rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Is Africa's economy at a
            turning point
In this paper, Arbache, Go, and Page
            examine the recent acceleration of growth in Africa. Unlike
            the past, the performance is now registered broadly across
            several types of countries-particularly the oil-exporting
            and resource-intensive countries and, in more recent years,
            the large- and middle-income economies, as well as coastal
            and low-income countries. The analysis confirms a trend
            break in the mid-1990s, identifying a growth acceleration
            that is due not only to favorable terms of trade and greater
            aid, but also to better policy. Indeed, the growth
            diagnostics show that more and more African countries have
            been able to avoid mistakes with better macropolicy, better
            governance, and fewer conflicts; as a result, the likelihood
            of growth decelerations has declined significantly.
            Nonetheless, the sustainability of that growth is fragile,
            because economic fundamentals, such as savings, investment,
            productivity, and export diversification, remain stagnant.
            The good news in the story is that African economies appear
            to have learned how to avoid the mistakes that led to the
            frequent growth collapses between 1975 and 1995. The bad
            news is that much less is known about the recipes for
            long-term success in development, such as developing the
            right institutions and the policies to raise savings and
            diversify exports, than about how to avoid economic bad times.
An evaluation of the initial impact
            of the medical assistance program for the poor in Georgia
As part of the recent health reform
            effort, the government of Georgia launched a Medical
            Assistance Program in June 2006 to provide health insurance
            to its poor population.  So far the program covers slightly
            over 50 percent of the poor and provides benefit coverage
            for outpatient and inpatient care. This paper estimates
            initial impact of the Medical Assistance Program and
            assesses whether the benefits have reached the poorest among
            those eligible, using utilization data from June 2006 to
            December 2006.  Based on the analysis using a regression
            discontinuity design and a three-part model, the paper
            presents two main findings. First, the Medical Assistance
            Program has significantly increased utilization of acute
            surgeries/inpatient services by the poor. Second, the
            benefits have successfully reached the poorest among the
            poor.  These two findings indicate that government efforts
            to improve the poor's access to and utilization of
            health services are yielding results. The paper emphasizes
            that the initial dramatic increase in surgeries must be
            interpreted with caution, given the possible
            misclassification or misreporting of acute surgeries in the
            data.  The paper also stresses the need to continue
            monitoring implementation of the Medical Assistance Program
            and further improve program design, particularly the
            targeting mechanism, to achieve better efficiency,
            effectiveness and overall equity in access to health care services.
Infrastructure and economic growth
            in East Asia
This paper examines whether
            infrastructure investment has contributed to East
            Asia's economic growth using both a growth accounting
            framework and cross-country regressions. For most of the
            variables used, both the growth accounting exercise and
            cross-country regressions fail to find a significant link
            between infrastructure, productivity and growth. These
            conclusions contrast strongly with previous studies finding
            positive and significant effect for all infrastructure
            variables in the context of a production function study.
            This leads us to conclude that results from studies using
            macro-level data should be considered with extreme caution.
            The Authors suggest that infrastructure investment may have
            had the primary function of relieving constraints and
            bottlenecks as they arose, as opposed to directly
            encouraging growth.
Earnings inequality within and
            across gender, racial, and ethnic groups in four Latin
            American Countries
Latin American countries are generally
            characterized as displaying high income and earnings
            inequality overall along with high inequality by gender,
            race, and ethnicity.  However, the latter phenomenon is not
            a major contributor to the former phenomenon.  Using
            household survey data from four Latin American countries
            (Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, and Guyana) for which
            stratification by race or ethnicity is possible, this paper
            demonstrates (using Theil index decompositions as well as
            Gini indices, and 90/10 and 50/10 percentile comparisons)
            that within-group earnings inequality rather than
            between-group earnings inequality is the main contributor to
            overall earnings inequality.  Simulations in which the
            relatively disadvantaged gender and/or racial/ethnic group
            is treated as if it were the relatively advantaged group
            tend to reduce overall earnings inequality measures only
            slightly and in some cases have the effect of increasing
            earnings inequality measures.
