rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Oil exporters in MENA have been severely hurt by low oil prices, which are about half the 2014 levels (see Figure 2.1). In oil-exporting countries, the oil price decline has turned fiscal and current account surpluses into deficits (see Figure 2.2). There are, however, important differences across countries in MENA. The effect of the decline in the price of oil on GDP, depends very much on a country’s degree of dependence on oil exports, and on what proportion of oil revenues went to the state.

In response to this historical collapse, many MENA countries—especially those in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), have undertaken bold reforms, such as eliminating fuel subsidies, cutting capital and current expenditures and introducing revenue-raising measures such as value-added taxes. These measures have helped stabilized their economies by <!-- Start of picture text --> Figure 0.1 Crude Oil Price, Actual and Forecast<br>Figure 2.1 Crude Oil Price, Actual and<br>Forecast<br>(US$ per barrel)<br>120 Actual (WB)<br>WB (f)<br>100<br>IMF (f)<br>80 EIU (f)<br>60<br>40<br>20<br>0<br>2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020 2022<br>Sources: World Bank (WB), Commodity Markets Outlook<br>October 2017; International Monetary Fund (IMF), World<br>Economic Outlook January 2018 Update; The Economist<br>Intelligence Unit (EIU), World Commodity Forecasts ,<br>March 2018 Edition; and WB staff calculations.<br><!-- End of picture text --> reducing deficits and even moved some countries back to (small) surpluses. In the medium run, oil exporters in MENA need to transform their economies by creating the conditions to foster risk taking and entrepreneurship in the private (and public) sector to absorb the fast-growing youth population entering the labor market.

Although MENA oil importers have realized an increase in real income from lower oil prices, they have also experienced severe adverse spillover effects because of lower income in their neighboring oil exporters, especially large GCC countries. These spillovers include a reduction in grants, remittances, and investments. On balance, oil importers in MENA have continued to run fiscal and current account deficits and to accumulate debt (see Figure 2.2).

4
# **1. Introduction**

Does the discovery of a new resource exacerbate the resource curse? It has been long debated whether natural resource endowments promote economic development (Van der Ploeg, 2011b). Previous research indicates mixed findings (Alexeev and Conrad, 2009; van der Ploeg, 2011a; Smith, 2015). Cross-country studies based on aggregate data suggest that resource abundance could have negative effects on economic growth (Sachs, 1995; Sachs and Warner, 2001).<sup>1</sup> The literature on the “natural resource curse” has identified several factors that influence the relationship between resource abundance and economic growth. These factors include conflicts (Angrist and Kugler, 2008), the presence of weak institutions, and the extent of democracy (Aragón, ChuhanPole, and Land, 2015).<sup>2</sup> The primary objective of this paper is to examine the impacts of natural resource discovery on welfare and employment at the sub-national level. We study Ghana’s offshore oil discovery in 2007, which is the largest and most significant oil discovery in the country’s history. Have the discovery of oil and subsequent oil production increased local employment and contributed to poverty reduction? Economic theory suggests that local economies benefit from natural resource discovery through increased local demand for labor not only in the mining sector but also in non-mining sectors due to spillover effects (Black, McKinnish, and Sanders, 2005; Marchand, 2011). In addition, households can benefit from windfall revenues if the government redistributes the revenues in the form of transfers or provision of public goods. Whether and how households are ultimately affected by a shock to natural resource availability is an empirical question, which we address in this paper.

We use three waves of household survey data covering the period 1998 to 2013 and information on oil fields to estimate the economic impacts of the oil discovery. We exploit the quasi-experimental nature of the discovery by comparing districts in regions associated with oil (treatment group) and districts in regions without oil (control group).

> 1  Cotet and Tsui (2013) show that oil discoveries increase military spending.

> 2 Aragón, Chuhan-Pole, and Land (2015) provide  a literature review of both cross-country and subnational level impacts of natural resources.

