rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Transport costs are measured as a function of the travel time to reach other regions from the most populated district (upazila) in each Indian state (Bangladeshi district). Travel time, calculated using GIS network techniques, is the shortest time given all possible routes in the primary and secondary road network. Travel times in Bangladesh are based on actual speeds collected from more than 200 intercity road segments across the country and random speed assignment to the remaining segments based on the distribution of speeds in nearby segments. Travel times in India come from Krishna and Leemput (2018), based on GPS data from Blackbuk, an Indian logistics company that provides an online marketplace platform for freight shipments.

The elasticity of substitution between traded varieties is assumed to be _σ_ = 5, as in Head and Mayer (2014). For robustness, we also consider 4 and 6 as alternative values of this elasticity. The aggregate TFP elasticity, _γ_ , is calibrated to 0.05, following Ciccone and Hall (1996). The Cobb-Douglas share of labor, _βL_ , is set to 0.39, and the share of private capital, _βK_ , to 0.49, using data from KLEMS for India, and to 0.46 and 0.26, respectively, for Bangladesh, using to data from the World Integrated Trade Solution database (WITS). The share of housing expenditure 1 _− αC_<sup>_W_issetto0.35forBangladeshand0.44forIndia,</sup> using the share of household consumption expenditures in total expenditures from UN data. Following Fajgelbaum et al. (2015), we set the calibrated shape parameter of the random component of utility, _εW_ , at 1.5. For robustness, we considered other values for _εW_ , to study how the results vary with workers’ mobility.

# **4 Counterfactual Scenarios**

In the baseline, Indian trucks are not allowed to use Bangladeshi routes and must bypass Bangladesh through the Siliguri corridor to reach the northeast, and Bangladeshi trucks are not allowed in India. It takes an average 138 hours for cargo to cross the border between Bangladesh and India at Benapole-Petrapole, including 28 hours spent transloading cargo to and from Bangladeshi and Indian trucks.

Three scenarios were considered to assess the trade and welfare impacts of allowing Indian trucks to ply Bangladeshi roads and Bangladeshi trucks to ply Indian roads. In all of them, we assume that labor is mobile within countries and immobile across countries.

_Inefficient MVA_ . The first scenario considers the opening of new corridors through Bangladesh for Indian trucks transporting cargo to and from northeast India and Indian exports to 9
be accounted for as two streets in OSM which impacts the calculated length of roads in the city or flood zone.

Figure 12: Fraction of roads affected by flooding in Kampala by road type and flood depth <!-- Start of picture text --> 12%<br>Motorway and primary<br>Secondary<br>10% Tertiary<br>Residential and others<br>8%<br>6%<br>4%<br>2%<br>0%<br>0 0.15 0.3 0.45 0.6 0.75 0.9 1.05<br>Flooding of over [m]<br>Fraction of roads affected<br><!-- End of picture text --> Just like in Kampala, main roads are disproportionally affected by flooding in Bamako and Kigali. Figure 13 compares the fraction of different types of roads flooded by more than 15cm in an event with a 50-year return period in the four cities. The high stress on main roads indicates significant indirect effects from transport disruptions to a flooded economy. At the same time, it suggests that flood protection measures can prove to be efficient investments. Concentrating flood mitigating efforts on main roads could already provide significant relief to the transportation network.

Figure 13: Fraction of roads in Bamako, Dar es Salaam, Kampala, and Kigali affected by flood depth of over 15cm in an event with 50-year return period <!-- Start of picture text --> 12%<br>10%<br>8%<br>6%<br>4%<br>2%<br>0%<br>Bamako Dar es Salaam Kampala Kigali<br>Motorway and primary Tertiary<br>Secondary<br>Fraction of roads affected<br>Residential and others<br><!-- End of picture text --> 18
and so could be measured directly in the national balance sheet. For natural areas as a source of user fees, ecotourism rents and ecosystem services, it is much less obvious that the natural area as a composite good lends itself to a decomposition of its total value into specific values associated with the different properties of the natural area, including biodiversity. A specific ‘value of biodiversity’ in the national balance sheet may therefore be an elusive goal, but an aggregate value of natural areas may be feasible.

On the other hand, given sufficient knowledge of natural systems and sufficient variation in the data on the inputs and outputs of natural systems, it may be possible to derive production functions for the different categories of value provided by natural areas. This in turn could lead to values of the marginal benefits associated with changes in the quantity of biodiversity, and therefore to adjusted measures of net income and net (genuine) saving in an extended national accounting system.<sup>13</sup> A number of complicating factors arise when it comes to including the value of natural areas in national balance sheet accounts. One important issue is that many user fees are not capturing the full willingness to pay of the user of the natural area. Under fairly stringent conditions – construction of a demand curve for person-days of use of the natural area, where the price is sensitive to any changes in the properties of the natural area – it would be possible to impute augmented values of national wealth and national income based on willingness to pay to use natural areas.

