rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
An analysis of money's worth
            ratios in Chile
Empirical analyses of annuities markets
            have been limited to a few industrial countries and
            restricted by data limitations. Chile provides excellent
            conditions for research on annuities because of the depth of
            its market and the availability of data. The authors use an
            extensive dataset on individual annuities to examine
            econometrically a measure of market performance-money's
            worth ratios (MWRs)-or the ratio of the expected present
            value of annuity payments to the premium. The results show
            that annuitants in Chile have generally a good deal for
            their premiums, as indicated by MWRs higher than one, and
            also higher than those estimated for other countries. The
            difference between Chile and other countries is striking
            considering that annuities in Chile are indexed to prices.
            The wide range of indexed instruments in Chile, allowing
            providers to hedge their risks while extracting higher
            returns, helps explain the difference. The high degree of
            market competition has also contributed to this outcome.
            Efforts to improve market transparency through a new
            electronic quotation system have decreased the dispersion of
            MWRs. Finally, MWRs tend to decrease for contracts with
            longer durations, reflecting pricing for higher longevity
            and reinvestment risks. These results are consistent with
            separate research on the annuity rate, and indicate the need
            to ensure competition and market transparency, as well as to
            develop appropriate financial instruments for providers to
            ensure good outcomes for annuitants.
Does rising landlessness signal
            success or failure for Vietnam's agrarian transition
In the wake of reforms to establish a
            free market in land-use rights, Vietnam is experiencing a
            pronounced rise in rural landlessness. To some observers
            this is a harmless by-product of a more efficient economy,
            while to others it signals the return of the pre-socialist
            class-structure, with the rural landless at the bottom of
            the economic ladder.  The authors' theoretical model
            suggests that removing restrictions on land markets will
            increase landlessness among the poor, but that there will be
            both gainers and losers, with uncertain impacts on aggregate
            poverty. Empirically, they find that landlessness is less
            likely for the poor and that the observed rise in
            landlessness is poverty reducing on balance.  However, there
            are marked regional differences, notably between the north
            and the south.
Does rising landlessness signal
            success or failure for Vietnam's agrarian transition
WPS3871 Does Rising Landlessness Signal Success or Failure for Vietnam’s Agrarian Transition?

# Martin Ravallion and Dominique van de Walle<sup>1</sup>

_Development Research Group, World Bank_

**Abstract:** In the wake of reforms to establish a free market in land-use rights, Vietnam is experiencing a pronounced rise in rural landlessness. To some observers this is a harmless by-product of a more efficient economy, while to others it signals the return of the pre-socialist class-structure, with the rural landless at the bottom of the economic ladder.  Our theoretical model suggests that removing restrictions on land markets will increase landlessness among the poor, but that there will be both gainers and losers, with uncertain impacts on aggregate poverty. Empirically, we find that landlessness is less likely for the poor and that the observed rise in landlessness is poverty reducing on balance. However, there are marked regional differences, notably between the north and the south.

**Key words:** Land reform, land markets, poverty, inequality, landlessness, Vietnam **JEL codes:** D60, P21, Q15

World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3871, April 2006 _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 view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at_ _<u>http://econ.worldbank.org.</u>_

> 1 The authors are grateful for the support of the Poverty and Social Impact Analysis initiative of the World Bank’s Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network and support from the PAPAP Trust Fund.  They are also grateful to Martin Rama for encouraging them to write this paper and to Hai Anh Dang for able research assistance. For comments on this paper the authors are grateful to Haroon Akram-Lodhi, Klaus Deininger, Quy-Toan Do, Gershon Feder, Alice Mesnard, Martin Rama, Rob Swinkels, Carrie Turk and seminar participants at the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, Hanoi.

