rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Public-private partnerships :
            promise and hype
This paper provides perspectives on
            patterns of public-private partnerships in infrastructure
            across time and space. Public-private partnerships are a new
            term for old concepts. Much infrastructure started under
            private auspices.  Then many governments nationalized the
            ventures. Governments often push infrastructure providers to
            keep prices low. In emerging markets, the price of water
            covers maybe 30 percent of costs on average, that of
            electricity some 80 percent of costs. This renders public
            infrastructure ventures dependent on subsidies. When
            governments run into fiscal troubles, they often look again
            for public-private partnerships, and price increases. As a
            result, public-private partnerships keep making a comeback
            in most countries, but are not always loved. Waves of
            interest in public-private partnerships sweep different
            countries at different times. Overall, in emerging markets
            today, public-private partnerships account for some 20
            percent of infrastructure investments, with wide variations
            across countries and from year to year. There is no “killer”
            rationale for public-private partnerships. They can help
            raise financing when governments face borrowing constraints.
            They can be more efficient when sound incentives are
            applied. Existing evaluations suggest public-private
            partnerships tend to perform often a bit better than public
            provision. Yet, well-run governments can do as well.
            Public-private partnerships provide mechanisms to improve
            the governance of infrastructure ventures where governments
            are flawed. Once the fiscal troubles are over, the politics
            of pricing assert themselves again. Tight pricing erodes the
            profitability of public-private partnerships and the wheel
            of privatization and nationalization keeps turning, as it
            has since modern infrastructure services were invented.
How much could South Asia benefit
            from regional electricity cooperation and trade
The South Asia region is lagging behind
            many regions in the world in regional electricity
            cooperation and trading, despite the huge anticipated
            benefits. This study uses an electricity planning model that
            produces optimal expansion of electricity generation
            capacities and transmission interconnections in the
            long-term to quantify the benefits of unrestricted
            cross-border electricity trade in the South Asia during
            2015–40. The study finds that the unrestricted electricity
            trade provision would save US$226 billion (US$9 billion per
            year) of electricity supply costs over the period. The ratio
            of the present value of benefits, in the form of reduction
            of fuel costs, to the present value of increased costs due
            to generation and interconnection would be 5.3. The
            provision would reduce regional power sector carbon dioxide
            emissions by 8 percent, mainly because of substitution of
            coal-based generation with hydro-based generation, although
            regional emissions would be well above current levels absent
            other policy interventions. To achieve these benefits, the
            region is estimated to add 95,000 megawatts of new
            cross-border transmission interconnection capacity.
High-powered incentives and
            communication failure
This paper uses a donor-provider-agent
            framework to study the role of provider incentives for the
            delivery of developmental goods like aid, credit, or
            technology transfer to the poor. The paper considers a
            situation where credible communication by the provider is
            the key to successful delivery. The study shows that the use
            of high-powered incentives can lead to breakdown of
            communication between providers and agents, leading to
            undesirable outcomes. The paper studies the interplay
            between incentives and communication in the presence of
            typical and motivated providers and finds that in certain
            situations incentivization leads to worse outcomes.
The economics of policy instruments
            to stimulate wind power in Brazil
Large-scale deployment of renewable
            energy technologies, such as wind power and solar energy,
            has been taking place in industrialized and developing
            economics mainly because of various fiscal and regulatory
            policies. An understanding of the economy-wide impacts of
            those policies is an important part of an overall analysis
            of them.  Using a perfect foresight computable general
            equilibrium model, this study analyzes the economy-wide
            costs of achieving a 10 percent share of wind power in
            Brazil’s electricity supply mix by 2030. Brazil is in the
            midst of an active program of wind capacity expansion. The
            welfare loss would be small, 0.1 percent of total baseline
            welfare in the absence of the 10 percent wind power
            expansion. The study also finds that, in the case of Brazil,
            production subsidies financed through increased value-added
            tax would have superior impacts on welfare and greenhouse
            gas mitigation, compared with a consumption mandate where
            electricity utilities are allowed to pass the increased
            electricity supply costs directly to consumers. These two
            policies would impact various production sectors differently
            to achieve the wind power expansion targets: the burden of
            the mandate falls mostly on electricity-intensive production
            and consumption, whereas the burden of the subsidy is
            distributed toward goods and services with higher value added.
