rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Policy Research Working Paper 9794

# **Abstract**

This paper employs high frequency transactions data on the world’s oldest and most extensive centralized peer-to-peer Bitcoin market, which enables trade in the currencies of more than 135 countries. It presents an algorithm that allows, with high probability, the detection of “crypto vehicle transactions” in which crypto currency is used to move capital across borders or facilitate domestic transactions. In contrast to previous work which has used “on-chain” data, this paper’s approach enables one to investigate parts of the vastly larger pool of “off-chain” transactions. Finding that, as a conservative lower bound, over 7 percent of the 45 million trades on the exchange we explore represent crypto vehicle transactions in which Bitcoin is used to make payments in fiat currency. Roughly 20 percent of these represent international capital flight/flows/remittances. Although this work cannot be used to put a price on cryptocurrencies, it provides the first systematic quantitative evidence that the transactional use of cryptocurrencies constitutes a fundamental component of their value, at least under the current regulatory regime.

This paper is a product of the Office of the Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, Development Economics Vice Presidency. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www. worldbank.org/prwp. The authors may be contacted at cgrafvonluckner@worldbank.org and creinhart@worldbank.org.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
Table 7: Firm size and movements on the jobs ladder (ALL COUNTRIES)

||(1)<br>Upper tier<br>self-emp.|(2)<br>Formal<br>wage|(3)<br>Upper tier<br>informal<br>wage|(4)<br>Lower tier<br>Informal<br>wage|(5)<br>Lower tier<br>self-emp|(6)<br>Unemployed|(7)<br>Inactive|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Share in firms|0.031|0.011|0.048**|0.185*|-0.208**|0.020|-0.087|
|6-20|(0.021)|(0.159)|(0.024)|(0.106)|(0.092)|(0.018)|(0.080)|
|Share in firms|0.003|0.315|0.000|0.085|-0.230***|0.026|-0.199*|
|21-50|(0.046)|(0.189)|(0.016)|(0.078)|(0.084)|(0.027)|(0.117)|
|Share in firms|0.035|0.170|0.008|0.002|-0.126*|0.074|-0.163|
|51+|(0.063)|(0.120)|(0.017)|(0.079)|(0.072)|(0.044)|(0.170)|
|Total pop. (log)|-0.182|-0.197|0.025|0.362|-0.010|0.052|-0.049|
||(0.147)|(0.132)|(0.043)|(0.231)|(0.271)|(0.080)|(0.222)|
|GDP p.c. (log)|0.005|0.213***|0.009|-0.017|-0.168**|-0.016|-0.024|
||(0.040)|(0.071)|(0.012)|(0.044)|(0.068)|(0.017)|(0.064)|
|Observations|323|323|323|323|323|323|323|

Notes. Standard errors are in parentheses and are clustered at the country level. Country and year fixed effects are included in all specifications. Firms size 1-5 is the omitted category. Shares refer to all workers (including wage workers, self-employed, employers and unpaid workers) with non-missing firm size. We assume that selfemployed work in a 1-person business. * p<0.10 ** p<0.05 *** p<0.01.

Overall, the results indicate that higher shares of employment in firms with more than 5 employees compared to microenterprises are significantly associated with movements out of lower tier informal self-employment. In particular, the growth of small firms – with size between six and 20 employees –is positively correlated with shifts from informal lower tier selfemployment to upper-tier- but also lower-tier informal wage employment. Unpacking the correlation by country income group we find that increasing shares of the workforce in small firms (with 6 to 20 employees) lead to shifts to formal wage employment in UMICs and HICs, though the coefficient - albeit positive - is not significant in LMICs and LICs. In LMICs and UMICs the increasing incidence of medium firms (with 21-50 employees) is positively associated with shifts from formal wage work to informal upper tier wage employment.