<u>Correspondence: Martin Ravallion and Dominique van de Walle, World Bank, 1818 H Street NW,</u> Washington, DC 20433, USA. mravallion@worldbank.org; <u>dvandewalle@worldbank.org</u>
Getting girls into school : evidence
            from a scholarship program in Cambodia
Increasing the schooling attainment of
            girls is a challenge in much of the developing world. The
            authors evaluate the impact of a program that gives
            scholarships to girls making the transition between the last
            year of primary school and the first year of secondary
            school in Cambodia. They show that the scholarship program
            had a large, positive effect on the school enrollment and
            attendance of girls. Their preferred set of estimates
            suggests program effects on enrollment and attendance at
            program schools of 30 to 43 percentage points. Scholarship
            recipients were also more likely to be enrolled at any
            scchool (not just program schools) by a margin of 22 to 33
            percentage points. The impact of the Japan Fund for Poverty
            Reduction (JFPR) program appears to have been largest among
            girls with the lowest socioeconomic status at baseline. The
            results are robust to a variety of controls for observable
            differences between scholarship recipients and
            nonrecipients, to unobserved heterogeneity across girls, and
            to selective attrition out of the sample.
Getting girls into school : evidence
            from a scholarship program in Cambodia
# WPS3910-IE

<mark>I</mark> MPACT <mark>E</mark> VALUATION <mark>S</mark> ERIES <mark>N</mark> O <mark>. 1</mark>

**Getting Girls into School: Evidence from a Scholarship Program in Cambodia**<sup>♣</sup>

Deon Filmer Norbert Schady

## World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3910, May 2006

_The Impact Evaluation Series has been established in recognition of the importance of impact evaluation studies for World Bank operations and for development in general. The series serves as a vehicle for the dissemination of findings of those studies. Papers in this series are part of the Bank’s Policy Research Working Paper Series. 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._

