rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Family planning and fertility :
            estimating program effects using cross-sectional data
Although reproductive health advocates
            consider family planning programs the intervention of choice
            to reduce fertility, there remains a great deal of
            skepticism among economists as to their effectiveness,
            despite little rigorous evidence to support either position.
            This study explores the effects of family planning in
            Ethiopia using a novel set of instruments to control for
            potential non-random program placement. The instruments are
            based on ordinal rankings of area characteristics, motivated
            by competition between areas for resources. Access to family
            planning is found to reduce completed fertility by more than
            one child among women without education. No effect is found
            among women with some formal schooling, suggesting that
            family planning and formal education act as substitutes, at
            least in this low-income, low-growth setting. This provides
            support to the notion that increasing access to family
            planning can provide an important, complementary entry point
            to kick-start the process of fertility reduction.
South Sudan's infrastructure :
            a continental perspective
Newly independent South Sudan faces a
            challenge in making its own way in infrastructure
            development. Despite earning $6 billion in oil revenues
            since 2005, South Sudan's spending has not been
            proportional to its income, but rather has lagged behind
            North Sudan's development of infrastructure and social
            support. South Sudan benefitted from strong donor support
            during 2004-10, the interim period defined by the
            Comprehensive Peace Agreement. It focused on reestablishing
            regional transport links and access to seaports as well as
            rehabilitating its ports, airstrips, and single rail line.
            South Sudan also successfully liberalized the ICT sector.
            Nonetheless, the new country's infrastructure remains
            in such a dismal state that it is difficult to pinpoint a
            single most pressing challenge. The transport sector
            accounts for half of the country's spending needs, and
            water and sanitation account for a further quarter of the
            total. But so many improvements are needed that the nation
            cannot realistically catch up with its neighbors within 10
            years, or even longer. South Sudan's annual
            infrastructure funding gap is $879 million per year. Given
            that the country's total needs are beyond its reach in
            the medium term, it must adopt firm priorities for its
            infrastructure spending. It also must attract international
            and private-sector investment and look to lower-cost
            technologies to begin to close its funding gap. Although
            South Sudan loses relatively little to inefficiencies,
            redressing those inefficiencies will be vital to creating
            solid institutions to attract new investors and get the most
            out of their investments.
Sudan's infrastructure : a
            continental perspective
Improvements in infrastructure across
            Sudan in recent years have contributed 1.7 percentage points
            to the country's per capita growth. Consistent with
            trends in other countries, the ICT revolution that swept
            Africa contributed more than any other sector to growth in
            Sudan. Raising the infrastructure endowment of all parts of
            Sudan to that of the region's best performer --
            Mauritius -- could boost annual growth by about 3.5
            percentage points. Sudan has heavily invested in
            infrastructure in recent years. Notable achievements include
            tripling power-generation capacity, liberalizing the ICT
            sector, and connecting to an undersea fiber-optic cable.
            Looking ahead, Sudan's most pressing infrastructure
            challenges lie in the water and transport sectors. In the
            water sector, the country needs to dramatically improve
            access to safe sources of water and sanitation while
            improving utility efficiency. In the transport sector the
            country needs to vastly expand rural and international
            connectivity and improve quality across the network. Sudan
            presently spends about $1.5 billion per year on
            infrastructure, with $580 million a year lost to
            inefficiencies. Even if the inefficiencies were eliminated,
            however, Sudan would face an infrastructure funding gap of
            $2.9 billion per year. This gap could be reduced by half by
            choosing lower-cost water, sanitation, and road-surfacing
            technologies, and could be bridged by continuing to capture
            financing from the private sector and abroad.
Rising food prices and household
            welfare : evidence from Brazil in 2008
Food price inflation in Brazil in the
            twelve months to June 2008 was 18 percent, while overall
            inflation was seven percent. Using spatially disaggregated
            monthly data on consumer prices and two different household
            surveys, we estimate the welfare consequences of these food
            price increases, and their distribution across households.