The other big issue is that many natural areas provide benefits as externalities to the wider economy. The consequence of these externalities for wealth measurement is that the inclusion of many ecosystem services in the balance sheet would lead to double-counting. The role of valuing ecosystem services in national accounting is therefore typically to decompose the sources of value underpinning those assets (such as farmland) which benefit from external environmental services.

This external nature of many ecosystem services has policy consequences. The natural areas which are sources of ecosystem services will generally be at risk, since the owner of the natural area (a government or a private actor) may not be aware of, or may not care about, its value to other actors when development decisions are being made. Payments for environmental service schemes (PES) are a policy response which internalizes the externality.

> 13 This ability to measure the marginal values of properties such as biodiversity suggests that constant returns to scale in the production function could lead to an additive decomposition of all the sources of value which could be broken out in the balance sheet account. However, constant returns to scale seems unlikely given the highly nonlinear character of many natural systems. This non-linearity also implies that the estimated marginal values of different properties of a natural system are purely local.

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<u>Second, we empirically verify the role that loan size plays in determining the</u> distribution of credit losses. In Chile, loans similar in size to the average per capita GDP show losses quasi-normally distributed, while larger loans exhibit asymmetric, fat-tailed, left-skewed distributions. This is not a mere statistical finding: it portends to wholly different risk management techniques for small loans, allowing for the automated processing of loan applications, whereas the traditional, manual, relationship-based processing remains appropriate where infrequent but large losses are the norm. This evidence provides a conceptual justification for the increasing automation of retail lending, and in particular of micro-lending. Also, it suggests that different solvency rules may be required for loan portfolios that exhibit radically different loan loss distributions, possibly reducing the regulatory cost of micro-lending and lowering the entry point to the provision of financial services. Overall broader opportunities exist for prospective borrowers whose loans exhibit a largely predictable payoff.

<u>Third, our estimates cover the last upswing of the economic cycle in Chile,</u> offering the first evidence - we believe - of cyclical behavior of ELs and ULs in emerging countries, and providing the basis for the estimation of an unconditional distribution of credit losses that may help calibrate a coherent regime of capital and loan loss reserves in Chile. At the same time, the lower cyclical sensitivity displayed by small loan portfolios’ payoffs strengthens our assumption that an appropriate understanding of loan loss distributions may present households and small-sized borrowers with additional access opportunities to credit markets.

The paper is structured as follows: Section II will describe the quantitative approach followed by the SBIF to assess level and changes of credit losses in Chile. Section III provides a summary review of the recent economic cycle in Chile as a background to the following analysis. Section IV discusses the determinants of the different shape of credit loss distributions for portfolios of small and large loans. Section V shows the results of the estimation of EL and UL along the cycle. Section VI concludes, suggesting areas for future work.

4
Migration Survey (PINZMS).<sup>7</sup> We restrict the analysis to 18 to 45 year olds, the age group who are eligible for both programs. Income and employment in the PINZMS are for 2004, compared to 2007 for the RSE applicants. Even without increasing the PAC applicant incomes to adjust for wage inflation over this time, we see that the PAC applicants earn more, and are much more likely to have worked in a wage job in the past year. Specifically, 59 percent of PAC applicants have had a wage job in the last year, compared to only 16 percent of 18 to 45 year old RSE applicants. The PAC applicants have higher schooling, and are much more balanced across gender than the RSE applicants. These differences show that the RSE is succeeding in offering the chance to work in New Zealand to poorer, more rural, and less skilled individuals (especially males) than are able to move to New Zealand through the main permanent work category used by Tongans.

# **6. Knowledge of the RSE and the Application Process in Practice**

The launch of the RSE program was a significant event in Tonga. Before the scheme began, a team from the Tongan Labor Ministry and New Zealand Immigration Services in Tonga visited nearly all the districts in Tongatapu and most of the Outer islands. These visits acted both as part of an awareness campaign, and also a means of establishing networks with the District and town officers who would be involved in pre-screening workers for the work-ready pool. Local newspapers covered the program launch, and the hiring and departure of the first sets of workers. When asked how they obtained information about the RSE, 87 percent of RSE applicants used village leaders, 31 percent television, 27 percent newspapers, 26 percent radio, and 7 percent the internet.