> ♣ We thank Luis Benveniste, Pedro Carneiro, Eric Edmonds, T. Paul Schultz, Miguel Urquiola, and participants at a seminar at the World Bank for many useful comments.  All remaining errors are our own.  This work benefited from generous support by Government of the Netherlands through the BNPP program.
Evaluating anti-poverty programs
The author critically reviews the
            methods available for the ex-post counterfactual analysis of
            programs that are assigned exclusively to individuals,
            households, or locations. The discussion covers both
            experimental and non-experimental methods (including
            propensity-score matching, discontinuity designs, double and
            triple differences, and instrumental variables). Two main
            lessons emerge. First, despite the claims of advocates, no
            single method dominates; rigorous, policy-relevant
            evaluations should be open-minded about methodology. Second,
            future efforts to draw more useful lessons from evaluations
            will call for more policy-relevant measures and deeper
            explanations of measured impacts than are possible from the
            classic ("black box") assessment of mean impact.
How important are financing
            constraints The role of finance in the business environment
What role does the business environment
            play in promoting and restraining firm growth? Recent
            literature points to a number of factors as obstacles to
            growth. Inefficient functioning of financial markets,
            inadequate security and enforcement of property rights, poor
            provision of infrastructure, inefficient regulation and
            taxation, and broader governance features such as corruption
            and macroeconomic stability are all discussed without any
            comparative evidence on their ordering. In this paper, we
            use firm level survey data to present evidence on the
            relative importance of different features of the business
            environment.  We find that although firms report many
            obstacles to growth, not all the obstacles are equally
            constraining. Some affect firm growth only indirectly
            through their influence on other obstacles, or not at all.
            Using Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) methodology as well as
            regressions, we find that only obstacles related to Finance,
            Crime and Policy Instability directly affect the growth rate
            of firms. Robustness tests further show that the Finance
            result is the most robust of the three. These results have
            important policy implications for the priority of reform
            efforts. Our results show that maintaining policy stability,
            keeping crime under control, and undertaking financial
            sector reforms to relax financing constraints are likely to
            be the most effective routes to promote firm growth.
Policy reform, economic growth, and
            the digital divide - an econometric analysis
Rapid growth of Internet use in
            high-income economies, has raised the specter of a
            "digital divide" that will marginalize developing
            countries, because they can neither afford Internet access,
            nor use it effectively when it is available. Using a new
            cross-country data set, the authors investigate two
            proximate determinants of the digital divide: Internet
            intensity (Internet subscriptions per telephones mainline),
            and access to telecom services. Surprisingly, they find no
            gap in Internet intensity. When differences in urbanization,
            and competition policy are controlled for, low-income
            countries have intensities as high as those of industrial
            countries. While income does not seem to matter in this
            context, competition policy matters a great deal. Low-income
            countries with high World Bank ratings for competition
            policy, have significantly higher Internet intensities. The
            authors' findings on Internet intensity implies that
            the digital divide is not really new, but reflects a
            persistent gap in the availability of mainline telephones
            services. After identifying mobile telephones as a promising
            new platform for Internet access, they use panel data to
            study the determinants of mobile telephone diffusion during
            the past decade. Their results show that income explains
            part of the diffusion lag for poor countries, but they also
            highlight the critical role of policy. Developing countries
            whose policies promote economic growth, and private sector
            competition, have experienced much more rapid diffusion of
            mobile telephone services. Simulations based on the
            econometric results, suggest that feasible reforms could
            sharply narrow the digital divide during the next decade for
            many countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The
            authors' review of the literature, also suggests that
            direct access promotion would yield substantial benefits for
            poor households, and that cost-effective intervention
            strategies are now available.
From users to custodians : changing
            relations between people and the State in forest management
            in Tanzania
Central control of forests takes
            management responsibility away from the communities most
            dependent on them, inevitably resulting in tensions. Like
            many African countries, Tanzania--which has forest or
            woodland cover over 30-40 percent of its land--established
            central forestry institutions at a time when there was
            little need for active management and protection because
            population pressures were low. But in the face of scarce
            public resources and burgeoning demand from the growing
            population for agricultural landand woodland products, there
            has been growing recognition of the need to bring
            individuals, local groups, and communities into the policy,
            planning, and management process if woodlands are to remain
            productive in the coming decades. Tanzania established its
            first three community-owned and -managed forest reserves in
            September 1994. Today, supported by substantive policy
            reforms that largely grew out of the early experiences with
            community-based management, more than 500 villages own and
            manage forest reserves, and anoher 500 or so smaller social
            units and individuals have recognized reserves. Joint
            management by the state and the people is getting underway
            in at least four government-owned forest reserves.The
            authors describe the evolution of community-based forest and
            woodland management in Tanzania and the underlying policy,
            legal, and institutional framework. They draw together some
            of the lessons from this experience and review emerging
            issues. They find that the most successful initiatives
            involving communities and individuals have been those that
            moved away from a user-centric approach (like that often
