rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Education outcomes, school
            governance and parents' demand for accountability :
            evidence from Albania
The extent to which teachers and school
            directors are held to account may play a central role in
            determining education outcomes, particularly in developing
            and transition countries where institutional deficiencies
            can distort incentives. This paper investigates the
            relationship between an expanded set of school inputs,
            including proxies for the functionality of
            "top-down" and "bottom-up"
            accountability systems, and education outputs in Albanian
            primary schools. The authors use data generated by an
            original survey of 180 nationally representative schools.
            The analysis shows a strong negative correlation between
            measures of top-down accountability and students' rates
            of grade repetition and failure in final examinations, and a
            strong positive correlation between measures of top-down
            accountability and students' excellence in math.
            Bottom-up accountability measures are correlated to various
            education outputs, although they tend lose statistical
            significance once parent characteristics, school resources
            and top-down accountability indicators are considered. An
            in-depth analysis of participatory accountability within the
            schools focuses on parents' willingness to hold
            teachers to account. Here, the survey data are combined with
            data from lab-type experiments conducted with parents and
            teachers in the schools. In general, the survey data
            highlight problems of limited parental involvement and lack
            of information about participatory accountability
            structures. The experiments indicate that the lack of
            parental participation in the school accountability system
            is owing to information constraints and weak institutions
            that allow parent class representatives to be appointed by
            teachers rather than elected by parents.
Income shocks and adolescent mental health
In this paper, the authors investigate
            the effect of positive income shocks on the mental health of
            adolescent girls using experimental evidence from a cash
            transfer program in Malawi. They find that the provision of
            monthly cash transfers had a strong beneficial impact on the
            mental health of school-age girls during the two-year
            intervention. Among baseline schoolgirls who were offered
            unconditional cash transfers, the likelihood of suffering
            from psychological distress was 38 percent lower than the
            control group, while the same figure was 17 percent if the
            cash transfers offers were made conditional on regular
            school attendance. The authors find no impact on the mental
            health of girls who had already dropped out of school at
            baseline. The beneficial effects of cash transfers were
            limited to the intervention period and dissipated quickly
            after the program ended.
Export restrictions and price
            insulation during commodity price booms
For individual countries, variable trade
            barriers can be used to reduce the volatility of domestic
            relative to world prices. If this is done by countries
            accounting for a large share of the market, its effect is
            offset by increases in world price volatility. This study
            shows the nature of the resulting collective action problem,
            with the policy being ineffective on average in stabilizing
            domestic prices while increasing the volatility of the
            income transfers from terms-of-trade changes. A simple
            approach to assessing the contribution of insulation to the
            price increases is developed and used with new estimates of
            agricultural distortions to assess its contribution to the
            price spikes in 1972-74 and 2006-08 for rice and wheat. The
            analysis suggests that 45 percent of the increase in rice
            prices in 2006-08, and 30 percent of the increase in wheat
            prices, was due to insulating behavior. One sign of progress
            since 1972-74 was a substantial reduction in the extent of
            price-insulating behavior by the industrial countries. This
            provides little stabilizing benefit in the rice market
            because countries not classifying themselves at the World
            Trade Organization as developing account for only 3 percent
            of world rice consumption. But it does offer some benefit
            for the wheat market where non-developing countries account
            for 27 percent of consumption.
Good countries or good projects
            macro and micro correlates of World Bank project performance
The authors use data from more than
            6,000 World Bank projects evaluated between 1983 and 2009 to
            investigate macro and micro correlates of project outcomes.
            They find that country-level "macro" measures of
            the quality of policies and institutions are very strongly
            correlated with project outcomes, confirming the importance
            of country-level performance for the effective use of aid
            resources. However, a striking feature of the data is that
            the success of individual development projects varies much
            more within countries than it does between countries. The
            authors assemble a large set of project-level
            "micro" correlates of project outcomes in an
            effort to explain some of this within-country variation.
