rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Formal versus informal finance :
            evidence from China
China is often mentioned as a
            counterexample to the findings in the finance and growth
            literature since, despite the weaknesses in its banking
            system, it is one of the fastest growing economies in the
            world. The fast growth of Chinese private sector firms is
            taken as evidence that it is alternative financing and
            governance mechanisms that support China's growth.
            This paper takes a closer look at firm financing patterns
            and growth using a database of 2,400 Chinese firms.  The
            authors find that a relatively small percentage of firms in
            the sample utilize formal bank finance with a much greater
            reliance on informal sources. However, the results suggest
            that despite its weaknesses, financing from the formal
            financial system is associated with faster firm growth,
            whereas fund raising from alternative channels is not. Using
            a selection model, the authors find no evidence that these
            results arise because of the selection of firms that have
            access to the formal financial system. Although firms report
            bank corruption, there is no evidence that it significantly
            affects the allocation of credit or the performance of firms
            that receive the credit. The findings suggest that the role
            of reputation and relationship based financing and
            governance mechanisms in financing the fastest growing firms
            in China is likely to be overestimated.
On SARS type economic effects during
            infectious disease outbreaks
Infectious disease outbreaks can exact a
            high human and economic cost through illness and death.
            But, as with severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in
            East Asia in 2003, or the plague outbreak in Surat, India,
            in 1994, they can also create severe economic disruptions
            even when there is, ultimately, relatively little illness or
            death. Such disruptions are commonly the result of
            uncoordinated and panicky efforts by individuals to avoid
            becoming infected, of preventive activity. This paper places
            these "SARS type" effects in the context of
            research on economic epidemiology, in which behavioral
            responses to disease risk have both economic and
            epidemiological consequences. The paper looks in particular
            at how people form subjective probability judgments about
            disease risk. Public opinion surveys during the SARS
            outbreak provide suggestive evidence that people did indeed
            at times hold excessively high perceptions of the risk of
            becoming infected, or, if infected, of dying from the
            disease. The paper discusses research in behavioral
            economics and the theory of information cascades that may
            shed light on the origin of such biases. The authors
            consider whether public information strategies can help
            reduce unwarranted panic. A preliminary question is why
            governments often seem to have strong incentives to conceal
            information about infectious disease outbreaks. The paper
            reviews recent game-theoretic analysis that clarifies
            government incentives. An important finding is that
            government incentives to conceal decline the more numerous
            are non-official sources of information about a possible
            disease outbreak. The findings suggest that honesty may
            indeed be the best public policy under modern conditions of
            easy mass global communications.
Finance, financial sector policies,
            and long-run growth
The first part of this paper reviews the
            literature on the relation between finance and growth. The
            second part of the paper reviews the literature on the
            historical and policy determinants of financial development.
            Governments play a central role in shaping the operation of
            financial systems and the degree to which large segments of
            the financial system have access to financial services. The
            paper discusses the relationship between financial sector
            policies and economic development.
Distortions to agricultural
            incentives in Australia since world war II
Australia's lackluster economic
            growth performance in the first four decades following World
            War II was in part due to an anti-trade, anti-primary sector
            bias in government assistance policies. This paper provides
            new annual estimates of the extent of those biases since
            1946 and their gradual phase-out during the past two
            decades. In doing so it reveals that the timing of the
            sector assistance cuts was such as sometimes to improve but
            sometimes to worsen the distortions to incentives faced by
            farmers. The changes increased the variation of assistance
            rates within agriculture during the 1950s and 1960s,
            reducing the welfare contribution of those programs in that
            period. Although the assistance pattern within agriculture
            appears not to have been strongly biased against exporters,
            its reform has coincided with a substantial increase in the
            export orientation of many farm industries. The overall
            pattern for Australia is contrasted with that revealed by
            comparable new estimates for other high-income countries.