            used in South Asia) and toward an approach based on the idea
            that communities can be most effective when they are fully
            involved in all aspects of decisionmaking about management
            and protection. This suggests that the government should
            allow communities to become engaged as managers in their own
            right, rather than as passive participants who merely agree
            to the management parameters defined by the government. The
            Tanzanian experience has shown that community-based forest
            and woodland management can be an integral part of
            initiatives that seek to improve governance over natural
            resources by improving accountability and by democratizing
            decisionmaking at the local level.
Securities clearance and settlement
            systems - a guide to best practices
As an essential part of a nation's
            financial sector infrastructure, securities clearance, and
            settlement systems must be closely integrated with national
            payment systems, so that safety, soundness, certainty, and
            efficiency can be achieved at a cost acceptable to all
            participants. Central banks have paid considerable attention
            to payment systems, but securities clearance, and settlement
            systems have only recently been subjected to rigorous
            assessment. The Western Hemisphere Payments and Securities
            Clearance and Settlement Initiative (WHI), led by the World
            Bank, and in cooperation with the Centro de Estudios
            Monetarios Latinoamericanos (CEMLA), gave the authors a
            unique opportunity to observe how various countries in Latin
            America, and the Caribbean undertake securities clearance,
            and settlement. To do so, the authors developed a practical,
            and implementable assessment methodology, covering key
            issues that affect the quality of such systems. In this
            paper they discuss the objectives, scope, and content of a
            typical securities system, identify the elements that
            influence the system's quality, and show how their
            assessment methodology works. They focus on the development
            of core principles, and minimum standards for integrated
            systems of payments, and securities clearance and
            settlement. Their paper fills a gap by providing an
            evaluation tool for assessors of such systems, especially
            those who must assess evolving systems in developing, and
            transition economies. Essentially, an assessment involves a
            structured analysis to answer four related questions: 1)
            What are the objective, and scope of a securities clearance
            and settlement system? 2) Who are the participants, what
            roles do they play, and what expectations do they have? 3)
            What procedures are required to satisfy the
            participants' needs? 4) What inherent risks are
            involved, and how can they be mitigated at an acceptable cost?
Implementing the market approach to
            enterprise support - an evaluation of ten matching grant schemes
Developing viable new business is
            critical to recovery, and long-term growth, especially in
            transition economies. There has been a long history of
            public support of enterprise development, starting with
            centralized state agency initiatives, but moving more
            recently to decentralized instruments for development of the
            business services market. The window of time during which
            the benefits of intervention are likely to be greatest: when
            a market is in its infancy, and its development is
            constrained by uncertainty, and lack of information.
            Interventions for enterprise support should be
            demand-responsive, and flexibly organized. In some
            circumstances, centralized assistance may still be
            effective, but it is generally better to use competitive
            private service providers responding to enterprises'
            changing needs. The main task is to stimulate the private
            services sector, improving its capacity to respond to the
            demands of new, and expanding private enterprises. Support
            for enterprises has tended to be either free, or heavily
            subsidized. But such subsidies can be justified only if
            interventions efficiently supply goods. Providing technical,
            and management know-how can be a public good if it generates
            externalities - if, for example, know-how benefits can be
            disseminated at proportionately low additional cost. Any
            subsidy for an intervention should be temporary, and should
            be phased out when the main objective of intervention is
            achieved - that is, when the market takes off. Grants should
            generally be for know-how, not for equipment. There may be a
            case for unbundling the know-how component of loans
            (including feasibility studies, and follow-up expert
            services) for grant funding. A package combining loans and
            grants - through a single financial institution, or through
            separate institutions - may work provided safeguards can be
            put in place to prevent perverse use of grants. The matching
            grant model, which is used increasingly in the World Bank,
            and elsewhere, is one solution - but it must be justified,
            and carefully designed. After evaluating ten matching grant
            funds, the author concludes that performance is mixed. Best
            practice models are needed. Ensuring economic benefits
            requires proactive management, with clear objectives of
            market facilitation ("making a market"). And it
            requires a balance between rapid grant approval procedures,
            and careful selection of services for grants.
Household welfare and poverty
            dynamics in Burkina Faso : empirical evidence from household surveys
The authors investigate the dynamics of
            poverty and income inequality in a cross-section of
            socio-economic groups and geographical regions over the
            five-year growth period following the 1994 devaluation of
            the CFA franc in Burkina Faso. Results show rapidly
            increasing urban poverty accompanied by rising income
            inequality, declining poverty -growth elasticities, and
            significant changes in the poverty map. In rural areas, the
            incidence of poverty remained the same and income inequality
            did not increase. In contrast, the distribution of welfare
            across socio-economic groups was more stable. The rank
            ordering of socioeconomic groups on the welfare scale did
            not change during the post-devaluation growth period.
            Poverty remains largely a rural phenomenon, whose inelastic
            nature may justify a shift toward growth-oriented policies
            that at least maintain the rural poor's share of income
            to reduce poverty in the medium term. Among factors that
            feed into income inequality: disparities in wages and in
            educational attainment and unequal access to productive
            assets (especially human capital).