We also see marginally significant increases in unemployment as larger firms become more common (and significant increases without heteroskedasticity corrections (Table A19). The changing industrial sector thus seems to be correlated with increases in unemployment, which 30
Policy Research Working Paper 9424

# **Abstract**

Short-cycle higher education programs (SCPs), lasting two or three years, capture about a quarter of higher education enrollment in the world and can play a key role enhancing workforce skills. This paper estimates the program-level contribution of SCPs to student academic and labor market outcomes, and studies how and why these contributions vary across programs. This paper exploits unique administrative data from Colombia on the universe of students, institutions, and programs to control for a rich set of student, peer, and local choice set characteristics. Results indicate that program-level contributions account for about 60–70 percent of the variation in student-level graduation and labor market outcomes. Estimates show that programs vary greatly in their contributions, across and especially within fields of study. Moreover, the estimated contributions are strongly correlated with program outcomes but not with other commonly used quality measures. Programs contribute more to formal employment and wages when they are longer, have been provided for a longer time, are taught by more specialized institutions, and are offered in larger cities.

This paper is a product of the Office of the Chief Economist, Latin America and the Caribbean Region. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/prwp. The authors may be contacted at mferreyra@worldbank.org.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
rural customers all over Bangladesh (REB 2007). Since the inception of REB, rural electrification has grown significantly – starting from less than 10 percent connectivity in 1977, about 61 percent villages have received electricity by 2007.<sup>2</sup> Under REB’s program, about 800,000 new rural customers get electricity every year, which is phenomenal for a poor country like Bangladesh. The REB consumers are mostly domestic users of electricity (85 percent), although industrial and commercial customers are also served, including those needing connection for irrigation pumps. REB plans to cover 75,000 villages of Bangladesh by the year 2020.<sup>3</sup> A detailed breakdown of rural electrification rates by region is given later when we discuss the sample data.

The rural electrification program of REB is often viewed as one of the most successful government programs in Bangladesh. A 2004 study of electricity distribution and transmission in Bangladesh found that system loss in 2000 for REB was much lower (16 percent) than that for other major electricity distribution bodies – PDB (28 percent), DESA (30 percent) and DESCO (33 percent) (Alam and others 2004).<sup>4</sup> This is because the usual distributional problems that plague other Bangladeshi distributors (theft, non-payment of bill by influential subscribers, illegal connection, over-billing, etc.) are almost nonexistent in the operation of REB. REB also has an almost perfect bill collection record - over 95 percent of the REB customers pay their bills. REB has improved further since 2000, and reported a 13 percent system loss during 2005-2006 (REB 2007), which compares quite favorably to the system loss in other South Asian countries. The success of REB is due mostly to its autonomy, minimal bureaucracy, strong culture of integrity, donor support and trust, and strong and independent leadership (USAID 2006).

The political appeal of the REB and other worldwide rural electrification programs is that many of the benefits for the countries seem obvious. Because of the electric lighting, household members can engage themselves in useful and productive activities in a way that is not possible or at least very difficult in households without electricity. For example, students can study more easily and comfortably after the dark, adults can postpone chores until the evening, access mass media through TV and radio, and so on and so forth. Besides

> 2 Our data, which were collected in 2005, show a 58 percent connectivity at village level in Bangladesh. 3 According 1991 census, total number of villages in Bangladesh is about 86,000. The 11,000 villages that are not included in REB’s plan are covered by PDB, DESA and other distributors.

> 4 System loss is the difference between the quantity produced (generated) and the actual quantity sold, and is expressed as a percentage of the quantity produced. It is a widely accepted measure of the efficiency of the distribution system.

5
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|||MIez®io|||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|IEduioin|||l0-5<br>6-0<br>9|10-112||3+|
|||__AveMra<br>M<br>nam|||
|Individualannuity-noSQ|34.0|39.7<br>48.6|61.4|105.0|
|SQ|12.4|12.4<br>12.4|11.7|11.1|
|Joint annuity(ifmarried)|-5.7|-6.3<br>-7.4|-8.9|-14.2|
|%incr.from SQ|*41%|135%<br>29%|22%|12%|
|Womeim<br>|||||
|Averagewoma_m|||||
|Own annuityifnoSQ|10.1|11.9<br>15.9|25.7|52.5|
|SQtoown-account<br>|6.2|6.3<br>6.9|7.8|9.0|
|Jointannuity(ifmarr.)<sup>2</sup>|6.4|7.2<br>8.4|10.1|16.1|
|%incr.from SQ|62%|53%<br>44%|30%|17%|
|%incr.fromjointannuity<br>|64%|60%<br>53%|39%|31%|
|IFCwomam''|||||
|OwnannuityifnoSQ|20.9|25.9<br>31.7|46.7|71.8|
|SQ|12.4|12.4<br>12.4|11.7|11.1|
|%incr.fromSQ|59%|48%<br>39%|25%|15%|
|%incr.fromjointannuity|31%|28%<br>27%|22%|22%|
|10yearwomaaim_|||||
|OwnannuityifnoSQ|5.9|6.7<br>7.7|10.2|13.8|
|SQ|4.7|4.8<br>5.1|5.3|5.3|
|%incr.from SQ|80%|72%<br>66%|52%|38%|
|%incr.fromjointannuity|109%|108%<br>109%|99%|117%|