            Because Brazil is a large food producer, with a
            predominantly wage-earning agricultural labor force, our
            estimates include general equilibrium effects on market and
            transfer incomes, as well as the standard estimates of
            changes in consumer surplus. While the expenditure (or
            consumer surplus) effects were large, negative and markedly
            regressive everywhere, the market income effect was positive
            and progressive, particularly in rural areas. Because of
            this effect on the rural poor, and of the partial protection
            afforded by increases in two large social assistance
            benefits, the overall impact of higher food prices in Brazil
            was U-shaped, with middle-income groups suffering larger
            proportional losses than the very poor. Nevertheless, since
            Brazil is 80 percent urban, higher food prices still led to
            a greater incidence and depth of poverty at the national level.
Task trade between similar countries
The authors propose a theory of task
            trade between countries that have similar relative factor
            endowments and technological capabilities but may differ in
            size. Firms produce differentiated goods by performing a
            continuum of tasks, each of which generates local
            spillovers. Tasks can be performed at home or abroad, but
            offshoring entails costs that vary by task. In equilibrium,
            the tasks with the highest offshoring costs may not be
            traded. Among the remainder, those with the relatively
            higher offshoring costs are performed in the country that
            has the higher wage and higher aggregate output. The paper
            discusses the relationship between equilibrium wages,
            equilibrium outputs, and relative country size and examines
            how the pattern of specialization reflects the key
            parameters of the model.
Do high and volatile levels of
            public investment suggest misconduct the role of
            institutional quality
This paper investigates the impact of
            institutional quality on public investment levels over the
            period 1984-2008. Moreover, it studies how the volatility of
            public investment and the quality of infrastructure are
            affected by institutional quality, and explores the
            contribution of other critical factors. The findings suggest
            an inverse relationship between public investment levels and
            institutional quality, supporting the idea that governments
            use public investment as a vehicle for rent-seeking or to
            compensate for the fall in private investment due to the
            poor business environment. In addition, aid flows, revenues
            and abundance of natural resources contribute positively to
            the level of capital spending. The author also finds that
            high volatility of public investment is associated with a
            lower quality of governance. An increase in revenues is
            associated with a reduction in the volatility of capital
            spending, suggesting that proper macroeconomic management
            smoothes the investment cycle. Finally, the paper provides
            some tentative evidence of a positive relationship between
            institutional quality and the quality of infrastructure.
Countercyclical financial regulation
The global financial crisis has focused
            much attention on procyclicality, particularly in the
            context of a macroprudential framework. This paper reviews a
            set of prudential measures that can be adopted by national
            authorities to deal with procyclicality and discusses issues
            in designing and implementing such measures. For developing
            countries, in addition to some general considerations on
            policy design and implementation, a range of issues may
            warrant special attention. These include the balance between
            financial stability and financial development objectives,
            selection and calibration of policy instruments according to
            national circumstances and taking into account data
            limitations and capacity constraints as well as other
            practical challenges, and continued efforts to improve
            supervisory independence, supervisory powers and analytical
            capacity and to ensure adequate resources in order to
            perform the required tasks. Given the limited practical
            experience with countercyclical prudential measures,
            developing countries (as well as developed countries) will
            have to ascend a learning curve and experiment with select
            instruments while carefully monitoring and evaluating their
            effectiveness over time before a framework matures.
