rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Impact evaluation helps deliver
            development projects
Does research add value to aid?
            Specifically, does impact evaluation research help or hinder
            the delivery of development projects? This paper analyzes
            the question by constructing a new data set of 100 impact
            evaluations and 1,135 projects approved by the World Bank
            between 2005 and 2011. The analysis finds that the delivery
            of projects with impact evaluation is significantly
            timelier: common delays are avoided and the gap between
            planned and actual disbursements is reduced by half.
            Evidence-based mid-course corrections, a clearer
            implementation road map, strengthened capacity on the
            ground, and observer effects are possible channels to
            explain the results. Hopefully, this analysis will stimulate
            discussion over the optimal balance between project
            financing and the impact evaluation research needed to
            deliver development outcomes.
Public sector size and performance
            management : a case-study of post-revolution Tunisia
This paper examines public sector size
            and performance management in post-revolution Tunisia,
            drawing on macro-empirical, legal, and qualitative analyses.
            The paper first shows that public sector employment figures
            and the wage bill have increased significantly since the
            2011 revolution, but that this represents merely an
            acceleration of the previous trend. The paper then examines
            de jure and de facto performance management in
            Tunisia's public sector, covering incentives through
            recruitment, evaluation, compensation, and promotion. The
            examination shows that Tunisia's legal framework is
            well-designed for recruiting the most skilled candidates
            into the public sector and promoting the most
            high-performing employees. De facto, the link between an
            employee's performance and evaluation, compensation,
            and promotion is weak. Performance evaluation is virtually
            nonexistent and promotions are automatic or awarded through
            a process that emphasizes seniority over performance. This
            is particularly true during the post-revolution period, in
            which a number of ad-hoc arrangements multiplied divergences
            between the legal basis for performance management and its
            application. These ad-hoc changes allowed the state to act
            as employer of last resort, significantly increasing direct
            (noncompetitive) recruitment and regularizing temporary
            staff. The increase in and proliferation of allowances have
            added to the complexity of the compensation system. In a
            qualitative review of past reform attempts, the paper
            demonstrates that reformers had identified the weaknesses of
            Tunisia's public sector performance system as early as
            1989, but failed to achieve major change.
The global trade slowdown: cyclical
            or structural
This paper focuses on the sluggish
            growth of world trade relative to income growth in recent
            years. The analysis uses an empirical strategy based on an
            error correction model to assess whether the global trade
            slowdown is structural or cyclical. An estimate of the
            relationship between trade and income in the past four
            decades reveals that the long-term trade elasticity rose
            sharply in the 1990s, but declined significantly in the
            2000s even before the global financial crisis. These results
            suggest that trade is growing slowly not only because of
            slow growth of gross domestic product, but also because of a
            structural change in the trade-gross domestic product
            relationship in recent years.  The available evidence
            suggests that the explanation may lie in the slowing pace of
            international vertical specialization rather than increasing
            protection or the changing composition of trade and gross
            domestic product.
Survival is for the fittest: export
            survival patterns in Georgia
This paper analyzes the determinants of
            export flow survival in Georgia. The paper uses a unique
            Georgian firm-level data set, in which firms'
            characteristics and output dynamics are matched with their
            customs' export transactions, for the period 2006-12. A
            discrete survival model is used to explore the role of firm
            level characteristics, diversification strategies, and
            network effects on the survival rates of export flows. Low
            survival rates at the product level are found to limit the
            ability of Georgian firms to consolidate new products in
            international markets. The analysis finds that it is
            production efficiency, rather than size, that boosts export
            survival chances, that firms diversification strategies
            matter for the prospects of survival, and that there is
            strong evidence of network effects in export survival. The
            analysis also finds that ratified foreign trade agreements
            contribute to increase the survival of export flows by
            reducing policy-induced trading costs and increasing
            information about destination markets.