Notes: Expected age of death of 65-year old cohort is used in these calculations. Husbands and wives are assumed to belong to the same educational group. Absolute amount of joint annuity benefit is same for average, full career and 10 year woman but it varies as % of own annuity. Public pillar benefit varies by labor force attachment. In Chile MPG top-up for married woman stops when MPG floor is reached due to joint annuity. Therefore % increment from MPG is less on lifetime than on monthly basis. PV of loss through joint annuity to man is less than PV of joint annuity benefit to woman because PV is measured as of age 65, which woman reaches 3 years later than man. Average man and FC and 10 year women get no MPG. In Mexico part of the subtraction to the husband and increment to the wife from the joint annuity is due to the husband's SQ. SQ has much larger % increment to 10 year woman than to other women, because that woman is assumed to work when she is young; at that point the SQ is larger relative to the wage than it becomes later on due to price indexation of SQ and rising ageearnings profiles. Same factor leads % SQ to be slightly lower for full career woman.

55
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cases, as noted in Appendix A, we use data lagged one or two years if current data are not available.<sup>3</sup> In some cases we use several individual variables from a single data source in our aggregate indicators. When we do so, we first compute a simple average of these variables from a single source, and then treat the average of these individual questions as a single observation from that data source.

Our data sources reflect the perceptions of a very diverse group of respondents. Several are surveys of individuals or domestic firms with first-hand knowledge of the governance situation in the country. These include the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report, the Institute for Management Development’s World Competitiveness Yearbook, the World Bank’s business environment surveys, the Gallup World Poll, Latinobarometro, and Afrobarometro. We refer to these as "Surveys" in Table 1. We also capture the perceptions of country analysts at the major multilateral development agencies (the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Bank), reflecting these individuals’ in-depth experience working on the countries they assess. Together with some data sources provided by the United States Department of State, we classify these as "Public Sector Data Providers" in Table 1. We also have a number of data sources provided by various nongovernmental organizations such as Reporters Without Borders, Freedom House, and the Bertelsmann Foundation. Finally, an important category of data sources for us are commercial business information providers, such as the Economist Intelligence Unit, Global Insight, and Political Risk Services. These last two types of data providers typically base their assessments on a global network of correspondents with extensive experience in the countries they are rating.

The distribution of the number of data sources of each type indicated in Table 1 is almost exactly uniform. Of our 33 data sources, nine fall in the category of nongovernmental organizations, and the remaining categories have eight data sources each. However, an important distinction is that the commercial business information providers typically report data for much larger country samples than our other types of sources. An extreme example is the Global Insight Business Conditions and Risk 3 We never use lagged data when current data are available, in order to ensure that our indicators are as timely as possible.

5
# I. **Introduction**

There has been a marked shift in many countries since the early 1980s towards liberalizing international trade. To a large extent this reflects a recognition that such intervention is often not only inefficient, but also ineffective and counterproductive. Governments around the globe are increasingly seeking to create an enabling environment allowing private individuals and firms to employ the nation's resources more efficiently. This enabling environment includes the provision of public goods such as a stable, business-friendly legal framework that allows contracts to be enforced rapidly and at low cost; a regulatory regime that fosters and maintains competition on product and factor markets; and the provision of basic education and health services. While trade liberalization is a powerful instrument for increasing competition, formal trade policies such as the level and dispersion of the tariff are only one aspect of the trade regime. As important are trade _institutions:_ the framework in which policies are determined and the administrative mechanisms through which they are implemented and enforced. Traders need to confront as little uncertainty as possible regarding the rules that apply, the taxes that must be paid, or the time taken up by customs clearance.