Patterns of export diversification
            in developing countries : intensive and extensive margins
This paper uses highly disaggregated
            trade data to investigate geographic and product
            diversification patterns across a group of developing
            nations for the period from 1990 to 2005. The econometric
            investigation shows that the gravity equation fits the
            observed differences in diversification across nations. The
            analysis shows that exports at the intensive margin account
            for the most important share of overall trade growth. At the
            extensive margin, geographic diversification is more
            important than product diversification, especially for
            developing countries. Taking part in free trade agreements,
            thereby reducing trade costs, and trading with countries in
            the North are also found to have positive impacts on export
            diversification for developing countries.
Informality among formal firms :
            firm-level, cross-country evidence on tax compliance and
            access to credit
The authors use firm-level, cross-county
            data from Investment Climate surveys in 49 developing
            countries to investigate an important channel through which
            informality can affect productivity: access to credit and
            external finance. Informality is measured as self-reported
            lack of tax compliance in a sample of registered firms that
            also answered questions on a large set of other
            characteristics. The authors find that more tax compliance
            is significantly associated with more access to credit both
            in OLS and in country fixed effects estimates. In
            particular, the link between credit and formality is
            stronger in high-formality countries. This suggests that
            firms' balance sheets are relatively more informative
            for financial institutions in environments where signal
            extraction is a less noisy process. The authors'
            results are robust to the inclusion of a wide array of
            correlates and to two-stage estimation.
Informality among formal firms :
            firm-level, cross-country evidence on tax compliance and
            access to credit
WPS4476 Policy ReseaRch WoRking PaPeR 4476 Informality among Formal Firms: Firm-level, Cross-country Evidence on Tax Compliance and Access to Credit _Roberta Gatti Maddalena Honorati_ The World Bank Development Research Group Macroeconomics and Growth Team January 2008
Indigenous and colonial origins of
            comparative economic development : the case of colonial
            India and Africa
This paper concerns the institutional
            origins of economic development, emphasizing the cases of
            nineteenth-century India and Africa. Colonial
            institutions-the law, western style property rights,
            newspapers and statistical analysis-played an important part
            in the emergence of Indian public and commercial life in the
            nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These institutions
            existed in the context of a state that was extractive and
            yet dependent on indigenous cooperation in many areas,
            especially in the case of the business class. In such
            conditions, Indian elites were critical in creating informal
            systems of peer-group education, enhancing aspiration
            through the use of historicist and religious themes and in
            creating a "benign sociology" of India as a
            prelude to development. Indigenous ideologies and practices
            were as significant in this slow enhancement of Indian
            capabilities as transplanted colonial ones. Contemporary
            development specialists would do well to consider the merits
            of indigenous forms of association and public debate,
            religious movements and entrepreneurial classes. Over much
            of Asia and Africa, the most successful enhancement of
            people's capabilities has come through the action of
            hybrid institutions of this type.
Joseph E. Stiglitz
Joseph E. Stiglitz, 2001 Nobel Laureate
            in Economics, helped create the theory of markets with
            asymmetric information and was one of the founders of modern
            development economics.  He played a leading role in an
            intellectual revolution that changed the characterization of
            a market economy.  In the new paradigm, the price system
            only imperfectly solves the information problem of scarcity
            because of the many other information problems that arise in
            the economy:  the selection over hidden characteristics, the
            provision of incentives for hidden behaviors and for
            innovation, and the coordination of choices over institutions.