Gold mining and proto-urbanization :
            recent evidence from Ghana
Central place theory predicts that
            agglomeration can arise from external shocks. This paper
            investigates whether gold mining is a catalyst for
            proto-urbanization in rural Ghana. Using cross-sectional
            data, the analysis finds that locations within 10 kilometers
            from gold mines have more night light and proportionally
            higher employment in industry and services and in the wage
            sector. Non-farm employment decreases at 20–30 kilometers
            distance to gold mines. These findings are consistent with
            agglomeration effects that induce non-farm activities to
            coalesce in one particular location. This paper finds that,
            over time, an increase in gold production is associated with
            more wage employment and apprenticeship, and fewer people
            employed in private informal enterprises. It also finds that
            the changes arising from increasing gold production are not
            reversed when large gold mines shrink. However this pattern
            cannot be ascribed unambiguously to agglomeration effects,
            given an increase in informal mining after formal mines
            decrease output is also observed.
Do poor countries really need more
            IT the role of relative prices and industrial composition
Conventional wisdom suggests too little
            information and communication technologies (ICT) in poor
            countries. Indeed, within 70 countries at various levels of
            development, there is a positive relationship between income
            per capita and the capital share of ICT. While this
            regularity is consistent with explanations based on
            technology adoption lags and ICT-labor substitutability,
            there is little empirical support for these hypotheses.
            Instead, the paper establishes that this regularity can be
            fully accounted for by (a) relatively higher ICT prices in
            low-income countries and (b) industrial composition.
Capital market financing, firm
            growth, and firm size distribution
How many and which firms issue equity
            and bonds in domestic and international markets, how do
            these firms grow relative to non-issuing firms, and how does
            firm performance vary along the firm size distribution? To
            evaluate these questions, a new data set is constructed by
            matching data on firm-level capital raising activity with
            balance sheet data for 45,527 listed firms in 51 countries.
            Three main patterns emerge from the analysis. (1) Only a few
            large firms issue equity or bonds, and among them a small
            subset has raised a large proportion of the funds raised
            during the 1990s and 2000s. (2) Issuers grow faster than
            non-issuers in assets, sales, and employment, that is, firms
            do not simply use securities markets to adjust their
            financial accounts. (3) The firm size distribution of
            issuers evolves differently from that of non-issuers,
            tightening among issuers and widening among non-issuers.
Public expenditure following disasters
This paper focuses on the impact of
            disasters on public expenditures, and how this impact might
            be valued. The impact may involve changes in the composition
            of spending, concurrently and over time. It may also involve
            changes in the level of spending and the profile of this
            over time. In the latter case, the associated financing must
            also be taken into account. The changes of interest are
            those that would take place under a given sovereign disaster
            risk financing and insurance strategy, as opposed to what
            would take place otherwise. The paper concludes with some
            suggestions toward an operational framework for addressing
            these questions.
The indirect cost of natural
            disasters and an economic definition of macroeconomic resilience
The welfare impact of a disaster does
            not depend only on the physical characteristics of the event
            or its direct impacts in terms of lost lives and assets.
            Depending on the ability of the economy to cope, recover,
            and reconstruct, the reconstruction will be more or less
            difficult, and the welfare effects smaller or larger. This
            ability, which can be referred to as the macroeconomic
            resilience of the economy to natural disasters, is an
            important parameter to estimate the overall vulnerability of
            a population. Here, resilience is decomposed into two
            components: instantaneous resilience, which is the ability
            to limit the magnitude of the immediate loss of income for a
            given amount of capital losses, and dynamic resilience,
            which is the ability to reconstruct and recover quickly. The
            paper proposes a rule of thumb to estimate macroeconomic
            resilience, based on the interest rate (a higher interest
            rate decreases resilience and increases welfare losses), the
            reconstruction duration (a longer reconstruction duration
            increases welfare losses), and a “ripple-effect” factor that
            increases or decreases immediate losses (negative if enough
            idle resources are available to cope; positive if
            cross-sector and supply-chain issues impair the production
            of non-affected capital). An optimal risk management
            strategy is very likely to include measures to reduce direct
            impacts (disaster risk reduction actions) and measures to
            reduce indirect impacts (resilience building actions).