Cash transfers in an epidemic
            context : the interaction of formal and informal support in
            rural Malawi
This paper investigates the short-run
            consumption expenditure dynamics and the interaction of
            public and private arrangements of ultra-poor and
            labor-constrained households in Malawi using an original
            dataset from the Mchinjii social cash transfer pilot project
            (one of the first experiments of social protection policies
            based on unconditional cash transfers in Sub-Saharan
            Africa). The authors exploit the unique source of exogenous
            variation provided by the randomized component of the
            program in order to isolate the effect of cash transfers on
            consumption expenditures as well as the net crowding out
            effect of cash transfers on private arrangements. They find
            a statistically significant reduction effect on the level of
            consumption expenditures for those households receiving cash
            transfers, thus leading to the rejection of the perfect risk
            sharing hypothesis. Moreover, by looking at the effects of
            cash transfers on private arrangements in a context
            characterized by imperfect enforceability of contracts and
            by a social fabric heavily compromised by high HIV/AIDS
            rates, the analysis confirms the presence of crowding out
            effects on private arrangements when looking at gifts and
            (to a lesser extent) remittances, while informal loans seem
            to be completely independent from the cash transfer's
            reception. From a policy perspective, the paper offers a
            contribution to the evaluation of the very recent wave of
            social protection policies based on (unconditional) cash
            transfers in Sub-Saharan Africa, suggesting that there might
            be an important role for public interventions aimed at
            helping households to pool risk more effectively.
Assessing the odds of achieving the MDGs
How many countries are on target to
            achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015? How many
            countries are off target, and how far are they from the
            goals? And what factors are essential for improving the odds
            that off-target countries can reach the goals? This paper
            examines these questions and takes a closer look at the
            diversity of country progress. The authors argue that the
            answers from the available data are surprisingly hopeful. In
            particular, two-thirds of developing countries are on target
            or close to being on target for all the Millennium
            Development Goals. Among developing countries that are
            falling short, the average gap of the top half is about 10
            percent. For those countries that are on target, or close to
            it, solid economic growth and good policies and institutions
            have been the key factors in their success. With improved
            policies and faster growth, many countries that are close to
            becoming on target could still achieve the targets in 2015
            or soon after.
DR-CAFTA and the environment
The Dominican Republic-Central American
            Free Trade Agreement with the United States aims to create a
            free trade zone for economic development. The Agreement is
            expected to intensify commerce and investment among the
            participating countries. This paper analyzes the changes in
            the production and trading patterns in 2-digit manufacturing
            sectors with the goal of understanding the short-term
            environmental implications of the Dominican Republic-Central
            American Free Trade Agreement. More specifically, the paper
            addresses the questions: Did pollution increase in the
            period after the Agreement negotiations? Did trade and
            production shift toward pollution intensive factors? The
            results suggest an increase in pollution emissions in the
            post-negotiations period. The increase in emissions is
            mainly attributable to scale effects. Composition effects
            are small and in some cases (including Nicaragua and
            Honduras) favoring cleaner industries and partially
            compensating the pollution gains from output and export growth.
Women's decision making power
            and human development : evidence from Pakistan
When deciding who should receive welfare
            benefits with the aim to increase household well-being, it
            is necessary to understand the effects of the distribution
            of power within the households at which the aid is directed.
            Two primary household models have been used to study
            intra-household bargaining and decision making: the unitary
            model and the collective model. The unitary model seems to
            fit Pakistan's context because the prevailing
            traditional culture positions the male head as the household
            decision maker. However, using a set of direct measures of
            decision-making power from the Pakistan Social and Living
            Standard Measurement Survey, this study finds that even in a
            country where men seem to have more power than women, the
            collective household bargaining model applies. This study
            also finds that, in Pakistan, when women have more
            decision-making power at home, households tend to spend more
            on women's preferred goods (such as clothing and
            education), family members eat more non-grain food items,
            and children, particularly girls, are more likely to be
            enrolled in school.
