rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Applying economic analysis to
            technical assistance projects
The author recommends using more
            quantitative economic analysis in appraising technical
            assistance loans and loan components. After giving a brief
            history of tecnhical assistance and the problems commonly
            associated with it, he describes classifications of
            technical assistance, proposes a new typology to be used for
            project appraisal, suggests methods for screening projects,
            and discusses different levels of economic analysis. He
            shows how the typology and economic analysis could be
            applied to 40 projects in the Europe and Central Asia
            region, Although some of the suggested approaches are
            sophisticated and demanding, much of it relies on fairly
            simple techniques. The author estimates that roughly 60
            percent of the technical assistance in his sample was
            suitable for quantitative analysis. Using four case studies,
            he demonstrates how quantitative economic analysis could be
            used more frequently in the appraisal process. The author
            recommends that all technical assistance be classified
            according to the methodology suitable for its appraisal and
            evaluation. In cases in which little or no quantitative
            analysis is used, the staff officer can and should provide a
            justification -in which case it should still be possible to
            conceptualize the problem in economic terms. Essential
            technical assistance should be included when calculating the
            economic rate of return on a project. When technical
            assistance is excluded from this calculation, a strong
            justification for such assistance should be given or it
            should be omitted from the project. In his sample, the
            author estimates that about 80 percent of the technical
            assistance in investment projects was not essential for
            project implementation. In the 12 projects for which an
            economic rate of return was calculated in the appraisal, the
            technical assistance was not included in the estimate -even
            though 53 percent of this technical assistance was deemed
            necessary to the project.
Light and lightning at the end of
            the public tunnel : reform of the electricity sector in the
            Southern Cone
The authors provide an overview of
            recent privatization experiences in Argentina, Brazil, and
            Chile. They focus on both achievements and outstanding
            problems in the electricity sector. They pay special
            attention to the issue of whether regulators can enforce
            compliance and sustain the spirit of reform - bringing the
            forces of competition to the sector - despite the
            unavoidable adjustments and fine-tuning that effective
            regulation requires. Among the lessons: Competition, rather
            than privatization, is the key to transforming the sector.
            For competition to work, several conditions must be met: 1)
            The primary energy source must be competitive for
            competition in the wholesale market to work. (In Chile, the
            fact that most of the water rights have been allocated to
            the major generator company seriously limits efficiency in
            the sector.) 2) Monopolistic stages must be formally
            separate from other stages, with clear rules for third-party
            access. (Here, the structure adopted by Argentina seems
            superior to that adopted by Chile.) 3) New entry into the
            system is the ultimate test of competition. The main gain
            from competition in electricity generation comes from the
            decentralization of decisions about when, how much, and what
            type of generation has to be brought to the market, rather
            than from short-term gains from minimizing costs. Overall,
            vertical and horizontal separation in the sector increases
            rather than reduces the burden and complexity of regulation.
            In a disintegrated system, the issues that arose in a
            traditional monopoly situation (fair rate of return, asset
            base, tariff to final consumers, and so on) are
            significantly increased. New issues include third-party
            access, the promotion of competition, interconnection
            pricing, and consistency of regulations across stages of
            competitive development. Restructuring and privatization are
            still in their early stages so lessons drawn from experience
            must be considered tentative.
Microdeterminants of consumption,
            poverty, growth, and inequality in Bangladesh
Using household data from five
            successive national surveys, the author analyzes the
            microdeterminants of (and changes in) consumption, poverty,
            growth, and inequality in Bangladesh from 1983 to 1996.
            Education, demographics, land ownership, occupation, and
            geographic location all affect consumption and poverty. The
            gains in per capita consumption associated with many of
            these household characteristics tend to be stable over time.
