rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Delivering education to the
            underserved through a public-private partnership program in Pakistan
This study experimentally evaluates the
            short-term impacts of public per-student subsidies to
            partnering local entrepreneurs to establish and operate
            tuition-free, coeducational, private primary schools in
            educationally underserved villages in Sindh province,
            Pakistan. Two subsidy structures were tested, one in which
            the subsidy amount did not differ by student gender, and the
            other in which the subsidy amount was higher for female
            students. The program administrator introduced the latter
            structure with the aim of correcting for the gender
            disparity in school enrollment in the general program
            setting. The program increased school enrollment by 30
            percentage points in treated villages, for boys and girls.
            It increased test scores by 0.63 standard deviations in
            treated villages. The gender-differentiated subsidy
            structure did not have larger impacts on girls'
            enrollment or test scores than the gender-uniform one.
            Program schools proved more effective in raising test scores
            than government schools located near the villages, with
            program-school students scoring 0.16 standard deviations
            higher, despite coming from more socioeconomically
            disadvantaged backgrounds. Estimations of the demand for
            schooling and education production suggest nearly efficient
            choices on school inputs by the program administrator and
            partnering entrepreneurs.
Delivering education to the
            underserved through a public-private partnership program in Pakistan
WPS8177 Policy Research Working Paper 8177 Delivering Education to the Underserved through a Public-Private Partnership Program in Pakistan _Felipe Barrera-Osorio David S. Blakeslee Matthew Hoover Leigh L. Linden Dhushyanth Raju Stephen P. Ryan_ South Asia Region Office of the Chief Economist August 2017
A bit far geography, international
            economic agreements, and foreign direct investment :
            evidence from emerging markets
How do international economic agreements
            influence the investment patterns of firms from emerging
            economies? This paper studies the ways in which bilateral
            investment treaties and preferential trade agreements
            interact with geographic and cultural distance to influence
            firms' investment patterns. How does geographic and
            cultural proximity affect the impact of international
            economic agreements on foreign direct investment flows? This
            question is answered using data from an original survey of
            700 firms from four emerging (or newly-emerged) economies:
            Brazil, India, the Republic of Korea, and South Africa. The
            findings suggest that bilateral investment treaties and
            preferential trade agreements increase the likelihood of
            foreign direct investment. Yet, the effects of these
            agreements on foreign direct investment depend on the
            distance between the origin and potential destination
            countries. Moreover, trade and investment agreements appear
            to interact differently with distance. By providing
            guarantees to investors and signaling credible commitment
            from host governments, bilateral investment treaties
            mitigate the higher uncertainty and transaction costs
            associated with investing in faraway, unfamiliar markets. By
            contrast, the investment attraction effectiveness of
            preferential trade agreements fades with distance.
Moving out and up : panel data
            evidence on migration and poverty in Uganda
This paper examines the relationship
            between spatial and economic mobility in Uganda using
            longitudinal data from 2005 through 2012. The study relies
            on a detailed panel tracking survey and exploits exogenous
            variation in the spatial intensity of violent conflict,
            rainfall shocks, distance from the regional capital, and
            ethnic networks in urban areas. The analysis finds
            significant welfare gains of 58 percentage points due to
            migration. However, the returns to migration vary with the
            direction of the move. Moving to a rural destination yields
            welfare returns of 56 percentage points; the returns to
            urban moves, at 65 percentage points, are markedly higher.
            Policies to capture the welfare gains from migration to
            cities should focus on further urbanization, the development
            of road infrastructure, and investments in education for men
            and women in rural areas.
The impact of digital technologies
            on routine tasks : do labor policies matter
There is a strong concern that
            technology is increasingly replacing routine tasks,
            displacing lower-skilled workers. Labor market institutions
            exist to protect workers from shocks but, by increasing
            labor costs, labor policy may also constrain firms from
            adjusting the workforce and, hence, from fully benefiting
            from technology adoption. This paper assesses the link
            between access to digital technologies and the demand for
            skills in the largest Latin American country, Brazil.