The major policy issue facing many of the countries in the MENA region is to follow the rest of the world in liberalizing, privatizing and deregulating markets. The role of the public sector in many MENA countries is still pervasive. In some parts of the region the public sector accounts for more than one-half of GDP, and employs over 60 percent of skilled workers (World Bank, 1995a). Trade barriers remain high. Average taxes on trade are around 15 percent, more than twice the level applying in Eastern Europe (Appendix Table 1). Para-tariffs of many kinds are prevalent, reducing the transparency of the trade regime. A basic tenet of economic reform efforts undertaken in the last decade in many countries of the region has been that reform be gradual. Given that gradual trade reform has often not been accompanied by actions to significantly reduce the role of the State in the economy, reform efforts have had a limited impact in terms of effectively increasing competition on product markets (Hoekman, 1995a). The slower the pace of economic reform and the less comprehensive its scope, the larger the gap between MENA's performance and that of the rest of the world is likely to become. The implicit rationale for gradualism in the region appears to be a 1
Policy Research Working Paper 8385

# **Abstract**

This paper quantifies the impact of market access on local GDP in the West Bank, _proxied_ by nighttime lights, using the deployment of road closure obstacles by the Israeli army between 2005 and 2012 as a quasi-natural experiment generating exogenous temporal and spatial variation in accessibility. Minimum travel times between locality pairs are computed using road network and obstacles data supplemented with information on checkpoint traversal times. These are combined with population data to construct a time-varying market access measure for each locality. Market access has a significant and substantial effect on local light emissions. This association is robust to controlling for conflict, and strengthens when market access is instrumented by the number of obstacles located in a radius between 10 and 25km away from the locality.

This paper is a product of the Development Research Group and the Development Data Group. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The authors may be contacted at rvanderweide@worldbank.org.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
To construct this measure of water supply, we first consider the modal aquifer type associated with each BGS storage grid. We then overlap the GAEZ grids with BGS storage grids. Because each grid can be mapped to multiple aquifers, we sum the volume for the BGS storage grids mapped to each GAEZ grid that has a (modal) aquifer type that is either U, CSF, CSI, CSIF, or B.

Our results using this measure of water supply can be found in Table 8 and Table 9 for the SD and SRHS approaches, respectively.

Using the SD approach, our simulated median gains in production for different crops range between 85.47% and 92.95% for barley, 59.57% and 75.11% for millet, 112.38% and 125.64% for maize, 124.41% to 127.22% for rice, 88.25% and 100.49% for sorghum, and 45.92% and 53.93% for wheat. The corresponding gains using the SRHS approach are between 52.87% and 68.80% for barley, 148.02% and 158.14% for maize, 126.88% and 129.00% for rice, 148.48% and 170.86% for sorghum, and 71.02% and 80.75% for wheat. These results are much higher than those found using the data from Rodella et al. (2022). We believe these differences arise due to the mapping of local shallow aquifers not being perfect between the two datasets. However, because our main results are on the conservative side, we believe we can safely say large gains in production are possible through groundwater irrigation.

# **8 Discussion on Costs**

We have so far discussed the potential for increased production through groundwater irrigation. However, its high initial cost can be a barrier to adoption, which might explain the low prevalence of this method among farmers who are credit constrained.

The cost of accessing groundwater is twofold: the fixed cost of groundwater exploration and well construction, and the variable cost of regular operation and maintenance. Fixed costs cover the detection of groundwater resources, water-quality testing, transportation of materials, pump purchase and drilling costs. Variable costs refer to the frequent operational and maintenance costs of running groundwater pumps. Given the substantial investment, some of the benefits previously discussed may not be realized. One approach to mitigating the fixed costs of groundwater irrigation involves the implementation of treadle pumps, capable of accessing groundwater up to 7 meters deep (Burney, Naylor, & Postel, 2013).

In Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), Burney et al. (2013) note that treadle pumps are priced between USD 100 and USD 300, significantly lower than earlier estimates by Xenarios and Pavelic (2013). Furthermore, Giordano, de Fraiture, Weight, and van der Bliek (2012) suggest that introducing treadle pumps in SSA could yield annual net revenues of up to USD 22 billion and benefit 185 million individuals. Therefore, to consider gains that can be cost effective, our analysis focuses on local shallow aquifers that are less than 7 meters deep and therefore easier and cheaper to access. A recent study found irrigation pumps for pumping from surface water sources pay for themselves within three years in 17