OECS ports : an efficiency and
            performance assessment
Handling charges in Caribbean ports are
            two to three times higher than in similar ports in other
            regions of the world. In some cases, it costs significantly
            less to ship a container to Hong Kong SAR, China, or Europe
            than it does to ship to a neighboring island no more than
            100 miles away. The reasons for high port-handling costs are
            linked to procedural inefficiencies along the logistics
            chain, high freight rates that shipping lines attribute to
            empty backhauls, and the poor performance of port management
            and operations. The Organization of Eastern Caribbean States
            shares the larger Caribbean region's advantages,
            challenges, and concerns related to the performance of port
            management and operations. Yet performance assessments have
            been difficult to make because of data constraints. This
            report seeks to provide such an assessment along four
            distinct policy dimensions: (i) traffic development, (ii)
            the institutional and regulatory framework, (iii)
            infrastructure development, and (iv) performance, including
            pricing and finance issues. The report concludes by
            benchmarking the efficiency of Organization of Eastern
            Caribbean States ports against other Latin American ports
            using a stochastic frontier approach, and providing a list
            of next steps for further research and policy
            prioritization. To make the current analysis possible, a
            rigorous exercise in the collection of primary data was
            conducted, using standardized templates adapted specifically
            to the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States context. The
            collection of data proved to be particularly difficult on
            financial and performance metrics, since many of the ports
            lack strong statistical systems and institutions.
SME exchanges in emerging market
            economies : a stocktaking of development practices
In recent years, many emerging market
            countries have developed or are in the process of developing
            SME Exchanges to provide financing to SMEs, but few have
            succeeded. This paper aims to help stock exchanges and
            policy makers think through the key questions to be
            addressed to determine if, when, how and for whom to develop
            an SME Exchange in emerging market countries. It takes stock
            of some of the actions that exchanges can take to reduce
            issuance costs, in time and money for SMEs, without
            compromising the prudential needs of investors. The paper
            draws on the experience of seven SME Exchanges and the World
            Federation of Exchanges that participated in a workshop
            organized and led by the WBG to discuss these and other
            questions. It does not recommend a specific model to follow
            and does not address specific context issues, however the
            analysis suggests approaches that are widespread and/or
            could be beneficial to consider such as (1) focus on SMEs
            with a sizeable growth rate, (2) have the SME exchange
            legally related to the main board, (3) do not reduce
            disclosure content to reduce costs, (4) allow private
            placements, (5) have well regulated advisors to vet issuers
            and provide comfort to investors about the quality of the
            issue, (6) have outreach, public awareness campaign and
            training for SMEs, (7) consider tax incentives for
            investors. The report is the first in a series on this
            topic, and subsequent reports will address and expand on
            related and broader issues.
Entrepreneurship and the allocation
            of government spending under imperfect markets
Previous studies have established a
            negative relationship between total government spending and
            entrepreneurship activity. However, the relationship between
            the composition of government spending and entrepreneurial
            activity has been woefully under-researched. This paper
            fills this gap in the literature by empirically exploring
            the relationship between government spending on social and
            public goods and entrepreneurial activity under the
            assumption of credit market imperfections. By combining
            macroeconomic government spending data with individual-level
            entrepreneurship data, the analysis finds a positive
            relationship between increasing the share of social and
            public goods at the cost of private subsidies and
            entrepreneurship while confirming a negative relationship
            between total government consumption and entrepreneurial
            activity. The implication may be that expansion of total
            government spending includes huge increases in private
            subsidies, at the cost of social and public goods, and is
            detrimental for entrepreneurship.
Living on the edge : vulnerability
            to poverty and public transfers in Mexico
Social policy in Mexico has focused on
            identifying and supporting chronically poor households. Yet,
            Mexico has a significant number of households that are just
            above the poverty line who are not eligible, by definition,
            for antipoverty programs and are at risk of falling back
            into poverty in the event of an economic crisis or shocks
            like loss of employment and natural disasters. These shocks
            can have serious negative effects on welfare in the absence
            of social safety nets targeted to these households. This
            study uses household survey data to better understand these
            "vulnerable" households, including their profile
            and risk exposure and, more importantly, to document the
            extent to which these households are covered by public
            transfers and insurance mechanisms. The analysis shows that
            until 2010 most social programs, including the few with
            productive components, such as vocational training and
            productive investment grants, barely covered the vulnerable.