            Between 1996 and 2006, the country experienced a period of
            strong growth in Internet service provision, as well as in
            the enforcement of labor market regulations at the
            subnational level. The paper's empirical strategy
            exploits administrative data to assess the extent to which
            the adoption of digital technology affects employment and
            the skill content of jobs at the local level. In addition,
            the paper investigates whether the stringency of labor
            regulations influences this adjustment, by comparing the
            effect across industries subject to different degrees of
            enforcement of labor regulations. Using the fact that
            industries vary in the degree of reliance on digital
            technologies, the estimates suggest that digital technology
            adoption leads to a reduction in employment in local labor
            markets. The decrease in employment is larger for routine
            tasks, thereby shifting the composition of the workforce
            toward nonroutine, cognitive skills. However, and in
            contrast with labor policy intentions, the evidence points
            to the idea that labor market regulations differentially
            benefit the skilled workforce, particularly those workers
            employed in nonroutine, cognitive tasks.
Natural disaster damage indices
            based on remotely sensed data: an application to Indonesia
Combining nightlight data as a proxy for
            economic activity with remote sensing data typically used
            for natural hazard modeling, this paper constructs novel
            damage indices at the district level for Indonesia, for
            different disaster events such as floods, earthquakes,
            volcanic eruptions and the 2004 Christmas Tsunami. Ex ante,
            prior to the incidence of a disaster, district-level damage
            indices could be used to determine the size of the annual
            fiscal transfers from the central government to the
            subnational governments. Ex post, or after the incidence of
            a natural disaster, damage indices are useful for quickly
            assessing and estimating the damages caused and are
            especially useful for central and local governments,
            emergency services, and aid workers so that they can respond
            efficiently and deploy resources where they are most needed.
Shelter from the storm
            household-level impacts of, and responses to, the 2015
            floods in Malawi
As extreme weather events intensify due
            to climate change, it becomes ever more critical to
            understand how vulnerable households are to these events and
            the mechanisms households can rely on to minimize losses
            effectively. This paper analyzes the impacts of the floods
            that occurred during the 2014/15 growing season in Malawi,
            using a two-period panel data set. The results show that
            while yields were dramatically lower for households severely
            affected by the floods, drops in food consumption
            expenditures and calories per capita were less dramatic.
            However, dietary quality, as captured by the food
            consumption score, was significantly lower for
            flood-affected households. Although access to social safety
            nets increased food consumption outcomes, particularly for
            those in moderately-affected areas, the proportion of
            households with access to certain safety net programs was
            lower in 2015 compared with 2013. The latter finding
            suggests that linking these programs more closely to
            disaster relief efforts could substantially improve welfare
            outcomes during and after a natural disaster. Finally,
            risk-coping strategies, including financial account
            ownership, access to off-farm income sources, and adult
            children living away from home, were generally ineffective
            in mitigating the negative impacts of the floods.
Optimal targeting under budget
            constraints in a humanitarian context
The combination of conflict, food
            insecurity, and displacement generates competing claims for
            financial resources that stretch the donors' ability to
            provide funding and the humanitarian organizations'
            capacity to provide social assistance. The paper uses
            Receiver Operating Characteristic curves and related indexes
            to determine the optimal targeting strategy of a food
            voucher program for refugees. The estimations focus on the
            2014 food vouchers administered by the World Food Programme
            to Syrian refugees in Jordan. The analysis uses data
            collected by the United Nations High Commissioner for
            Refugees. Based on a poverty model, Receiver Operating
            Characteristic curves are used to optimize coverage and
            leakage rates under budget constraints. The paper shows how
            policy makers can use these instruments to fine-tune
            targeting using coverage rates, budgets, or poverty lines as
            guiding principles to increase the overall efficiency of a
            program. As humanitarian organizations operate under
            increasing budget constraints and increasing demands for
            efficiency, the proposed approach addresses both concerns.