Distributional impact analysis of
            the energy price reform in Turkey
A pricing reform in Turkey increased the
            residential electricity tariff by more than 50 percent in
            2008. The reform, aimed at encouraging energy efficiency and
            private investment, sparked considerable policy debate about
            its potential impact on household welfare. This paper
            estimates a short-run residential electricity demand
            function for evaluating the distributional consequences of
            the tariff reform. The model allows heterogeneity in
            household price sensitivities and is estimated using a
            national sample of 18,671 Turkish households. The model also
            addresses the common problem of missing data in survey
            research. The study reveals a highly skewed distribution of
            price elasticities in the population, with rich households
            three times more responsive in adjusting consumption to
            price changes than the poor. This is most likely because the
            poor are close to their minimum electricity consumption
            levels and have fewer coping options. In addition, the
            welfare loss of the poorest quintile -- measured by the
            consumer surplus change as a percentage of income -- is 2.9
            times of that of the wealthiest.
Macro-prudential regulation of
            credit booms and busts -- the case of Poland
The last several years before the global
            downturn of 2008-2009 saw rapid credit growth in Poland. The
            credit-to-gross domestic product ratio rose from about 25
            percent in 2004 to close to 50 percent in 2009. Such an
            expansion itself might potentially be a source of risks to
            financial stability, but it was also coupled with relatively
            new phenomena, such as massive foreign currency lending.
            Thanks to the pro-active attitude of the Polish authorities
            and sound economic fundamentals, the risks largely have not
            materialized. Since 2006 the financial supervisor has
            addressed in its recommendations for banks the problem of
            foreign exchange lending, which contributed to the high
            quality of the portfolio. Before the economy slowed down,
            the Polish Financial Supervisory Authority persuaded banks
            to accumulate an additional capital buffer that helped
            protect them from the negative consequences of the downturn.
            Some regulatory concepts that had been put into place in
            Poland in the previous years, including quantitative
            liquidity requirements, are now being implemented globally.
            The Polish Financial Supervisory Authority participates in
            international debates on a new regulatory regime for the
            financial system. The major message the authority intends to
            convey is that all new regulations must be tailored
            carefully. Regulators should make an effort to ensure that
            the benefits of enhanced quality of the capital base or the
            countercyclical buffer are not compromised by international
            overregulation that could undermine national
            authorities' ability to pursue effective
            country-specific policies.
Relationship-based and arms-length
            financial systems -- a European perspective
This paper surveys the debate on
            arms-length and relationship-based financial systems with a
            special focus on the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region.
            The paper argues that while the initial dominance of
            relationship-based systems in the region is consistent with
            the implications of the theoretical literature, the
            subsequent improvements in supporting institutions coupled
            with structural changes suggests a greater scope for
            arms-length elements going forward.
Zimbabwe's infrastructure : a
            continental perspective
Despite general economic decline and
            power-supply deficiencies, infrastructure made a modest net
            contribution of just less than half a percentage point to
            Zimbabwe's improved per capita growth performance in
            recent years. Raising the country's infrastructure
            endowment to that of the region's middle-income
            countries could boost annual growth by about 2.4 percentage
            points. Zimbabwe made significant progress in infrastructure
            in its early period as an independent state, building a
            national electricity network with regional interconnections,
            an extensive and internationally connected road network, and
            a water and sewer system. But the country has been unable to
            maintain its existing infrastructure since it became
            immersed in economic and political turmoil in the late
            1990s. Zimbabwe now faces a number of important
            infrastructure challenges, the most pressing of which lie in
            the power and water sectors, where deteriorating conditions
            pose risks to the economy and public health. Zimbabwe
            currently spends about $0.8 billion per year on
            infrastructure, though $0.7 billion of this is lost to
            inefficiencies of various kinds. Even if these
            inefficiencies were fully captured, Zimbabwe would still
            face an infrastructure funding gap of $0.6 billion per year.
            That staggering figure can be reduced, however, to $0.4
            billion if the country adopts a more modest spending
            scenario, or even to $0.1 billion under a minimalist,
            maintenance-only scenario. To close the gap, Zimbabwe needs
            to raise additional public, private-sector, and
            international funding, which, when coupled with the prospect
            of economic rebound and prudent policies, would allow the
            country to regain its historic infrastructure advantages.