            The study concludes that public policies need to pay
            attention to the vulnerable households and find the right
            policy mix between targeted interventions and universal
            insurance schemes to serve this economic group.
Moldova : a story of upward economic mobility
During the early 2000s, Moldova
            experienced strong economic growth and poverty and
            inequality reductions. This paper aims at uncovering the
            patterns behind these poverty trends by looking at economic
            mobility and its associated factors in Moldova. The findings
            build on the synthetic panel approach and allow for a
            non-anonymous view of the process of poverty reduction. The
            data used for this country study on Moldova come from the
            Household Budget Survey, which is conducted on a yearly
            basis. The paper presents transition matrices to look at the
            patterns of economic mobility across selected consumption
            thresholds, as well as descriptive statistics and a linear
            probability model aimed at identifying correlates of
            economic mobility. The findings show that the observed
            poverty reductions happened with little churning, and
            highlight the importance of education and employment on
            upward economic mobility in Moldova in the 2000s, as well as
            the role of public and private transfers.
Intentions to return : evidence from
            Romanian migrants
Romania faces an acute population crisis
            with an aging workforce and an increased number of emigrants
            particularly from the young, highly educated/skilled
            population. This paper uses a new cross-sectional data set
            of Romanian emigrants to find which factors are related to
            plans to return home permanently. The analysis pays
            particular attention to differences in expected earnings and
            skills and training acquired as a migrant. The study finds
            that higher expected earnings in Romania and investment in
            Romanian firms are positively correlated with plans to
            return migrate. Policies that boost productivity and
            therefore wages as well as policies that improve the
            business climate could therefore encourage Romanian migrants
            to return to Romania, moderating the negative consequences
            of the declining and aging population, and increasing the
            skill stock of the Romanian labor force.
Connectivity for Caribbean countries
            : an initial assessment
Every discussion of the Caribbean states
            considers their characteristics as sea-locked countries,
            small economies, highly vulnerable to natural disasters, and
            a geographic platform that calls for regional cooperation
            and integration. The Caribbean Sea is the most important
            vehicle and the most challenging obstacle Caribbean
            countries have to connect with the world. This report
            measures and analyzes the Caribbean region's air and
            maritime connectivity, by taking a sample of 15 countries
            that represent 64 percent of the Caribbean population and 59
            percent of the region's gross domestic product. The
            report finds that the most salient issue of Caribbean
            logistics is the huge costs associated with trade, driven by
            embedded inefficiencies in customs systems and document
            preparation processes. The report also documents how the
            Caribbean air transport network is characterized by fierce
            competition between the islands for tourists from abroad,
            rather than coordinated efforts to promote Caribbean
            tourism. This has led to suboptimal routing based on
            distorting subsidy schemes with often unstainable volumes
            and load factors, raising questions about the sustainability
            of many of the extra-Caribbean routes, and indicating a need
            for route consolidation. Air connectivity within and among
            Caribbean states is poor and represents an opportunity to
            develop alternative and more competitive private sector-led
            services such as inter-island ferries and low-cost air
            shuttle services. Maritime connectivity for freight is well
            structured around two coexisting and functional
            hub-and-spoke systems (intra-regional with a hub in Trinidad
            and extra-regional with a hub in the Miami area) that
            effectively serve all the Caribbean countries. Yet, tariffs
            are high by worldwide standards and are likely driven by
            high market concentration in a handful of shipping liners.