Assessing the redistributive effect
            of fiscal policy
Who benefits from public spending?  Who
            bears the burden of taxation? How desirable is the
            distribution of net benefits from the operation of a
            tax-benefit system?  This paper surveys basic concepts,
            methods, and modeling approaches commonly used to address
            these issues in the context of fiscal incidence analysis.
            The review covers the incidence of both taxation and public
            spending.  Methodological points are supported by country
            cases.  The effective distribution of benefits and burdens
            associated with fiscal policy depends on the size of the
            government, the distributive mechanisms involved, and the
            incentives properties of the policy under consideration.
            This creates a need for analytical methods to account for
            both individual behavior and social interaction.  The
            approaches reviewed include simple reduced form regression
            analysis, microsimulation models (both the envelope and
            discrete choice models), computable general equilibrium
            modeling, and approaches that link computable general
            equilibrium models to microsimulation models.  Explicit
            modeling facilitates the construction of counterfactuals to
            back up causal analysis.  Social desirability is assessed on
            the basis of progressivity along with deadweight loss.
Mineral-rich countries and dutch
            disease : understanding the macroeconomic implications of
            windfalls and the development prospects-the case of
            Equatorial Guinea
Referring to the original context of
            Dutch Disease, the term refers to the fears of
            de-industrialization that gripped the Netherlands as a
            result of the appreciation of the Dutch currency that
            followed the discovery of natural gas deposits. Expansion of
            petroleum exports in the 1960s not only crowded out other
            exports, it actually reduced other exports
            disproportionately and fueled the fears of dire consequences
            for Dutch manufacturing. In the case of Equatorial Guinea,
            the secondary sector represents about 2 percent of the gross
            domestic product, manufacturing represents less than 1
            percent, and oil represents more than 95 percent. The
            negative impact of the Dutch Disease in this context would
            be limited given the structure of the economy and on the
            contrary may even be a good thing because it fuels the
            structural transformational process of the economy, which is
            needed in Equatorial Guinea. This paper argues that the
            ongoing Dutch Disease is a natural and necessary
            reallocation of resources in the economy of Equatorial
            Guinea. The magnitude of negative macroeconomic consequences
            of the Dutch Disease depends on the country's economic
            structure and stage of development. In a country where the
            manufacturing sector barely exists or where the non-oil
            primary sector is structurally deficient, as has been the
            case of Equatorial Guinea, there is little to fear about the
            disease. The oil boom is a blessing, given that oil revenues
            when properly managed can play a special and critical role
            in overall economic development and poverty reduction in
            low-income countries. To promote good governance in the
            management of the country's oil wealth, the government
            may wish to adhere to clear standards of accountability and
            transparency; especially by complying with the Extractive
            Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI++).
Windfall management for poverty
            reduction : improving public finance Management-the case of Chad
This paper aims at providing a guide to
            ensure efficiency in the management of Chad's windfall
            to support the development process and poverty reduction.
            The analysis is based on the lessons and experience of
            countries that have successfully used
            natural-resource-generated windfalls to launch their
            development process while avoiding the natural resource
            curse. The paper also discusses the petroleum management
            arrangements in place in Chad for poverty reduction. The
            author argues that the successful management of Chad's
            windfall for poverty reduction will depend on the
            effectiveness of oil revenue management arrangements in
            place in Chad and the government's willingness to
            improve public finance management (PFM).
Conditional cash transfers in
            education : design features, peer and sibling effects
            evidence from a randomized experiment in Colombia
This paper presents an evaluation of
            multiple variants of a commonly used intervention to boost
            education in developing countries - the conditional cash
            transfer - with a student level randomization that allows
            the authors to generate intra-family and peer-network
            variation.  The analysis tests three treatments: a basic
            conditional cash transfer treatment based on school
            attendance, a savings treatment that postpones a bulk of the
            cash transfer due to good attendance to just before children
            have to re-enroll, and a tertiary treatment where some of
            the transfers are conditional on students' graduation
            and tertiary enrollment rather than attendance.  On average,
            the combined incentives increase attendance, pass rates,
            enrollment, graduation rates, and matriculation to tertiary
            institutions.  Changing the timing of the payments does not
            change attendance rates relative to the basic treatment but
            does significantly increase enrollment rates at both the
            secondary and tertiary levels.  Incentives for graduation
            and matriculation are particularly effective, increasing
            attendance and enrollment at secondary and tertiary levels
            more than the basic treatment.  There is some evidence that
            the subsidies can cause a reallocation of responsibilities
            within the household.  Siblings (particularly sisters) of
            treated students work more and attend school less than
            students in families that received no treatment.  In
            addition, indirect peer influences are relatively strong in
            attendance decisions with the average magnitude similar to
            that of the direct effect.