2
domestic violence in households in which the woman has more than primary education but increases domestic violence in households where the woman has less than primary education, if she has more than her partner.

Other research which has focused on the impact of microfinance on domestic violence has typically not found statistically significant average effects, though as in the studies of cash transfers there are important heterogenous effects among subgroups. Kim et al. (2009) found that a randomly allocated microfinance intervention in South Africa improved women’s economic standing but did not decrease domestic violence; although a treatment that received combined with cur- group microfinance gender/HIV training riculum did suffer less domestic violence. Ferrari and Iyengar (2010) found that a microfinance program in Burundi increased women’s reported empowerment but did not affect domestic violence.

Several studies have examined the relationship between domestic violence and microfinance using observational data from Bangladesh. Two studies find a negative correlation between microfinance participation and domestic violence (Bates et al. 2004; Schuler et al. 1996); another finds an overall zero correlation (Ahmed, 2011). An interesting pattern of heterogeneity with respect to time in the program yields the zero average effect in Ahmed (2011). He argues that empowerment programs increase domestic violence in the short run as the household adjusts to the newly empowered women, but decrease domestic violence in the long run as women are able to use their newly improved economic status to demand less violence within the household. Koenig et al. (2003) also find that the effect of participation in a credit group increased the chance of her facing domestic violence in conservative villages but decreased her risk in relatively more liberal villages.

# **2.3 Work versus Transfers**

While these results contribute to an understanding of the relationship between intrahousehold bargaining and domestic violence, there are several reasons why a woman’s labor force participation may impact domestic violence differently from money received in a cash transfer or microfinance program. First, the sample of women choose to participate in the “treatment” is different. While cash transfers typically are available to all women or mothers who are poor enough to qualify, the decision to join the labor force is affected by characteristics of the woman and community, which might interact with her status within the home.

There are also differences in the way in which receiving a transfer or a loan, compared to a paycheck, changes the household’s resource endowments between the husband and 7
Peterson (2002) and Mayer _et al_ . (2002) indicate positive effects of vouchers on achievement scores of African-Americans. In New York, this effect is around 5 percentile points. The careful reanalysis of the New York data by Krueger and Zhu (2004) does, however, cast doubt on this positive result. They show that if the analysis also includes observations with missing baseline test scores the positive effect gets smaller and is statistically insignificant. When they subsequently redefine the category of African-Americans the effect is again smaller and statistically insignificant.

More convincingly and less controversial positive results about the effects of vouchers on achievement come from the targeted secondary school voucher program, known as PACES, in Colombia. Angrist _et al_ . (2002, 2006a) analyze this program that provided over 125,000 poor children with vouchers covering half of the cost of private secondary school. The evaluation is based on the fact that vouchers were allocated through a lottery. The vouchers contain a performance incentive as they are only renewed in case of sufficient academic progress. The results indicate that the program increased school completion rates by 15-20 percent and that test scores increased by 0.20 of a standard deviation, a truly substantial amount.

In a follow-up study on the PACES program, Bettinger _et al_ . (2007) provide evidence showing that lottery winners had better educational outcomes than lottery losers, even if they applied to schools with peers that have inferior observable characteristics. This is an important finding, as it cast doubt on the argument sometimes raised by voucher skeptics that vouchers benefit recipients only through peer effects, in which case the net benefit of vouchers to society as a whole might be small.

13
implemented by contracted local NGOs and aimed to provide supportive supervision as well as generate demand through community mobilization.

# **2.1 Study area, design and participants**

This study tests two models of program support: combined supportive supervision of ASHAs and community mobilization in what we term treatment arm A; and community mobilization alone in treatment arm B. The control arm (referred to as arm K) received the routine activities of the government’s malaria control program, i.e. fever case management by ASHAs without any additional supervision or community mobilization. All study villages are in four sub-districts of Sundargarh and Mayurbhanj districts, both of which are on the national list of 50 highly malaria endemic districts identified by the Indian government.<sup>2</sup> The two districts also have significant scheduled tribe (indigenous) populations as well as populations living in hilly and forested areas. The four sub-districts together comprise the highest endemicity sub-districts (as identified from health administrative data) within the study area.