            They find that measures of project size, the extent of
            project supervision, and evaluation lags are all
            significantly correlated with project outcomes, as are
            early-warning indicators that flag problematic projects
            during the implementation stage. They also find that
            measures of World Bank project task manager quality matter
            significantly for the ultimate outcome of projects. They
            discuss the implications of these findings for donor
            policies aimed at aid effectiveness.
Politics and preschool : the
            political economy of investment in pre-primary education
What drives governments with similar
            revenues to publicly provide very different amounts of goods
            for which private substitutes are available? Key examples
            are education and health care. This paper compares spending
            by Brazilian municipalities on pre-primary education -- a
            good that is also provided privately -- with spending on
            public infrastructure like parks and roads, which lacks
            private substitutes. Panel data from 1995-2008 reveal how
            the distribution of income affects public investment.
            Revenue is endogenous to investment outcomes, and the
            analysis addresses this problem by exploiting a 1998,
            nationwide education finance reform and several revisions to
            the policy. The author constructs a variable that captures
            exogenous variation in revenue generated by nonlinearities
            of the law to instrument for observed revenue.
            Municipalities with higher median income and more inequality
            are less likely to allocate revenue to education or to
            expand pre-primary enrollment. They are more likely to
            allocate revenue to public infrastructure. There is
            suggestive evidence that this occurs for two reasons,
            hypothesized in two separate literatures. In rich and
            unequal municipalities, fewer total people support public
            education spending (the collective choice channel), and
            also, any given poor person wanting public education has
            less influence over policymakers there (the political power channel).
Five feet high and rising : cities
            and flooding in the 21st century
Urban flooding is an increasingly
            important issue. Disaster statistics appear to show flood
            events are becoming more frequent, with medium-scale events
            increasing fastest. The impact of flooding is driven by a
            combination of natural and human-induced factors. As recent
            flood events in Pakistan, Brazil, Sri Lanka and Australia
            show, floods can occur in widespread locations and can
            sometimes overwhelm even the best prepared countries and
            cities. There are known and tested measures for urban flood
            risk management, typically classified as structural or
            engineered measures, and non-structural, management
            techniques. A combination of measures to form an integrated
            management approach is most likely to be successful in
            reducing flood risk. In the short term and for developing
            countries in particular, the factors affecting exposure and
            vulnerability are increasing at the fastest rate as
            urbanization puts more people and more assets at risk. In
            the longer term, however, climate scenarios are likely to be
            one of the most important drivers of future changes in flood
            risk. Due to the large uncertainties in projections of
            climate change, adaptation to the changing risk needs to be
            flexible to a wide range of future scenarios and to be able
            to cope with potentially large changes in sea level,
            rainfall intensity and snowmelt. Climate uncertainty and
            budgetary, institutional and practical constraints are
            likely to lead to a combining of structural and
            non-structural measures for urban flood risk management, and
            arguably, to a move away from what is sometimes an
            over-reliance on hard-engineered defenses and toward more
            adaptable and incremental non-structural solutions.
Labor market transitions and social
            security in Colombia
This paper quantifies the magnitude of
            transitions across occupational categories in Colombia, a
            country with high unemployment and informality but quickly
            increasing its social security coverage for health. The
            analysis makes use of a panel of households between 2008 and
            2009, representative of the main metropolitan areas in the
            country. Results confirm previous evidence found in Colombia
            and elsewhere in the region that transitions between
            occupations are large and asymmetric: they are
            disproportionally more likely to happen from formal to
            informal occupations than vice versa. The paper finds for
            the first time that such transitions are also different for
            salaried workers compared with the self-employed, as well as
            by poverty status of the worker. Salaried workers are more
            likely to transition first into other salaried jobs, while
            self-employed are more likely to transition into
            unemployment or out of the labor force. There are marked
            differences in the profiles of transitioning and
            non-transitioning workers, both in terms of socioeconomic
            characteristics and social security coverage. Causal
            analysis shows that affiliation to social security on health
            deters occupational transitions, while pension insurance
            does not. Hence, high-volume transitions may not be
            crisis-specific phenomena, but rather associated with
            contributive and non-contributive social security mechanisms
            that incentivize informality, and workers' preferences
            for informal jobs. The debate on labor market and social
            security reforms needs to take these features of transitions
            into account.
