Many economies of the former Soviet
            Union have experienced cash shortages: people with demand
            and savings deposits in the banking system are unable to
            convert them into currency.  Usually this is attributed to
            the common use of the ruble.  The author argues otherwise.
            According to him: (a) cash shortages are manifestations of
            financial disintermediation: the banking sector is unable to
            attract enough voluntary deposits; (b) cash shortages allow
            the government to hold inflationary pressures in check; (c)
            solutions to the cash shortage problems that rely on
            printing new currency will lead to accelerating inflation.
            More appropriate solutions (increasing the nominal interest
            rates, for example) involve reversing the economic
            incentives to financial disintermediation.  Excess demands
            for cash reflect conditions in financial markets.  The
            phenomenon of cash shortage is related to the concept of
            shallow formal financial markets.  This shallowness is
            recent in the former Soviet Union.  The burst of inflation
            in early 1992 removed the "ruble overhang" and
            greatly reduced all indicators of financial depth.
            Continuing shallowness is a direct consequence of financial
            disintermediation because of negative real interest rates.
Why do some economies adjust more
            successfully than others lessons from seven African countries
The sustained application of adjustment
            policies is explicable in terms of two variables - domestic
            ownership and capacity. These findings carry important
            implications for the future policies of African governments
            and their external partners. There is an urgent need for the
            African governments to go beyond their limited and small
            groups of technocratic advisers and civil servants to
            consult, educate, and inform the representatives of the
            civil society and opinion-makers in the design and
            implementation of adjustment policies and institutional
            restructuring. A strong, committed, and visionary leadership
            that places these policy reforms in the context of the
            country's long-term development can bond and cement
            diverse and divergent viewpoints and nurture a shared vision
            for the future. For the international financial institutions
            and external donors who are supporting African governments,
            the narrow, short-term, and conditionality-driven
            enforcement and compliance of agreements needs to be
            replaced by a medium- to long-term framework of macro,
            sectoral policy, and investment and institutional changes
            developed and owned by government - keeping short-term
            capacity as given constraints, but taking measures to
            develop this capacity within the long-term framework. This
            framework can then be translated into time-bound, specific
            action programs on various agreed-on changes between the
            donors and the African governments. Both the African
            governments and their external partners have to rethink the
            measures that will build, save, use, and enhance the
            capacity of African governments, private sectors,
            nongovernmental organizations, professional groups,
            universities, and research institutes. The adversarial
            relationship between the government and the private sector
            will have to be transformed into a symbiotic and
            constructive partnership aimed at achieving the long-term
            developmental goals. The effectiveness of the present
            practices of delivering the technical assistance by external
            donors has been sufficiently questioned, and a new way of
            delivering this assistance employing capacity building and
            utilization as the overreaching objective needs to be
            developed. The transferability of institutions or policies
            from one setting to another has always proved difficult, but
            adapting successful practices that have worked elsewhere
            should be encouraged.
Does participation improve project
            performance : establishing causality with subjective data
Development practitioners are coming to
            a consensus that participation by the intended beneficiaries
            improves project performance. But is there convincing
            evidence that this is true? Skeptics have three objections:
            1) "Participation is not objective -- project rankings
            are subjective; 2) this subjectivity leads to "halo
            effects"; 3) better project performance may have
            increased beneficiary participation rather than the other
            way around -- a statistical association is not proof of
            cause and effect. The authors show methodologically how to
            answer each of these objections. Subjectivity does not
            preclude reliable cardinal measurement. Halo effects do not
            appear to induce a strong upward bias in estimating the
            effect of participation. Finally, instrumental variables
            estimation can help establish a structural cause and effect
            relationship between participation and project performance
            -- at least in the rural water supply projects they studied.
Are portfolio flows to emerging
            markets complementary or competitive
Increasing portfolio investment flows to
            emerging markets in the past few years have led to fears of
            a sudden reversal of these flows and possible portfolio
            switching (from one emerging market to another) among
            foreign investors. To assess the sustainability of such
            portfolio flows, the author examines econometrically whether
            portfolio investment flows to one region in the developing
            world are significantly related to those going to another
            region. This question has important policy implications for
            policymakers in developing countries who, in considering
            domestic policy reforms to attract foreign portfolio
            investment, want to ascertain whether financial flows from
            abroad are coming from an increasing pool of investible
            resources in the industrial world or whether they represent
            the same funds chasing different high-yield securities as
            emerging markets change. In other words, does a sort of
            "adding-up" constraint apply to these flows - do
            they function as substitutes or not? Or could these flows be
            complementary? The author analyzes new quarterly World Bank
            data on gross portfolio investment flows for eight emerging
            markets (India, Indonesia, Korea, Thailand, Argentina,
            Brazil, Chile and Mexico) for the period from the first
            quarter of 1989 to the second quarter of 1993. Results
            indicate an inverse relationship between total portfolio
            flows to emerging Asian stock markets and those to Latin
            America. This negative relationship holds for both debt
            portfolio flows and equity portfolio flows. There has been a
            surge of portfolio flows to developing countries in the
            1990s, but developing countries must compete for those
            flows. In the long term, portfolio flows to well-performing
            countries will be sustained because of improved
            creditworthiness and proportionately greater investor
            interest. Increasing the pace of reform in an emerging stock
            market is essential for sustaining portfolio flows.