Improving education outcomes in
            South Asia : findings from a decade of impact evaluations
There have been many initiatives to
            improve education outcomes in South Asia. Still, outcomes
            remain stubbornly resistant to improvements, at least when
            considered across the region. To collect and synthesize the
            insights about what actually works to improve learning and
            other education outcomes, this paper conducts a systematic
            review and meta-analysis of 29 education-focused impact
            evaluations from South Asia, establishing a standard that
            includes randomized control trials and quasi-experimental
            designs. It finds that while there are impacts from
            interventions that seek to increase the demand for education
            in households and communities, those targeting teachers or
            schools and thus the supply-side of the education sector are
            generally much more adept at improving learning outcomes. In
            addition, interventions that provide different actors with
            resources and those that incentivize behavioral changes show
            moderate but statistically significant impacts on student
            learning. A mix of input- and incentive-oriented
            interventions tailored to the specific conditions on the
            ground appears most promising for fostering education
            outcomes in South Asia.
Can minimum wages close the gender
            wage gap evidence from Indonesia
Using manufacturing plant-level census
            data, this paper demonstrates that minimum wage increases in
            Indonesia reduced gender wage gaps among production workers,
            with heterogeneous impacts by level of education and
            position of the firm in the wage distribution.
            Paradoxically, educated women appear to have benefitted the
            most, particularly in the lower half of the firm average
            earnings distribution. By contrast, women who did not
            complete primary education did not benefit on average, and
            even lost ground in the upper end of the earnings
            distribution. Minimum wage increases were thus associated
            with exacerbated gender pay gaps among the least educated,
            and reduced gender gaps among the best educated production
            workers. Unconditional quantile regression analysis attests
            to wage compression and lighthouse effects. Changes in
            relative employment prospects were limited.
The export-productivity link in
            Brazilian manufacturing firms
This paper explores the link between
            exports and total factor productivity in Brazilian
            manufacturing firms over the period 2000–08. The Brazilian
            experience is instructive, as it is a case of an economy
            that expanded aggregate exports significantly, but with
            stagnant aggregate growth in total factor productivity. The
            paper first estimates firm-level total factor productivity
            under alternative assumptions (exogenous and endogenous law
            of motion for productivity) following a GMM procedure. In
            turn, the analysis uses stochastic dominance techniques to
            assess whether the ex ante most productive firms are those
            that start exporting (self-selection hypothesis). Finally,
            the paper tests whether exporting boosts firms’ total factor
            productivity growth (learning-by-exporting hypothesis) using
            matching techniques to control for the possibility that
            selection into exports may not be a random process. The
            results confirm the self-selection hypothesis and show that
            starting to export yields additional growth in total factor
            productivity that emerges since the firm’s first year of
            exporting but lasts only one year. Further, this extra total
            factor productivity growth is much higher under the
            assumption of an endogenous law of motion for productivity,
            which reinforces the importance of accounting for firm
            export status to study the evolution of productivity.
The impacts of trade facilitation
            measures on international trade flows
This paper analyzes the impacts of
            selected trade facilitation measures on international trade
            flows. A gravity model is used to estimate four equations: a
            pooled cross-section model; a fixed-effects model; a random
            effects model; and a Poisson maximum likelihood estimator.
            The contribution of the paper is twofold. First, the
            analysis uses a recent data set, a panel that includes trade
            data from 2011 and 2012 for 72 countries. Second, to measure
            the impacts of trade facilitation measures, the analysis
            includes dummy variables for the presence of an authorized
            economic operator program, the existence of a single-window
            program in the countries in the sample, and the existence of
            a mutual recognition arrangement between pairs of countries
            in the sample. The results show that the presence of an
            authorized economic operator program and the existence of a
            single-window program will improve countries’ trade
            performance. By contrast, the existence of a mutual
            recognition arrangement will not necessarily improve
            countries’ trade performance. These results suggest that, in
            general, trade facilitation measures as a whole will help
            countries improve their trade performance.