Bosnia and Herzegovina 2001-2004 :
            enterprise restructuring, labor market transitions and poverty
This paper takes stock of labor market
            developments in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the period
            2001-2004, using the panel Living Standards Measurement
            Study/Living in Bosnia and Herzegovina survey. The analysis
            estimates a multinomial logit model of labor market
            transitions by state of origin (employment, unemployment,
            and inactivity) following the specification of widely used
            models of transition probabilities, and analyzes the impact
            of standard covariates. The results provide strong evidence
            that there are indeed significant differences in labor
            market transitions by gender, age, education, and geographic
            location. Using the panel structure of the multi-topic
            survey data, the authors find that these transitions are
            related to welfare dynamics, with welfare levels evolving
            differently for various groups depending on their labor
            market trajectories. The findings show that current labor
            market trends reflecting women's movement out of labor
            markets and laid-off male workers accepting informal sector
            jobs characterized by low productivity will lead to adverse
            social outcomes. These outcomes could be averted if the
            planned enterprise reform program creates a more favorable
            business environment and leads to faster restructuring and
            growth of firms.
Aid, growth, and real exchange rate dynamics
Devarajan, Go, Page, Robinson, and
            Thierfelder argued that if aid is about the future and
            recipients are able to plan consumption and investment
            decisions optimally over time, then the potential problem of
            an aid-induced appreciation of the real exchange rate (Dutch
            disease) does not occur.  In their paper, "Aid, Growth
            and Real Exchange Rate Dynamics," this key result is
            derived without requiring extreme assumptions or additional
            productivity story. The economic framework is a standard
            neoclassical growth model, based on the familiar Salter-Swan
            characterization of an open economy, with full dynamic
            savings and investment decisions. It does require that the
            model is fully dynamic in both savings and investment
            decisions. An important assumption is that aid should be
            predictable for intertemporal smoothing to take place. If
            aid volatility forces recipients to be constrained and
            myopic, Dutch disease problems become an issue.
The impact of regional
            liberalization and harmonization in road transport services
            : a focus on Zambia and lessons for landlocked countries
Based on a detailed empirical study,
            this paper argues that regional liberalization of trucking
            services has had an important effect on transport costs and
            tariffs for Zambia's economy.  Zambia is a peculiar
            example in Southern Africa as it benefits from relatively
            low transport costs compared with other landlocked countries
            in Africa. This is mainly because of competition between
            Zambian and other regional, mainly South African, operators
            and because of South African investments in Zambia's
            trucking industry.  As a result, the costs of operators
            registered in Zambia and South Africa are similar.  The
            study also demonstrates that enhancing trucking
            interoperability in Southern Africa would significantly
            impact positively the Zambian trucking industry's
            competitiveness. The main measures to significantly increase
            trucking competitiveness in the region would more likely
            derive from reducing fuel costs in Zambia, improving
            border-post operations, and relaxing South African truck
            import rules.
Enforceability of labor law :
            evidence from a labor court in Mexico
The authors analyze lawsuits involving
            publicly-appointed lawyers in a labor court in Mexico to
            study how a rigid law is enforced. They show that, even
            after a judge has awarded something to a worker alleging
            unjust dismissal, the award goes uncollected 56 percent of
            the time. Workers who are dismissed after working more than
            seven years, however, do not leave these awards uncollected
            because their legally-mandated severance payments are
            larger. A simple theoretical model is used to generate
            predictions on how lawsuit outcomes should depend on the
            information available to the worker and on the worker's
            cost of collecting an award after trial, both of which are
            determined in part by the worker's lawyer. Differences
            in outcomes across lawyers are consistent with the
            hypothesis that firms take advantage both of workers who are
            poorly informed and of workers who find it more costly to
            collect an award after winning at trial.
On measuring the benefits of lower
            transport costs
Despite large amounts invested in rural
            roads in developing countries, little is known about their
            benefits.  This paper derives an expression for the
            willingness-to-pay for a reduction in transport costs from
            the canonical agricultural household model and uses it to
            estimate the benefits of a hypothetical road project.
            Estimation is based on novel cross-sectional data collected
            in a small region of Madagascar with enormous, yet plausibly
            exogenous, variation in transport cost. A road that
            essentially eliminated transport costs in the study area
            would boost the incomes of the remotest households-those
            facing transport costs of about USD 75/ton-by nearly half,
            mostly by raising non-farm earnings. This benefit estimate
            is contrasted to one based on a hedonic approach.