Linking competition and trade
            policies in Central and Eastern European countries
The authors explore options for Central
            and Eastern Europe (CEE) governments to make competition law
            enforcement more sensitive to trade and investment policy,
            thereby supporting liberal trade policy. The competition
            laws of these countries tend to resemble European Union (EU)
            competition disciplines (Article 85 - 86 of the Treaty of
            Rome), but give competition authorities great scope for
            discretion in interpreting the relevant statutes. Much can
            be done through appropriate wording of criteria and
            implementation guidelines within the framework of existing
            legislation to subject trade policy to competition policy
            scrutiny. A liberal trade policy and active enforcement of
            competition laws will be crucial not only for national
            welfare, but also for eliminating the threat of contingent
            protection by EU firms. When CEE countries face antidumping
            threats or action from EU countries, the authors suggest
            that they seek a link between competition law enforcement
            and antidumping investigation in the context of the
            association agreements with the European Union. That is, the
            European Commission could be asked to apply competition
            policy criteria in antidumping investigations against
            products originating in CEE countries, ensuring that there
            is a threat to competition, not just a threat to a European
            Union competitor. This treatment could be sought informally
            during the transitional period. Generally, since the CEE
            countries have adopted competition legislation comparable to
            that of the European Union, it seems safe to assume that if
            they enforce their competition laws vigorously, EU
            consistent minimum standards will be respected. Until the
            association agreements are fully implemented, it is
            important to reduce to a minimum the risk of being treated
            as an "unfair trader." Safeguard actions will
            remain possible until EU membership has been attained. But
            safeguard protection is more difficult to seek and obtain if
            there is only a weak case for arguing that Central and
            Easter European firms are benefiting from trade barriers,
            state aids, or various government maintained entry barriers.
Antitrust-based remedies and dumping
            in international trade
The authors explore the possibility of
            government's seeking to agree to apply competition
            policy based considerations and disciplines in addressing
            unfair-trade allegations before turning to
            "standard" antidumping remedies. The premise of
            proponents of antidumping actions is that the existence of
            market power in exporter's home markets, or potential
            market dominance in the importing (host) market, is an
            important source of perceived "unfairness." But
            antidumping authorities do not investigate the existence of
            such situations. The authors propose that allegations of
            dumping first be investigated by competition authorities to
            determine the contestability of the relevant markets. Their
            proposal does not involve harmonization of competition laws.
            All that would change from the status quo is that a
            necessary condition for an antidumping action is that
            competition authorities find that the exporting firm's
            home market is not contestable, and conclude that no
            remedial action is possible through the application of
            competition law. Ideally, agreement along these lines would
            be sought in the multilateral (GATT) context, but bilateral
            or regional trade agreements could also be concluded. For
            example, European Union cooperation or association
            agreements might be extended along the lines proposed.
Taxation, public services, and the
            informal sector in a model of endogenous growth
Large informal sectors are an important
            characteristic of developing countries.  The authors build a
            dynamic model in which the informal sector exists when
            overregulation (high tax rates and high cost for entering
            the formal sector) is coupled with an inefficient and
            corrupt system of compliance control.  They consider a
            production technology in which public services are essential
            and subject to congestion.  The public services are financed
            by taxes collected from the formal sector.  Informal
            producers evade taxes and, because of their illegal status,
            can use only some public services, cannot use capital or
            insurance markets, and are subject to stochastic penalties.
            The authors find that the relative size of the informal
            sector is negatively related to the severity of the
            penalties and positively related to tax rates and the extent
            of informal use of public services.  They also find that
            economies with larger informal sectors have lower capital
            return and growth rates because the contribution of public
            services to productivity decreases with informality.  They
            argue that self-interested bureaucracies create an economic
            environment that makes informality attractive or simply
            unavoidable because they profit from the presence of the
            informal sector.
A test of the international
            convergence hypothesis using panel data
The author, using a neoclassical Solow
            model, estimates an economy's rate of convergence to
            its own steady state. Using panel date for a sample of 98
            countries, the author applies Chamberlain's (1984)
            estimation procedures to account for the presence of
            country-specific effects resulting from idiosyncratic
            unobservable factors. This procedure also prevents the
            estimation bias due to measurement error in the Gross
            Domestic Product. Controlling, additionally, for the
            country's level of education, the author estimates the
            rate of convergence to be 0.0494, which implies a half-life
            of about 14 years. This estimated rate of convergence is
            about two and a half times higher than those obtained by
            Barro and Salai-Martin (1992) and Makiw, Romer, and Weil
            (1992). The author claims that those estimates are biased
            toward zero because they fail to account for country
            specific effects. Finally, the author estimates the capital
            share in production to be 0.374, which is very close to the
            accepted benchmark value.