A total of 120 endemic villages, with an average population of approximately 900, were randomly assigned with equal probability to one of the two treatment arms or the control (randomization was stratified by sub-district). Each village had one ASHA, who had been previously recruited by the government. The intervention was divided into two phases: a planning phase from September to December 2009, that included formative research, recruitment and training of project staff; and an implementation phase from January to December 2010.

Extensive consultation with local health officials and community leaders identified no more than three NGOs that fulfilled the stipulated criteria of (a) previous experience in malaria-related activities and (b) previous activity in the selected sub-districts. These three local NGOs were approached for further screening and ultimately chosen for study implementation. The two subdistricts in Sundargarh district were each assigned to a separate local NGO (hereafter denoted as NGO-S1 and NGO-S2) while the sole NGO in Mayurbhanj was of sufficient size to operate

> 2The National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme defines an area with an Annual Parasite Incidence– confirmed malaria cases in a thousand population– over five as endemic.

5
The Heterogeneous Effect of Information on Student Performance: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial in Mexico<sup>_∗_</sup> Ciro Avitabile<sup>_†_</sup> Rafael de Hoyos<sup>_‡_</sup> <mark>September 2015</mark>

# **1 Introduction**

Early work for developing countries finds that providing information about the labor market returns to education had a positive impact on student attainments (Jensen 2010; Nguyen 2008).<sup>1</sup> These results, coupled with the low costs of these interventions, have induced scholars and policy makers to advocate for a more extensive usage of information interventions to boost students’ outcomes in developing countries.<sup>2</sup> However, while there is growing con-

> _∗_ The paper has been screened to ensure no confidential information is r evealed. The original design of the _Percepciones_ project benefited f rom d iscussions w ith E rik B loom, Robert J ensen a nd H arry P atrinos. We are especially indebted to Martha Hernández, Elizabeth Monroy and Paula Villaseñor who were responsible for project and data management at the Mexican Secretariat of Public Education (SEP) at the time of implementing the project. We thank Caio Piza, Laura Trucco and participants at the World Bank’s impact evaluation seminar (DIME) and _Banco de México_ for their comments. The authors gratefully acknowledge funding from the World Bank’s _Research Support Budget_ .

> _†_ The World Bank. 1818 H Street NW, 20433 Washington DC. Corresponding Author. E-mail: cavitabile@worldbank.org.

> _‡_ The World Bank. 1818 H Street NW, 20433 Washington DC. E-mail: rdehoyos@worldbank.org.

> 1Jensen (2010) finds that providing information about the returns to lower secondary has a very large impact on school completion rates among eight graders in the Dominican Republic. Nguyen (2008) shows an increase in attendance of fourth graders in Madagascar as a result of information about the labor market returns to lower secondary education. More recently, Dinkelman and Martínez (2014) find that information about financial aid for tertiary education had a significant impact on college preparatory enrollment, school attendance, and financial aid knowledge among eight graders in Chile. Loyalka et al. (2013) finds that providing information on college costs and financial aid to high school students in poor regions of northwest China increases the probability of attending college.

> 2A number of studies analyze the impact of information about the benefits and costs of higher education on students’ perceptions in developed countries (see, among others, Oreopoulos and Dunn (2013) for Canada and McGuigan et al. (2012) for the UK.)
As these children already bear the burden of living in households with overlapping deprivations in education, health, living standards, and financial security, their educational disadvantages further erode their prospects. While displacement status affected intrahousehold inequality in school attendance, gender was more important for the completion of primary school, reflecting accumulated disadvantage over time. These educational findings predate the global pandemic and highlight potential long-term repercussions of school closures among the poor both for the generation already out of school and for the children who will have become deprived in school attendance in the last year (OECD 2021).