            Returns to demographics (variables in household size) have
            the greatest impact on growth, perhaps because of improving
            employment opportunities for women. Education (in urban
            areas) and land (in rural areas) contribute most to measures
            of between-group inequality. Location takes second place, in
            both urban and rural areas. The author introduces the
            concept of conditional between-group inequality. Existing
            group decompositions of the Gini index along one variable do
            not control for other characteristics correlated with that
            variable. Conditional between-group Ginis avoid this
            pitfall. He also shows how to use unconditional and
            conditional between-group Ginis for simulating policies.
Politics, transaction costs, and the
            design of regulatory institutions
Providing a more complete framework for
            assessing the efficiency of government intervention requires
            moving away from the idealistic perspective typically found
            in the normative approach to traditional public economics,
            contend the authors. Such a move requires viewing the
            government not as a monolithic entity but as many different
            government bodies, each with its own constituency and
            regulatory tools. Not only is the "multitiered"
            government limited in its ability to commit, but interest
            groups influence the regulatory process and impose
            significant transaction costs on government interventions
            and on their outcome. The authors discuss the nature of
            those transaction costs and argue that the overall design of
            the government is the result of their minimization. Among
            the points they make in their conclusions: 1) Safeguards
            built into regulatory contracts sometimes reflect and
            sometimes imply transactions costs which influence, or
            should influence, the optimal tradeoff between rent and
            efficient in ways practitioners sometimes ignore. 2) Most of
            the literature on transaction costs arising from government
            failures would agree that to be sustainable, regulatory
            institutions should be independent, autonomous, and
            accountable. How these criteria are met is determined by the
            way transaction costs are minimized, which in turn drives
            the design of the regulatory framework. In practice, for
            example, if there at commitment problems, short-term
            institutional contracts between players are more likely to
            ensure autonomy and independence. This affects the duration
            of the nomination of the regulators. Short-term contracts
            may be best, but contracts for regulators typically last
            four to eight years and are often renewable. The empirical
            debate about the design of regulators' jobs is a
            possible source of tension. Practitioners typically
            recommend choosing regulators based on professional rather
            than political criteria, but that may not be the best way to
            minimize regulatory capture. Professional experts are likely
            to come from the sector they are supposed to regulate and
            are likely to return to it sooner or later (as typically
            happens in developing countries). On the other hand, elected
            regulators are unlikely to be much more independent than
            professional regulators; they will simply represent
            different interests. Practitioners and theorists alike
            emphasize different sources of capture and agree that one
            way to deal with its risk is to make sure the selection
            process involves both executive and legislative branches.
Between group inequality and
            targeted transfers
The author provides two extensions to
            Yitzhaki and Lerman's group decomposition of the Gini
            index. First, he analyzes stratification (within the group)
            and inequality (between groups) along several dimensions at
            once. This makes the determinants of inequality more
            understandable. Second, he derives the impact on the Gini of
            marginal changes in income or consumption by group. This can
            be used to evaluate targeted redistributive policies or to
            assess the impact of exogenous shocks by group. He applies
            the analysis to data from Bangladesh, with a focus on how
            inequality affects land ownership, education, and
            occupation. Education appears to be a stronger determinant
            of inequality than occupation, with land ownership ranking
            third. Marginal targeted transfers and taxes have more
            effect on redistribution when applied to education (from the
            well-educated to the illiterate) or occupation groups (from
            officials and managers to tenants and agricultural workers).
Protecting the poor in
            Vietnam's emerging market economy
All households see some fluctuation in
            their incomes over time. Many have access to
            consumption-smoothing devices such as savings and borrowing
            that allow them to maintain relatively stable living
            standards. But the poor tend to have fewer reserves beyond
            what is needed to survive lean periods during normal years
            and also less access to credit. An unfavorable turn of
            events, particularly an unexpected one or even a series of
            small shocks, can be catastrophic. Poor people's
            exposure to downside risk in their living standards can also
            bring adverse long-term consequences from the depletion of
            their productive assets at times of distress and the
            adoption of costly risk avoidance strategies. This paper
            uses Vietnam as a case study in rapidly assessing the
            strengths and weaknesses of an existing system of transfers
            and safety nets. Data are taken to be weak; in particular,
            rigorous ex-post evaluations of the components of the
            existing social security system are not available in time to
            inform policy choices. So the aim is instead to provide a
            broad qualitative assessment, also pointing to key issues on
            which knowledge needs to improve. The paper provides a
            critical overview of the existing public poverty and safety
            net programs in Vietnam that aim to help and protect those
            outside the formal employment sectors, notably those in the
            rural economy and urban informal sector. It begins with a
            brief examination of the principal sources of vulnerability
            for Vietnamese households and what is known about household
            coping strategies.