Could the debate be over errors in
            farmer-reported production and their implications for the
            inverse scale-productivity relationship in Uganda
Based on a two-round household panel
            survey conducted in Eastern Uganda, this study shows that
            the analysis of the inverse scale-productivity relationship
            is highly sensitive to how plot-level maize production,
            hence yield (production divided by GPS-based plot area), is
            measured. Although farmer-reported production-based
            plot-level maize yield regressions consistently lend support
            to the inverse scale-productivity relationship, the
            comparable regressions estimated with maize yields based on
            sub-plot crop cutting, full-plot crop cutting, and remote
            sensing point toward constant returns to scale, at the mean
            as well as throughout the distributions of objective
            measures of maize yield. In deriving the much-debated
            coefficient for GPS-based plot area, the maize yield
            regressions control for objective measures of soil
            fertility, maize genetic heterogeneity, and edge effects at
            the plot level; a rich set of plot, household, and plot
            manager attributes; as well as time-invariant household- and
            parcel-level unobserved heterogeneity in select
            specifications that exploit the panel nature of the data.
            The core finding is driven by persistent overestimation of
            farmer-reported maize production and yield vis-à-vis their
            crop cutting–based counterparts, particularly in the lower
            half of the plot area distribution. Although the results
            contribute to a larger, and renewed, body of literature
            questioning the inverse scale-productivity relationship
            based on omitted explanatory variables or alternative
            formulations of the agricultural productivity measure, the
            paper is among the first documenting how the inverse
            relationship could be a statistical artifact, driven by
            errors in farmer-reported survey data on crop production.
Financial globalization : a glass
            half empty
Since the 1970s, the world has embarked
            on a new financial globalization era. Cross-country capital
            flows have significantly increased in developed and
            developing countries. However, the characteristics of
            financial globalization differ from what was originally
            expected. Various examples illustrate this point. Although
            the literature predicted large gains from financial
            globalization (such as additional funding, broad
            diversification, and deeper financial systems), the positive
            effects have been more limited. In developed and developing
            countries, financial globalization has manifested in
            increasing gross capital flows (inflows and outflows) rather
            than larger net flows. Capital markets are segmented and
            only a few large firms access international markets.
            International institutional investors do not seem to have
            played a stabilizing role, helping to exacerbate and
            transmit crises across countries. Although financial
            globalization has brought several beneficial changes, its
            net effects and spillovers to the overall economies
            participating in it have yet to be understood.
Flies without borders : lessons from
            Chennai on improving India's municipal public health services
India's fast-growing cities face
            three key challenges in improving public health outcomes.
            The first is the persistence of weak links in the chain --
            notably, slums badly underserved with basic civic services
            -- that can pose public health threats to all. Richer
            residents corner public resources, such as water and
            sanitation services, but their children's health
            indicators suggest they are deeply affected by contagion
            from the broader urban environment. The second challenge
            relates to devolution of services to elected bodies.
            Devolution works poorly for intangible and highly technical
            services, such as public health, where success is measured
            by the lack of (adverse) events. The third challenge is high
            fragmentation of services that directly affect health
            outcomes. In India, some cities have addressed these
            challenges more effectively than others have. This paper
            explores the management of municipal public health services
            in two major Indian metropolises with sharply contrasting
            health and sanitation indicators. The paper explains how
            Chennai mitigates these challenges through active service
            outreach to vulnerable populations, and a considered
            approach to devolution that distributes responsibilities
            appropriately between line agencies, technical personnel,
            and elected representatives. Services in Delhi are quite
            constrained. These policy lessons are pertinent to other
            Indian cities and beyond.