On the welfarist rationale for
            relative poverty lines
The theory and evidence supporting a
            relativist approach to poverty measurement are critically
            reviewed.  Various sources of welfare interdependence are
            identified, including the idea of "relative
            deprivation" as well other (positive and negative)
            welfare effects for poor people of belonging to a better-off
            group.  An economic model combines informal risk sharing
            with the idea of a "positional good," and
            conditions are derived in which the relative deprivation
            effect dominates, implying a relative poverty measure. The
            paper then reviews the problems encountered in testing for
            welfare effects of relative deprivation and discusses the
            implications of micro evidence from Malawi.  The results are
            consistent with the emphasis given to absolute level of
            living in development policy discussions.  However, relative
            deprivation is still evident in the data from this poor but
            unequal country, and it is likely to become a more important
            factor as the country develops.
Fiscal redistribution and income
            inequality in Latin America
Income inequality in Latin America ranks
            among the highest in the world.  It can be traced back to
            the unequal distribution of assets (especially land and
            education) in the region. But the extent to which asset
            inequality translates into income inequality depends on the
            redistributive capacity of the state. This paper documents
            the performance of Latin American fiscal systems from the
            perspective of income redistribution using newly-available
            information on the incidence of taxes and transfers across
            the region. The findings indicate that: (i) the differences
            in income inequality before taxes and transfers between
            Latin America and Western Europe are much more modest than
            those after taxes and transfers; (ii) the key reason is
            that, in contrast with industrial countries, in most Latin
            American countries the fiscal system is of little help in
            reducing income inequality; and (iii) in countries where
            fiscal redistribution is significant, it is achieved mostly
            through transfers rather than taxes. These facts stress the
            need for fiscal reforms across the region to further the
            goal of social equity. However, different countries need to
            place different relative emphasis on raising tax collection,
            restructuring the tax system, and improving the targeting of expenditures.
Realizing the gains from trade :
            export crops, marketing costs, and poverty
This paper explores the role of export
            costs in the process of poverty reduction in rural Africa.
            The authors claim that the marketing costs that emerge when
            the commercialization of export crops requires
            intermediaries can lead to lower participation into export
            cropping and, thus, to higher poverty. They test the model
            using data from the Uganda National Household Survey. The
            findings show that: i) farmers living in villages with fewer
            outlets for sales of agricultural exports are likely to be
            poorer than farmers residing in marketendowed villages; ii)
            market availability leads to increased household
            participation in export cropping (coffee, tea, cotton,
            fruits); and iii) households engaged in export cropping are
            less likely to be poor than subsistence-based households.
            The authors conclude that the availability of markets for
            agricultural export crops helps realize the gains from
            trade. This result uncovers the role of complementary
            factors that provide market access and reduce marketing
            costs as key building blocks in the link between the gains
            from export opportunities and the poor.
Agro-manufactured export prices,
            wages and unemployment
This paper estimates the impacts of
            world agricultural trade liberalization on wages, employment
            and unemployment in Argentina, a country with positive net
            agricultural exports and high unemployment rates. In the
            estimation of these wage and unemployment responses, the
            empirical model allows for individual labor supply responses
            and for adjustment costs in labor demand. The findings show
            that a 10 percent increase in the price of agricultural
            exports would cause an increase in the Argentine employment
            probability of 1.36 percentage points, matched by a decline
            in the unemployment probability of 0.75 percentage points
            and an increase in labor market participation of 0.61
            percentage points. Further, the unemployment rate would
            decline by 1.23 percentage points (by almost 10 percent).
            Expected wages would increase by 10.3 percent, an effect
            that is mostly driven by higher employment probabilities.
            This indicates that the bulk of the impacts of trade reforms
            originates in household responses in the presence of
            adjustment costs, and that failure to account for them may
            lead to significant biases in the welfare evaluation of
            trade policy.