Who is vouching for the input
            voucher decentralized targeting and elite capture in Tanzania
Input subsidy programs carry support as
            instruments to increase agricultural productivity, provided
            they are market-smart.  This requires especially proper
            targeting to contain the fiscal pressure, with decentralized
            targeting of input vouchers currently the instrument of
            choice. Nonetheless, despite clear advantages in
            administrative costs, the fear of elite capture persists.
            These fears are borne out in the experience from the 2008
            input voucher pilot program in Kilimanjaro, Tanzania,
            examined here. Elected village officials received about 60
            percent of the distributed vouchers, a factor that
            significantly reduced the targeting performance of the
            program, especially in more unequal and remote communities.
            When targeting the poor, greater coverage and a focus on
            high trust settings helped mitigate these concerns. The
            findings highlight the continuing need for scrutiny when
            relying on decentralized targeting. A clearer sense of
            purpose (increasing productivity among poorer farmers versus
            increasing aggregate output) could also enhance the
            targeting performance.
Trade policies, investment climate,
            and exports across countries
There is a large body of research that
            explores international trade as a source of the dispersion
            in income levels and growth performances across countries.
            The trade liberalization policies undertaken between 1950
            and 2006 led to an almost 30 fold growth in the volume of
            international trade. However this increase has not been
            homogeneous across countries. This study investigates a
            possible reason that prevents convergence of countries in
            export performance. It shows that regulatory quality,
            customs efficiency, quality of infrastructure, and access to
            finance among other factors increase export performance.
            Furthermore, it shows that countries that are relatively
            more constrained in accessing to foreign markets benefit
            more from improvements in investment climate than the
            countries with easier foreign market access. Hence obtaining
            a favorable investment climate for private sector
            development should be an important policy objective for
            relatively closed economies to achieve convergence in export
            volumes with countries that have more liberal trade policies.
Is it what you inherited or what you
            learnt Intergenerational linkage and interpersonal
            inequality in Senegal
Institutional features of the African
            setting -- large extended families and imperfect credit and
            land markets -- matter to the equity and efficiency roles
            played by intergenerational linkages. Using original survey
            data on Senegal that include an individualized measure of
            consumption, this paper studies the role played by land
            inheritance, other bequests and parental background as
            influences on an adult's economic welfare and economic
            activities. Although intergenerational linkages are evident,
            the analysis finds a seemingly high degree of mobility
            across generations, associated with the shift from farm to
            non-farm sectors and the greater economic activity of women.
            Male-dominated bequests of land and housing bring little
            gain to mean consumption and play little role in explaining
            inequality, although they have effects on the sector of
            activity. Inheritance of non-land assets and the education
            and occupation of parents (especially the mother) and their
            choices about children's schooling are more important
            to adult welfare than property inheritance. Significant
            gender inequality in consumption is evident, although it is
            almost entirely explicable in terms of factors such as
            education and (non-land) inheritance. There are a number of
            other pronounced gender differences, with intergenerational
            linkages coming through the mother rather than the father.
Maize revolutions in Sub-Saharan Africa
There have been numerous episodes of
            widespread adoption of improved seed and long-term
            achievements in the development of the maize seed industry
            in Sub-Saharan Africa. This summary takes a circumspect view
            of technical change in maize production. Adoption of
            improved seed has continued to rise gradually, now
            representing an estimated 44 percent of maize area in
            Eastern and Southern Africa (outside South Africa), and 60
            percent of maize area in West and Central Africa. Use of
            fertilizer and restorative crop management practices remains
            relatively low and inefficient. An array of extension models
            has been tested and a combination of approaches will be
            needed to reach maize producers in heterogeneous
            agricultural environments. Yield growth overall has been 1
            percent over the past half-century, although this figure
            masks the high variability in maize yields, as well as
            improvements in resistance to disease and abiotic pressures
            that would have caused yield decline in the absence of maize
            breeding progress. The authors argue that conducive policies
            are equally, if not more, important for maize productivity
            in the region than the development of new technology and
            techniques. Currently popular, voucher-based subsidies can
            "crowd out" the private sector and could be
            fiscally unsustainable.