> 7 See <u>www.pacificmigration.ac.nz</u> for a description of the survey and link to related papers.

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# Political Reforms and Public Policy:

# Evidence from Agricultural and Food Policies

_Alessandro Olper, Jan Fałkowski, and Johan Swinnen_<sup>_1_</sup>

**JEL classification codes:** D72, F13, O13, P16, Q18

**Keywords:** Democratic reforms, Agricultural and food policies, Comparative political

economics

**Sector Board** : Public Sector Governance (PSM)

1 Alessandro Olper (corresponding author) is an associate professor at the University of Milano, Italy, and a researcher at LICOS; his email address is <u>alessandro.olper@unimi.it. Jan Fałkowski is an assistant professor at the University of</u> Warsaw, Poland, and a researcher at CEAPS; his email address is <u>jfalkowski@wne.uw.edu.pl. Jo Swinnen is the director of LICOS, a professor at the</u> University of Leuven, Belgium, and a visiting professor at Stanford University; his email address is <u>Jo.Swinnen@econ.kuleuven.be. The authors would like to thank the</u> participants at several conferences and meetings and the editor and three anonymous referees for the _World Bank Economic Review_ for their useful comments and suggestions. Alessandro Olper and Jo Swinnen are grateful for financial support from the KU Leuven Research Council (OT, EF, and Methusalem projects). Jan Fałkowski gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (grant no. NN112118639).
Table I. All-Inclusive Deals and the Risk of Post-Settlement Conflict: Settlement Level

||_Signatory Peace Duration_|_Overall Peace Duration_|
|---|---|---|
||_Model 1_|_Model 2_|
|Exclusive-Multiple|0.750<br>(0.93)|1.843**<br>(2.25)|
|Two-Party Conflict|0.739|0.786|
||(0.81)|(0.77)|
|Conflict Duration|0.986|1.028*|
||(0.49)|(1.94)|
|Conflict Intensity|2.433***|1.679**|
||(2.69)|(2.41)|
|Conflict Issue|1.959|1.120|
||(1.56)|(0.45)|
|UN Peacekeeping|0.840|0.629|
||(0.43)|(1.22)|
|Non-UN Peacekeeping|0.956<br>(0.12)|1.288<br>(0.99)|
|Power Sharing|0.506*|0.515**|
||(1.77)|(2.31)|
|Observations|295|235|
|No. of Failures|29|45|
|Log Likelihood|-113.281|-184.757|

Note: A Cox proportional hazards model is employed. Hazard ratios rather than coefficients are reported, with robust z statistics (given in parentheses) clustered on conflict. *Statistically significant at the .10 level. **Statistically significant at the .05 level. ***Statistically significant at the .01 level. Two-tailed tests are used. Stata 10.0 was used to generate the statistical results.

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# **BOX 4: Adoption of Tax E-services in Africa**

**Problem:** Traditional tax processes involve paper-based filing and extensive in-person interactions between taxpayers and tax officials. This system creates several challenges such as large compliance costs, collusion with tax officials or extortion by them, and poor tax records that limit the potential of tax agencies to conduct analyses for compliance monitoring and forecasting. Whereas new technology to digitize taxpayer services may hold a lot of promise, important barriers to adoption of these technologies may severely curb the potential for revenue mobilization.

**Technology intervention:** Many African governments have been heavily investing in e- services as a way to move from paper-based systems to fully digital platforms. As an example of such e-services, e-filing and e-payment facilities enable digital filing of returns and digital payment of tax liabilities. These e-services often live within integrated and automated tax administration systems. The associated web portals also provide a range of benefits in terms of clear information on deadlines, access to assistance, and better record-keeping.

**Research design:** A number of studies from Africa attempt to understand the barriers to access of such e-services. These studies are typically based on surveys of representative samples of taxpayers, collecting detailed information around taxpayer experiences with e-services. In the case of Rwanda, Santoro et al. (2022) originally link survey data with tax administration data, in order to gain more information around taxpayers and their filing behavior.

**Results:** Lack of awareness and lack of training are key factors that have been identified in both Nigeria (Mas’ud, 2019) and Zimbabwe (Obert et al., 2018) as barriers to adoption of e- services by taxpayers. In Nigeria, Efobi et al. (2019) conclude that internal firm characteristics like owner’s education, age of the company, and use of an external auditor and computerized accounting system, are most strongly correlated with the use of e-filing and e-payment by firms.