The informal sector, firm dynamics,
            and institutional participation
The informal microfirm sector is
            believed to be large, accounting for 20-40 percent of
            employment in many developing countries. The literature
            tends to view the sector as the disadvantaged sector of a
            segmented labor market, as existing to evade government
            regulations, or as constrained by lack of access to
            government services. The authors offer a unique theoretical
            framework to analyze informality and microfirm growth
            behavior -- one that emphasizes the entrepreneurial nature
            of informal firms and sees informality as a secondary
            characteristic. First, they assume that informal firms in
            developing countries have dynamics similar to firms in
            industrial countries: entrepreneurs have unobserved,
            differing cost structures that determine their long-run size
            and survival -- structures that they can only discover by
            going into business. Second, informality can be thought of
            as a decision to participate in societal institutions.
            Access to mechanisms that ensure property rights, pool risk,
            or enforce contracts become more important as a firm grows,
            and the entrepreneur will be willing to pay for them through
            "taxes" in a way that was not the case as a small
            firm. The combination of these assumptions generates several
            of the stylized facts emerging from cross-sectional data and
            identified in existing models -- informal firms tend to
            remain small and have high rates of mortality, and lower
            productivity -- without recourse to government-induced
            distortions in labor or product markets. Further, the
            framework predicts that firms whose cost structures dictate
            that they should expand will make the transition to
            formality as they grow. Using detailed observations from
            Mexico, the authors find their view consistent with patterns
            of formality and growth of microfirms.
Political economy and political
            risks of institutional reform in the water sector
It is difficult and time-consuming to
            get adequate information about influence groups in a
            society. Dinar, Balakrishnan, and Wambia develop an approach
            to estimating the political risk associated with
            implementing a set of institutional reforms in the water
            sector. Their approach endogenizes the actions taken by
            politicians, users, service providers, and other
            stakeholders. Their analysis provides insights into the
            relationships between institutional arrangements, the power
            structure, and policy outcomes. T,he authors develop a
            two-tier tool to assess the risks associated with
            implementing reform. The first tier is a structured analysis
            of the distribution of power among groups interested in the
            outcome of reform. The second tier is a Delphi process,
            based on experts' opinions. Their approach is a
            compromise between the two options: the first (structured
            analysis) is costly and time-consuming and often entails
            creating and using pseudo precise indices; the second
            (Delphi) process is an unstructured "expert
            opinion" way of assessing risk Their compromise
            approach provides a manageable framework that, after some
            testing, could be added to the feasibility analysis of
            projects undertaken in politically complicated environments.
            They apply the approach to the National Drainage Program
            Project, currently in the early stages of implementation in
            Pakistan.  They describe risk mitigation strategies that
            should be followed in dealing with political risks
            associated with the project.
The effect of household wealth on
            educational attainment : demographic and health survey evidence
In this paper are interested not just in
            countries' average educational enrollment and
            attainment, for which there has been a great deal of
            examination both from official and academic sources, but in
            how educational attainment differs by household wealth
            within countries. How much schooling are children from poor
            households India, Brazil, or Kenya receiving, both
            absolutely and relative to the rich in the same country?