Forcibly displaced individuals do experience higher levels of intrahousehold inequality than their non-displaced peers in deprivations like school attendance and legal identification, but gender may be the more important predicting factor in chronic deprivations. Note that households experiencing intrahousehold disparities around legal documentation will be recorded as non-deprived in the indicator, as at least one household member holds ID. This intrahousehold analysis therefore unveils a gendered experience otherwise omitted by the household-level measure’s censored headcount ratios. Without unpacking the MPI at the individual level, we would have overlooked these important findings.

Future research and measurement tools should usefully prioritize intrahousehold breakdowns if they are to serve the most vulnerable. Further analysis of each MPI by country – their geographic regions, rural/urban divides, and administrative divisions, as the samples allow – would inform policy makers where to deploy those programs. Further research on the intra-country level would also be valuable.

# Notes

1. Throughout the paper we refer to refugees as inclusive of refugees and people in refugee-like situation, as per the classification by UNHCR.

2. Notten and Roelen, 2012; Omotoso and Koch, 2018; SAHRC and UNICEF, 2014; and Vasquez, 2016.

27
# **Appendix A (continued): Number of Banks in MENA, 2001-2008**

|**Non-GCC Private-led**|**2001**|**2002**|**2003**|**2004**|**2005**|**2006**|**2007**|**2008**|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Total Banks|68|74|80|78|80|84|90|82|
|State Banks|7|7|10|10|10|9|10|10|
|Private Banks|61|67|70|68|70|75|80|72|
|Private Domestic|41|44|46|47|47|49|51|43|
|Private Foreign|20|23|24|21|23|26|29|29|
|Private Foreign International|8|8|9|8|9|12|14|13|
|Private Foreign Regional|12|15|15|13|14|14|15|16|
|Listed Banks|33|35|42|40|44|51|55|52|
|Listed Private Banks|33|35|39|36|40|47|51|48|
|Listed State Banks|0|0|3|4|4|4|4|4|
|**Non-GCC Sate-led**|**2001**|**2002**|**2003**|**2004**|**2005**|**2006**|**2007**|**2008**|
|Total Banks|12|10|12|19|21|24|27|24|
|State Banks|9|7|7|8|7|7|8|6|
|Private Banks|3|3|5|11|14|17|19|18|
|Private Domestic|1|1|1|2|3|3|4|2|
|Private Foreign|2|2|4|9|11|14|15|16|
|Private Foreign International|0|0|3|3|3|3|3|3|
|Private Foreign Regional|2|2|1|6|8|11|12|13|
|Listed Banks|1|1|4|6|8|9|12|13|
|Listed Private Banks|1|1|4|6|8|9|11|12|
|Listed State Banks|0|0|0|0|0|0|1|1|

**Appendix B: Number of Banks in the Non-GCC Region, 2001-2008**

||**2001**|**2002**|**2003**|**2004**|**2005**|**2006**|**2007**|**2008**|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Algeria|6|6|7|11|10|12|12|11|
|Egypt|21|21|21|21|21|22|23|22|
|Jordan|10|10|10|10|11|11|11|10|
|Lebanon|24|27|27|24|24|27|31|26|
|Libya|5|3|4|4|5|5|5|3|
|Morocco|3|3|3|3|4|4|6|6|
|Syria|1|1|1|4|6|7|10|10|
|Tunisia|4|5|11|12|12|12|12|11|
|Yemen|6|8|8|8|8|8|7|7|

44
16 Korea and Japan, where the average WRI across countries using the elasticity data is between 6 and 46 percentage points lower than estimates without elasticity data. It should be noted, however, that this is off a high base of WRI averages of over 100 percent in many instances. The Western European countries also have a fairly significant change in their TRI and WRI estimates. The elasticity values for this region reveal that livestock products tend to have a higher (absolute) elasticity of supply and demand, while grains and tropical crops have elasticities lower than the average.<sup>6</sup> As such, including elasticity estimates results in livestock products in the EU having a higher weighting than grains and sugar. There is little divergence in the results with and without the simplifying elasticity assumption for North America and Oceania, which have relatively low TRI and WRI estimates. Despite the differences reported in Table 5, it is clear that in all cases, the index trends over time are much the same under either set of elasticity assumptions, and they give a better indication of the trade reduction and welfare losses from agricultural policies than standard weighted aggregates of NRAs and CTEs.