Partial take-up can persist even when e-services are mandatory, like in Rwanda. Santoro et al. (2022) uncover important digital divides among users and non-users. First, they show that female, less educated taxpayers, with less sophisticated businesses, are significantly less aware of e-services and less likely to use them.

In sum, for broad adoption of e-services to occur, tax administrators must ensure that the introduction of new technology is accompanied with extensive sensitization, training, and assistance, especially for disadvantaged taxpayers that are more likely to be excluded.

A second strand of the literature considers the impacts from technology adoption. While the impact of e-services like e-filing on tax payments, compliance costs and corruption have been rigorously studied in other similar contexts, such as Tajikistan (Okunogbe and 22
cost of contacting the Nikkei associations and obtaining names from them is not included in this estimate, since it was carried out by a World Bank consultant. The intercept survey was much cheaper, averaging US$30 per questionnaire.

Thus adding on 14 percent in taxes and 20 percent in administrative fees, the estimated cost of a survey of 500 questionnaires would be: $142,000 for the random, stratified survey; $67,000 for a snowball survey; and $20,100 for an intercept survey. Of course in any given application local wage levels and the costs of transportation will change the levels of these, and could also change the relative ratios. Nevertheless, since few detailed migration surveys are available, and even fewer provide details on their costs, these estimates should be useful to other researchers as a starting point.

# **7. Discussion and Conclusions**

Ethnic minorities and households containing migrants tend to be rare elements, making it difficult to obtain representative surveys in many instances. This paper has reported on an experiment which compared three different sampling methods in surveying JapaneseBrazilian households in Brazil. As expected, we find that snowball and intercept point survey methods tend to sample individuals more closely tied to the Nikkei community than randomly sampled individuals identified through a two-phase stratified survey. As a consequence the use of these other methods tends to overestimate the proportion of Nikkei households with migrant experience. Nevertheless, we do find that reweighting the intercept point survey to account for individuals who are more likely to visit multiple locations does bring the results closer to the stratified sample. The different survey methods also give quite different results in probit equations intended to examine the characteristics of return migrants, with the snowball sample in particular giving quite a different picture of the gender- and educational-selectivity of migration.

The three survey methods used here are often applicable in migrant-receiving countries, since migrants tend to cluster in certain geographic locations, and be regular visitors at certain fixed points and community events. The fact that migrants are often ethnically distinguishable from many citizens of the receiving country makes identification of 36

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management, growing local financial markets can help countries graduate from concessional lending by mitigating some of the costs and risks associated with non-concessional debt.

**Better data collection.** Transparency about balance sheets is a pre-requisite for sound debt management. Among other gaps, there is often limited data on contingent liabilities (especially those arising from state-owned enterprises and public-private partnerships) and the assets held by LIC governments. These data limitations are especially acute for debt issued by commercial and non-Paris Club creditors. Improving data collection practices for LIC debt would help policy makers make informed and appropriate borrowing decisions and allow the public to hold the government accountable for its fiscal management (World Bank and IMF 2018d).

**Monetary policy and exchange rate regimes.** More resilient monetary policy frameworks and foreign reserve buffers can help mitigate the impact of terms-of-trade and other shocks, including on the fiscal position (Adler, Magud, and Werner 2017). More LICs could join the growing number of EMDEs where improvements in the monetary policy regime have reduced inflation and, where appropriate, allow greater exchange rate flexibility to absorb shocks.

**Rigorous and transparent lending standards.** Creditors also have a role to play in containing debt vulnerabilities. The Addis Ababa Action Agenda calls for debtors and creditors to work together to prevent and resolve unsustainable debt situations. Creditors can aim for good practice in lending, drawing on principles for sustainable lending such as those being championed by the G20 countries (G20 2018).

# **VI. Conclusion**

In recent years, a broad-based rise in borrowing has increased public debt vulnerabilities in LICs. The composition of debt has also shifted, as many LICs have increased their exposure to non-Paris Club creditors and market-based debt, which may pose coordination challenges for any future debt resolution. While increased access to market funding has provided LICs with opportunities to address development needs, it has also exposed some countries to currency, interest rate, and refinancing risks.

The number of LICs at high risk of debt distress or in debt distress has increased significantly, and safety margins in many LICs currently assessed at low or moderate risks of debt distress have eroded. External gross financing needs are likely to rise further as current account deficits widen and large international bonds fall due. By increasing the effectiveness of resource mobilization, public spending, and debt management—supported by better data collection—LICs can reduce the probability of costly defaults, enhance debt transparency, support sustainable financial sector development, and reduce economic volatility.

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