Can we measure resilience a proposed
            method and evidence from countries in the Sahel
Although resilience has become a popular
            concept in studies of poverty and vulnerability, it has been
            difficult to obtain a credible measure of resilience. This
            difficulty is because the data required to measure
            resilience, which involves observing household outcomes over
            time after every exposure to a shock, are usually
            unavailable in many contexts. This paper proposes a new
            method for measuring household resilience using readily
            available cross section data. Intuitively, a household is
            considered resilient if there is very little difference
            between the pre- and post-shock welfare. By obtaining
            counterfactual welfare for households before and after a
            shock, households are classified as chronically poor,
            non-resilient, and resilient. This method is applied to four
            countries in the Sahel. It is found that Niger, Burkina
            Faso, and Northern Nigeria have high percentages of
            chronically poor: respectively, 48, 34, and 27 percent. In
            Senegal, only 4 percent of the population is chronically
            poor.  The middle group, the non-resilient, accounts for
            about 70 percent of the households in Senegal, while in the
            other countries it ranges between 34 and 38 percent.
            Resilient households account for about 33 percent in all
            countries except Niger, where the share is around 18 percent.
Vulnerability to malnutrition in the
            West African Sahel
This study estimates marginal increase
            in malnutrition for children ages 1-3 years from exposure to
            an extreme shock in the West African Sahel. The study uses
            knowledge of a child's birth and high resolution
            spatial and temporal distribution of shocks, calculated from
            the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index and
            satellite-based measures of rainfall and temperature to link
            a child to the shock experienced in-utero. The study finds
            that while around 20 percent of the children in the sample
            are stunted or underweight, more than 30 percent of the
            children in the sample are highly vulnerable to either form
            of malnutrition.
Gender inequality and growth: the
            case of rich vs. poor countries
This paper uses cross-section data for
            107 countries to explore the relationship between gender
            inequality and economic growth. The paper departs from the
            literature by using a broad measure of gender inequality
            that goes well beyond gender inequality in education, which
            has been the focus of most studies. Another novelty of the
            paper lies in exploring heterogeneity in the growth-gender
            inequality relationship. The results confirm that greater
            gender inequality is strongly associated with lower economic
            growth. However, this negative relationship between gender
            inequality and growth is entirely due to the relatively poor
            countries, with the relatively rich countries showing no
            such relationship. The findings have important implications
            for the design and targeting of gender-specific policies.
Estimating parameters and structural
            change in CGE models using a Bayesian cross-entropy
            estimation approach
This paper uses a three-step Bayesian
            cross-entropy estimation approach in an environment of noisy
            and scarce data to estimate behavioral parameters for a
            computable general equilibrium model. The estimation also
            measures how labor-augmenting productivity and other
            structural parameters in the model may have shifted over
            time to contribute to the generation of historically
            observed changes in the economic arrangement. In this
            approach, the parameters in a computable general equilibrium
            model are treated as fixed but unobserved, represented as
            prior mean values with prior error mass functions.
            Estimation of the parameters involves using an
            information-theoretic Bayesian approach to exploit
            additional information in the form of new data from a series
            of social accounting matrices, which are assumed were
            measured with error. The estimation procedure is
            "efficient" in the sense that it uses all
            available information and makes no assumptions about
            unavailable information. As illustration, the methodology is
            applied to estimate the parameters of a computable general
            equilibrium model using alternative data sets for the
            Republic of Korea and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Managing risk with insurance and
            savings : experimental evidence for male and female farm
            managers in the Sahel
Although there is fast-growing policy
            interest in offering financial products to help rural
            households manage risk, the literature is still scant as to
            which products are the most effective. This paper uses a
            randomized field experiment in Senegal and Burkina Faso to
            compare male and female farmers who are offered index-based
            agricultural insurance with those who are offered a variety
            of savings instruments. The paper finds that female farm
            managers were less likely to purchase agricultural insurance
            and more likely to invest in savings for emergencies, even
            controlling for access to informal insurance and differences
            in crop choice. It is hypothesized that this finding results
            from the fact that, although men and women are equally
            exposed to yield risk, women face additional sources of
            lifecycle risk -- particularly health risks associated with
            fertility and childcare -- that men do not. In essence, the
            basis risk associated with agricultural insurance products
            is higher for women. Purchasing insurance increased input
            spending and use more than savings. Those who purchased more
            insurance realized higher average yields and were better
            able to manage food insecurity and shocks. This finding
            suggests that gender differences in demand for financial
            products can have an impact on productivity, resilience, and welfare.