Asymmetric information about migrant
            earnings and remittance flows
This paper examine asymmetric
            information about migrant earnings and its implications for
            remittance behavior using a sample of Indian households with
            husbands working overseas in Qatar. On average, wives
            underreport their husbands’ income and underreporting is
            more prevalent in households with higher earning migrants.
            The discrepancy in earning reports is strongly correlated
            with variation in remittances: greater underreporting by
            wives is associated with lower remittances. An exchange
            model of remittances is developed with asymmetric
            information and costly state verification. The optimal
            remittance contract prescribes a threshold for remittances
            that invites verification only if unmet. The model’s
            predictions closely match our empirical findings.
The effects of volumetric pricing
            policy on farmers’ water management institutions and their
            water use: the case of water user organization in an
            irrigation system in Hubei, China
This article examines the effect of
            water pricing policies on farmers’ water saving behaviors,
            using original water user group (WUG) data from a reservoir
            irrigation system in China. The introduction of volumetric
            water pricing at the group level, to replace area-based
            pricing, induces institutional change to prevent each
            member’s overuse of water when the volumetric price levels
            are moderate. Depending on the initial conditions, the
            multiple pathways of change lead to new institutional
            arrangements, with all of them contributing to water
            savings. However, when the price is set high enough, many
            farmers exit a WUG for private irrigation. This tendency is
            associated with an increased probability that the remaining
            members do not undertake institutional change and that they
            do not end up saving water. This may be due to the increased
            management difficulties among the remaining members whose
            fields are separated by former members who have now opted
            out for private irrigation across the WUG. As a result, we
            do not find evidence that the reservoir water is saved at
            high volumetric price levels.
The impact of expanding access to
            early childhood services in rural Indonesia : evidence from
            two cohorts of children
This paper uses three waves of
            longitudinal data to examine the impact of expanding access
            to preschool services in rural areas of Indonesia on two
            cohorts of children. One cohort was children aged 4 at the
            start of the project and was immediately eligible for
            project-provided services when they began operation in 2009.
            The other cohort was children aged 1 at the start of the
            project and became eligible for project-provided services
            two years later. The paper presents intent-to-treat
            estimates of impact in the short term (first year of the
            project) and medium term (three years after the project
            started), using experimental and quasi-experimental methods.
            For the cohort of 4-year-olds, while the magnitude of the
            enrollment impact is similar across children from different
            backgrounds, the impact on child outcomes is larger for
            children from more disadvantaged backgrounds in the short
            and medium terms. However, for this cohort of children, it
            seems that project-provided playgroups encouraged
            substitution away from existing kindergartens, suggesting
            that future interventions should incorporate such
            possibilities into their design. For the average child in
            the younger cohort, the project led to improvements in
            physical health and well-being as well as language and
            cognitive development. For this cohort, there is little
            evidence of differential impact. This can be explained by
            the fact that children who enrolled soon after the centers
            opened (the older cohort) were generally poorer, compared
            with children who enrolled later (the younger cohort). This
            may be because of fee increases in project centers as
            project funding ended.
Unconditional cash transfers in
            China : an analysis of the rural minimum living standard
            guarantee program
This paper examines China’s rural
            minimum living standard guarantee (dibao) program, one of
            the largest minimum income cash transfer schemes in the
            world. Using household survey data matched with published
            administrative data, the paper describes the dibao program,
            estimates the program’s impact on poverty, and carries out
            targeting analysis. The analysis finds that the program
            provides sufficient income to poor beneficiaries but does
            not substantially reduce the overall level of poverty, in
            part because the number of beneficiaries is small relative
            to the number of poor. Conventional targeting analysis
            reveals rather large inclusionary and exclusionary targeting
            errors; propensity score targeting analysis yields smaller
            but still large targeting errors. Simulations of possible
            reforms to the dibao program indicate that expanding
            coverage can potentially yield greater poverty reduction
            than increasing transfer amounts. In addition, replacing
            locally diverse dibao lines with a nationally uniform dibao
            threshold could in theory reduce poverty. The potential
            gains in poverty reduction, however, depend on the
            effectiveness of targeting.