How relevant is infrastructure to
            growth in East Asia
This paper seeks to shed some light on
            the extent to which infrastructure sub-sectors - energy,
            telecommunications, water supply, sanitation, and transport
            - contributed to growth in East Asia during 1985-2004. It
            also attempts to provide additional insights on whether the
            relationship between infrastructure and growth depends on
            five additional variables: the degree of private
            participation in infrastructure, the quality of governance,
            the extent of rural-urban inequality in access to
            infrastructure services, country income levels, as well as
            geography. The findings show that greater stocks of
            infrastructure were indeed associated with higher growth.
            However, a more nuanced look at the sensitivity of
            infrastructure impacts on the five additional variables
            yields different results, with some sectors supporting
            conventional expectations and others yielding mixed or
            counter-intuitive results. In particular, the telecom and
            sanitation sectors yield statistically significant results
            supporting the a priori hypotheses; electricity and water
            infrastructure provide mixed results; and road
            infrastructure consistently contradicts a priori
            expectations. The results are consistent with the
            widely-accepted idea in policy research that infrastructure
            plays an important role in promoting growth, as well as with
            the viewpoint that certain countries' endowments
            influence the growth-related impacts of infrastructure.
The challenge of reducing
            international trade and migration barriers
While barriers to trade in most goods
            and some services including capital flows have been reduced
            considerably over the past two decades, many remain. Such
            policies harm most the economies imposing them, but the
            worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and
            textiles) are particularly harmful to the world's
            poorest people, as are barriers to worker migration across
            borders. This paper focuses on how costly those anti-poor
            trade policies are, and examines possible strategies to
            reduce remaining distortions. Two opportunities in
            particular are addressed: completing the Doha Development
            Agenda process at the World Trade Organization (WTO), and
            freeing up the international movement of workers. A review
            of the economic benefits and adjustment costs associated
            with these opportunities provides the foundation to
            undertake benefit/cost analysis required to rank this set of
            opportunities against those aimed at addressing the
            world's other key challenges as part of the Copenhagen
            Consensus project. The paper concludes with key caveats and
            suggests that taking up these opportunities could generate
            huge social benefit/cost ratios that are considerably higher
            than the direct economic ones quantified in this study, even
            without factoring in their contribution to alleviating
            several of the other challenges identified by that project,
            including malnutrition, disease, poor education and air pollution.
Differential adaptation strategies
            to climate change in African cropland by agro-ecological zones
This paper quantifies how African
            farmers have adapted their crop and irrigation decisions to
            their farm's current agro-ecological zone.  The results
            indicate that farmers carefully consider the climate and
            other conditions of their farm when making these choices.
            These results are then used to forecast how farmers might
            change their irrigation and crop choice decisions if climate
            changes. The model predicts African farmers would adopt
            irrigation more often under a very hot and dry climate
            scenario but less often with a mild and wet scenario.
            However, farms in the deserts, lowland humid forest, or mid
            elevation humid forest would reduce irrigation even in the
            very hot and dry climate scenario. Area under fruits and
            vegetables would increase Africa-wide with the very hot and
            dry climate scenario, except in the lowland semi-arid
            agro-ecological zone. Millet would increase overall under
            the mild and wet scenario, but decline substantially in the
            lowland dry savannah and lowland semi-arid agro-ecological
            zones. Maize would be chosen less often across all the
            agro-ecological zones under both climate scenarios. Wheat
            would decrease across Africa. The authors recommend that
            care must be taken to match adaptations to local conditions
            because the optimal adaptation would depend on the
            agro-ecological zone and the climate scenario.