Which emerging markets and
            developing economies face corporate balance sheet
            vulnerabilities : a novel monitoring framework
This paper introduces a novel corporate
            financial vulnerability index that tracks financial
            conditions of the non-financial corporate sector. Using the
            balance sheet information of 14,207 listed non-financial
            firms in 69 emerging markets and developing economies, the
            index shows that, at the global level, corporate
            vulnerability sharply increased since 2013 and stabilized in
            2016. Regional trends are more heterogeneous, pointing to
            significant corporate vulnerabilities in Eastern Europe and
            Central Asia, as well as a deterioration of firms'
            financial conditions in Latin America, the Middle East and
            North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa in recent years. The
            energy sector has exhibited the fastest deterioration,
            especially since 2014, in part driven by the decline in oil
            prices. However, if currently relatively benign global
            funding conditions and higher commodity prices endure,
            companies may have an opportunity to strengthen their
            balance sheets. The paper also finds that the index has
            leading indicator properties for socioeconomic outcomes,
            such as a rise in unemployment and an economic recession,
            and outperforms a commonly used "debt at risk" approach.
Regulatory constraints to
            agricultural productivity
The economic thinking around the role of
            agriculture for development has evolved since the 1950s.
            Over the past decades, the agriculture sector has been
            rediscovered as a sector with great potential for triggering
            growth, reducing poverty and inequality, providing food
            security, and delivering environmental services. This paper
            contributes to the literature on the determinants of
            agricultural development by investigating the role played by
            laws and regulations. First, the paper proposes new measures
            of regulatory quality and regulatory efficiency in
            agriculture. Second, the paper employs cross-section data to
            test the relationship of the proposed measures with
            agricultural performance. The results indicate that
            agricultural productivity is on average higher where
            transaction costs imposed by regulations are lower and where
            countries adhere to more regulatory good practices. This
            relationship is stronger when low transaction costs and
            regulatory good practices are combined.
Assessing effects of large-scale
            land transfers: challenges and opportunities in
            Malawi's estate sector
This study uses data from the complete
            computerization of agricultural leases in Malawi, a
            georeferenced farm survey, and satellite imagery to document
            the opportunities and challenges of land-based investment in
            novel ways. Although 1.5 million hectares, or 25 percent, of
            Malawi's agricultural area is under agricultural
            estates, analysis shows that 70 percent has expired leases
            and 140,000 hectares are subject to overlapping claims. This
            reduces revenue from ground rent by up to US$35 millon per
            year or 5 percent of public spending and, by decreasing
            tenure security, may affect the productivity of land use.
            Indeed a 2006/07 survey shows large farms underperforming
            small ones in yield, productivity, and intensity of land
            use, while failing to generate positive spillovers. Recently
            passed Land Acts create opportunities to clarify the
            boundaries and lease status for existing estates as a first
            step toward systematic demarcation of customary estates.
            Failure to follow this sequence could exacerbate insecurity,
            with undesirable effects on productive performance.
Output- and performance-based road
            contracts and agricultural production : evidence from Zambia
Rural access is among the most important
            infrastructure elements to stimulate economic growth in
            rural and remote areas. The sustainability of feeder road
            maintenance is a challenge in many developing countries.
            Many feeder roads are unpaved and need to be maintained
            frequently, but they are often neglected under budget
            pressure. Output- and performance-based road contracts are
            an instrument to ensure the sustainability of road
            maintenance. Contractors are required not only to improve
            roads, but also to maintain them. Using micro data from
            household surveys in Zambia, the paper examines the impacts
            of output- and performance-based road contracts on
            agricultural production. It shows that the contracts have a
            significant impact on crop production, especially maize and
            groundnuts, two major crops grown in the study area. The
            paper also finds that the measured impacts are associated
            with actual road maintenance works, regardless of
            contractual methods. Any road work can improve people's
            connectivity, even if it is not an output- and
            performance-based road contracts. The impact of the
            contracts is catalytic: more road works were implemented on
            contract roads than non-contract roads, holding everything
            else constant. This is an important contribution to the
            sustainability of road maintenance. Finally, road
            improvement works are found to facilitate farmers'
            market participation, but the impact seems weak. There may
            be other constraints. Transport service costs are found to
            have a negative impact on farmers' market sales. Thus,
            although roads are improved, transport services may be not
            available or too expensive, which still hamper farmers'
            market participation.