Our other assumption — that the aggregate marginal response of domestic demand to a price change is the same as the aggregate marginal response of domestic supply— might also have an impact on the results. We re-compute our two indexes assuming that demand was instead twice, or half, as responsive as supply. Despite that wide range, the estimates were almost unchanged at the aggregate level across the six regional groups. This benign result is due to the empirical fact that the producer and consumer distortions are similar, reflecting the dominance of border measures in the policy instrument mix.

A third caveat on the results for the TRI and WRI by policy instrument is the exclusion of non-product-specific (NPS) distortions in the estimates. In the Anderson and Valenzuela (2008) database, NPS assistance can be a significant component of overall agricultural sector distortions in some OECD countries. NPS is reported in three forms in the database: general NPS assistance, input subsidies that are not

> 6 Thus the size and ranking of the commodity indexes for the OECD country group, summarized in Figure 4, also would be affected somewhat by using differential elasticity estimates. Croser, Lloyd and Anderson (2010) examine this at the global level for eight major agricultural products and find that, if the elasticities found in Tyers and Anderson (1992) are used, there is little difference in the overall indications of distortions: the index averages using the elasticity estimates are 5 percentage points lower than the estimates using the simpler elasticity assumptions for one decade, but are between just 0 and 3 points lower for the other seven decade averages shown. Not surprisingly the differences are largest for the product with the most diverse NRAs, namely rice. In all cases, the global commodity index trends over time are much the same under either set of elasticity assumptions.
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initiatives could be extended multilaterally or to a wider regional grouping, namely the proposed Tripartite Free Trade Area among EACU, COMESA and SADC.

We decompose trade costs into three categories: costs that can be lowered by **trade facilitation; non-tariff barriers;** and the costs of **business services.** Trade facilitation addresses costs such as delays at border crossing, roadblocks for trucks and the necessity to pay bribes. Regarding **non-tariff barriers,** recent work by Cadot and Gourdon (2012) has shown that the old command and control non-tariff barrier measures have significantly declined, but standards as barriers to trade have supplanted them in importance. Further, poor **business services** for trade are also a problem. Improvements in a wide range of business services such as banking, insurance, communication and professional services such as legal, auditing, engineering and computer services would also lower trade costs. This also includes poor transportation services, such as very poor or non-existent freight train services in many countries of SubSaharan Africa, delays at ports, poor air freight services in many countries.

In this paper we build a ten region, 19-sector global trade model, with a focus on the members of the EACU. The model contains Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda (the four EACU countries included in the GTAP 8.1 data set), plus COMESA, SADC, the US, EU, China and Rest of the World.

Since the early 1990s, regional trade agreements have surged; 377 are in force and have been notified to the WTO as of January 2014.<sup>5</sup> Policy makers have expressed considerable demand for analysis of their actual or potential regional agreements. Applied modelers have responded with applied general equilibrium models that focus on goods. So the literature now contains a substantial number of good studies (summarized below) that examine regional agreements in goods. But the literature does not contain any global modeling studies of regional arrangements that involve commitments to multinational firms who will undertake foreign direct investment in services. Given the inclusion of services in modern FTA agreements negotiated with the EU, the US and in some other agreements, economists need to be able to assess the impact of services commitments as part of their advice to governments regarding preferential trade agreements. We attempt to fill that gap in this paper.

> 5 <u>http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/region_e/region_e.htm. This counts goods, services and accessions separately,</u> but does not include a significant number that are in force but which have not been notified to the WTO.

2