Long-term adaptation : selecting
            farm types across agro-ecological zones in Africa
Using economic data from more than 8,500
            household surveys across 10 African countries, this paper
            examines whether the choice of farm type depends on the
            climate and agro-ecological zone of each farm. The paper
            also studies how farm type choice varies across farmers in
            each zone, using a multinomial logit choice model. Farmers
            are observed to choose from one of the following five types
            of farms: rainfed crop-only, irrigated crop-only, mixed
            rainfed (crop and livestock), mixed irrigated, and
            livestock-only farming. The authors compare current
            decisions against future decisions as if the only change
            were climate change. They focus on two climate scenarios
            from existing climate models: the Canadian Climate Centre
            scenario, which is hot and dry, and the Parallel Climate
            Model scenario, which is mild and wet. The results indicate
            that the change in farm types varies dramatically by climate
            scenario but also by agro-ecological zone. Policy makers
            must be careful to encourage the appropriate suite of
            measures to promote the most adapted farm type to each location.
A structural ricardian analysis of
            climate change impacts and adaptations in African agriculture
This paper develops a Structural
            Ricardian model to measure climate change impacts that
            explicitly models the choice of farm type in African
            agriculture. This two stage model first estimates the type
            of farm chosen and then the conditional incomes of each farm
            type after removing selection biases. The results indicate
            that increases in temperature encourage farmers to adopt
            mixed farming and avoid specialized farms such as crop-only
            or livestock-only farms. Increases in precipitation
            encourage farmers to shift from irrigated to rainfed crops.
            As temperatures increase, farm incomes from crop-only farms
            or livestock-only farms fall whereas incomes from mixed
            farms increase. With precipitation increases, farm incomes
            from irrigated farms fall whereas incomes from rainfed farms
            increase.  Naturally, the Structural Ricardian model
            predicts much smaller impacts than a model that holds farm
            type fixed.  With a hot dry climate scenario, the Structural
            Ricardian model predicts that farm income will fall 50
            percent but the fixed farm type model predicts farm incomes
            will fall 75 percent.
Latin America and the social
            contract : patterns of social spending and taxation
This paper presents an incidence
            analysis of both social spending and taxation for seven
            Latin American countries, the United Kingdom, and the United
            States. The analysis shows that Latin American countries are
            headed de facto toward a minimalist welfare state similar to
            the one in the United States, rather than toward a stronger,
            European-like welfare state. Specifically, both in Latin
            America and in the United States, social spending remains
            fairly flat across income quintiles. On the taxation side,
            high income inequality causes the rich to bear most of the
            taxation burden. This causes a vicious cycle where the rich
            oppose the expansion of the welfare state (as they bear most
            of its burden without receiving much back), which in turn
            maintains long-term inequalities. The recent increased
            socioeconomic instability in many Latin American countries
            shows nonetheless a real need for a stronger welfare state,
            which, if unanswered, may degenerate into short-term and
            unsustainable policies. The case of Chile suggests that a
            way out from this apparent dead end can be found, as elites
            may be willing to raise their contribution to social
            spending if this can lead to a more stable social contract.
Assessing asset indices
This paper compares how results using
            various methods to construct asset indices match results
            using per capita expenditures. The analysis shows that
            inferences about inequalities in education, health care use,
            fertility, child mortality, as well as labor market outcomes
            are quite robust to the specific economic status measure
            used. The measures-most significantly per capita
            expenditures versus the class of asset indices-do not,
            however, yield identical household rankings. Two factors
            stand out in predicting the degree of congruence in rankings
            between per capita expenditures and an asset index.  First
            is the extent to which per capita expenditures can be
            explained by observed household and community
            characteristics.  In settings with small transitory shocks
            to expenditure, or with little measurement error in
            expenditure, the rankings yielded by the alternative
            approaches are most similar. Second is the extent to which
            expenditures are dominated by individually consumed goods
            such as food.  Asset indices are typically derived from
            indicators of goods which are effectively public at the
            household level, while expenditures are often dominated by
            food, an almost exclusively private good. In settings where
            private goods such as food are the main component of
            expenditures, asset indices and per capita consumption yield
            the least similar results, although adjusting for economies
            of scale in household expenditures reconciles the results somewhat.