            Answering this question, especially in a way that produces
            valid comparisons across countries is hampered by the
            limited availability, difficulty of use, and comparability
            of household survey data. The Demographic and Health Surveys
            (DHS), having applied essentially the same survey instrument
            in 35 countries potentially overcomes these problems. One
            potential limitation of the DHS is that it lacks questions
            on household income or consumption expenditures, which are
            conventionally used as indicators of households'
            economic status. However, in a separate methodological paper
            the authors shows that an index constructed from the
            questions asked in the DHS about household assets and
            housing characteristics (e.g. construction materials,
            drinking water and toilet facilities) works as well, and
            arguably better, than consumption expenditures as a proxy
            for household long-run wealth. This finding allows us to use
            a comparable method, principal components, in constructing a
            ranking of households within each country. The
            'poor' are simply defined as the bottom 40 percent
            in each country, so while levels of poverty are not
            comparable across countries, the rankings are constructed
            using a similar method. An analysis of this data on
            education and wealth reveals three key findings. First, very
            low primary attainment by the poor is driven by two distinct
            patterns of enrollment and dropout. There is a South Asian
            and Western/Central African pattern in which many of the
            poor never enroll in school.
Capital flows to Central and Eastern
            Europe and the Former Soviet Union
The capital flows to Central and Eastern
            Europe and the Former Soviet Union (CEE/FSU) represent a
            relatively small, albeit growing share of capital flows to
            developing countries. Taking all flows together, the total
            net flows to these 25 countries (Albania, Armenia,
            Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic,
            Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic,
            Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Moldova, Poland, Romania,
            Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan,
            Ukraine, and Uzbekistan) were about $44 billion in 1996 or
            about 1/8 of aggregate net flows to all developing
            countries. These countries accounted, however, for about 20
            and 22 percent respectively of all developing countries
            Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and exports in 1996. As a
            fraction of their GDP, total inflows were consequently
            smaller than for many other developing countries, and
            averaged about 5.4 percent over the 1990-96 periods. In more
            recent years, there has been a more rapid inflow of private
            capital, as reform efforts have consolidated and economic
            prospects improved and, for some countries, as European
            Union (EU) integration became a possibility for the near
            future. For some countries, short-term capital has recently
            become an important source of external financing. Since most
            countries have been late comers to the phenomenon of large
            private capital inflows, they have not experienced much of
            the overheating phenomena which have affected other
            developing countries in the past (Latin America) and
            recently (East Asia). The paper is organized as follows.
            Section II briefly describes the facts on capital flows to
            these countries. Section III discusses important links and
            relationships between macroeconomic variables and the
            capital flows, including some of the basic motivations, and
            causes for capital flows. Section IV describes and analyzes
            the policy framework and policy responses in those countries
            that received the bulk of capital flows. Econometric tests
            are presented in section V, while section VI discusses the
            issues which may be arising with capital flows in these
            countries in the future and provides some conclusions.
Politicians and firms in seven
            central and eastern European countries
The authors test several propositions
            derived by Shleifer and Vishny (1994, 1996) about how
            privatization and stabilization (hard budget constraints)
            affect enterprise behavior. They document the changes in
            financing, employment, and operating efficiency that have
            occurred in more than 6300 manufacturing enterprises in
            seven Central and Eastern European countries (Bulgaria,
            Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Slovak Republic,
            and Slovenia). They then compare the relative performance of
            privatized and state-owned enterprises. Controlling for
            institutional differences and the endogeneity of
            privatization choices, they find that privatization is
            associated with significant improvements in total factor
            productivity and reductions in employment. Reductions in
            soft financing are associated with further productivity
            gains. State-owned enterprises employ more workers, have
            lower productivity, receive more financing and direct
            subsidies, and have higher variable costs than privatized
            firms, particularly firms privatized for more than three
            years. Privatized firms also consistently outperform state
            enterprises in productivity growth. Over time, the role of
            politicians in allocating bank financing and subsidies
            appears to have declined, however, and banks have played a
            greater role in (efficiently) allocating resources. And the
            institutional environment appears to have improved in most
            countries, suggesting that the influence of corruption has
            declined over time. The results--which provide significant
            support for the Shleifer-Vishny model--demonstrate the
            beneficial effects of privatization in the presence of
            stabilization and decreasing corruption.