A second look at the pesticides
            initiative program : evidence from Senegal
This paper investigates whether the
            Pesticides Initiative Program has significantly affected the
            export performance of Senegal' shorticulture industry.
            The authors apply two main microeconometric techniques,
            difference-in-differences and matching
            difference-in-differences, to identify the effect of the
            Pesticides Initiative Program on exports of fresh fruits and
            vegetables. They use a unique firm-level dataset containing
            data on sales, employment, and exports by product and
            destination markets, as well as firm enrolment year, over
            2000-2008. The results suggest that wile the program had no
            significant effect on exports pooled over all products and
            destinations, it had a positive effect when considering
            fresh fruits and vegetables exports to the European Union.
On the relevance of freedom and
            entitlement in development : new empirical evidence (1975-2007)
Reviewing the economic performance --
            good and bad -- of more than 100 countries over the past 30
            years, this paper finds new empirical evidence supporting
            the idea that economic freedom and civil and political
            liberties are the root causes of why some countries achieve
            and sustain better economic outcomes.  For instance, a one
            unit change in the initial level of economic freedom between
            two countries (on a scale of 1 to 10) is associated with an
            almost 1 percentage point differential in their average
            long-run economic growth rates.  In the case of civil and
            political liberties, the long-term effect is also positive
            and significant with a differential of 0.3 percentage point.
            In addition to the initial conditions, the expansion of
            freedom conditions over time (economic, civil, and
            political) also positively influences long-run economic
            growth. In contrast, no evidence was found that the initial
            level of entitlement rights or their change over time had
            any significant effects on long-term per capita income,
            except for a negative effect in some specifications of the
            model. These results tend to support earlier findings that
            beyond core functions of government responsibility --
            including the protection of liberty itself -- the expansion
            of the state to provide for various entitlements, including
            so-called economic, social, and cultural rights,  may not
            make people richer in the long run and may even make them poorer.
Economic performance under NAFTA : a
            firm-level analysis of the trade-productivity linkages
Did the North American Free Trade
            Agreement make Mexican firms more productive? If so, through
            which channels? This paper addresses these questions by
            deploying an innovative microeconometric approach that
            disentangles the various channels through which integration
            with the global markets (via international trade) can affect
            firm-level productivity. The results show that the North
            American Free Trade Agreement stimulated the productivity of
            Mexican plants via: (1) an increase in import competition
            and (2) a positive effect on access to imported intermediate
            inputs. However, the impact of trade reforms was not
            identical for all integrated firms, with fully integrated
            firms (i.e. firms simultaneously exporting and importing)
            benefiting more than other integrated firms. Contrary to
            previous results, once self-selection problems are solved,
            the analysis finds a rather weak relationship between
            exports and productivity growth.
Cotton subsidies, the WTO, and the
            'cotton problem'
Following an 8-year long dispute over
            cotton subsidies, Brazil and the United States signed a
            Memorandum of Understanding on April 21, 2010, effectively
            paving the way for settling the dispute. This paper argues
            that cotton subsidies are just the tip of the iceberg while
            a number of other, perhaps more important, issues require
            attention and, indeed, political will. Chief among them is
            the persistent divergence between cotton prices and the
            prices of other agricultural commodities, which reflects,
            for the most part, the large supply response by China and
            India, a direct consequence of con-version to biotech cotton
            varieties in these (and other) countries. Such response --
            which kept cotton prices low, compared with other
            commodities -- imposes a competitive disadvantage to
            non-users of biotech cotton. The paper also highlights two
            additional constraints faced by the cotton producing
            countries of West and Central Africa, namely, the structural
            inefficiencies of their primary processing industries (also
            known as ginning) and the appreciation of the CFA franc
            against the US dollar. Without downplaying the importance of
            subsidy elimination, the paper concludes that these
            impediments should receive high priority in the policy agenda.