rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Investing in Human Capital : What
            Can We Learn from the World Bank's Portfolio Data
This paper compiles project-level data
            from the World Bank's lending history to describe
            patterns and the composition of its portfolio. The paper
            focuses particularly on the effect of countries'
            transition from International Development Association to
            International Bank for Reconstruction and Development
            status, which marks the point when countries start borrowing
            at near market rates, on lending for human development
            sectors (education, health and social protection). Using
            country and year fixed effects, which account for
            unobservable country characteristics (for example, national
            priorities) and time effects (for example, market interest
            rates), the paper finds that human development lending
            decreases when countries graduate from the International
            Development Association. The average difference in the
            binary indicator of lending for any sector is 27 percent
            while it is 60 percent for human development sectors. The
            share of human development lending (lending by human
            development Global Practices over total lending) is also 6.9
            percentage points (30 percent) lower. This decline in human
            development lending in International Bank for Reconstruction
            and Development countries is accompanied by a greater use of
            budget support. The results are robust to controlling for
            non-World Bank aid, as well as various alternative
            specifications and estimation samples.
Policy Implications of Non-linear
            Effects of Tax Changes on Output
An earlier paper titled "Non-linear
            effects of tax changes on output: The role of the initial
            level of taxation," estimated tax multipliers using (i)
            a novel dataset on value-added taxes for 51 countries (21
            industrial and 30 developing) for the period 1970-2014, and
            (ii) the so-called narrative approach developed by Romer and
            Romer (2010) to properly identify exogenous tax changes. The
            main finding is that, in line with existing theoretical
            distortionary and disincentive-based arguments, the effect
            of tax changes on output is highly non-linear. The tax
            multiplier is essentially zero under relatively low/moderate
            initial tax rate levels and more negative as the initial tax
            rate and the size of the change in the tax rate increase.
            This companion paper first shows that these findings have
            important policy implications, given that the initial level
            of taxes varies greatly across countries and thus so will
            the potential output effect of changing tax rates. The paper
            then turns to some specific policy applications. It focuses
            on the relevance of the arguments for revenue mobilization
            in countries with low levels of provision of public goods
            and social and infrastructure gaps, as well as in
            commodity-dependent countries. The paper then considers some
            practical implications for the standard debt sustainability
            analysis. Lastly, it evaluates the implications of the
            findings for the Laffer curve.
Estimating Poverty in a Fragile
            Context -- The High Frequency Survey in South Sudan
The High Frequency South Sudan Survey,
            implemented by the South Sudan National Bureau of Statistics
            in collaboration with the World Bank, conducted several
            waves of representative surveys across seven of the ten
            former states between 2015 and 2017. These surveys provided
            a long overdue update to poverty numbers in South Sudan,
            with the previous national poverty estimates dating as far
            back as 2009. The escalation and expansion of the civil
            conflict posed severe challenges to the planning and
            implementation of fieldwork. The surveys therefore
            capitalized on several technological and methodological
            innovations to establish a reliable system of data
            collection and obtain valid poverty estimates. Focusing on
            the 2016 urban-rural wave, this paper describes the design
            and analysis of the survey to arrive at reliable poverty
            estimates for South Sudan, utilizing the Rapid Consumption
            Methodology combined with geo-spatial data for inaccessible
            survey areas.
Inequality of Access to
            Opportunities and Socioeconomic Mobility : Evidence from the
            Life in Transition Survey
Expectations of future socioeconomic
            mobility are an important determinant of cur- rent policy
            preferences. But how may these expectations be formed? Using
            Life in Transition survey data for a large set of transition
            economies and several Western European countries, this paper
            examines the link between beliefs about the importance of
            personal connections for getting access to opportunities,
            such as a good job or university education, and expectations
            of future socioeconomic mobility. The analysis of survey
            data finds evidence that: (i) lack of connections is
            associated with expectations of a lower position on the
            future social ladder; and (ii) when informal connections are
            unavailable, it matters for your aspirations whether you
            perceive connections to be vital or not. There is also some
            evidence that in the European Union, where formal
            institutions are stronger, individuals are less likely to
            resort to informal institutions such as personal
            connections, even when these are available. Perceptions of
            unequal access to opportunities are also linked with
            stronger redistributive preferences. Finally, there is some
            evidence that unequal access to opportunities is associated
            not only with lower intragenerational mobility, but also
            with lower intergenerational mobility.
The Impact of Forced Displacement on
            Host Communities : A Review of the Empirical Literature in Economics
The paper reviews 49 empirical studies
            that estimate the impact of forced displacement on host
            communities. A review of the empirical models used by these
            studies and a meta-analysis of 762 separate results
            collected from them are the main contributions of the paper.
            Coverage extends to 17 major forced displacement crises that
            occurred between 1922 and 2015, to host countries at
            different levels of economic development and different types
            of forced migrants. The focus is on outcomes related to
            household well-being, prices, employment, and wages. All
            studies can be classified as ex post quasi-natural
            experiments. The analysis on empirical modeling shows a
            preference for partial equilibrium modeling,
            differences-in-differences evaluation methods, and
            cross-section econometrics, with all these choices largely
            dependent on the type of data available. The meta-analysis
            on household well-being shows that between 45 and 52 percent
            of the results are positive and significant, indicating a
            net improvement in household well-being. An additional 34 to
            42 percent of the results are found to be nonsignificant,
            and 6 to 20 percent show a decrease in household well-being.
            The analyses on employment and wages show positive and
            significant improvements for 12 to 20 percent of the
            results, nonsignificant results in 63 percent of the cases,
            and negative and significant results for 22 to 25 percent of
            the results. Negative results on employment and wages relate
            to young and informal workers in middle-income countries.
            The results on prices show asymmetric behavior across types
            of products. Overall, the probability of having a negative
            outcome for host communities in the consumer and labor
            markets is below 20 percent.
The Textile-Clothing Value Chain in
            India and Bangladesh : How Appropriate Policies Can Promote
            (or Inhibit) Trade and Investment
There are significant value chain
            linkages between India and Bangladesh, particularly in the
            textile and apparel sector. India specializes in the
            upstream segment, supplying such intermediate inputs as
            silk, cotton, yarn, and fabrics to Bangladesh. Bangladesh
            specializes in the downstream final apparel segment,
            exporting worldwide as well as to India. Tariffs and
            nontariff barriers in both countries inhibit the growth of
            value chain linkages. In addition, subsidies and other
            industrial policies in India distort incentives away from
            the natural pattern of specialization. The results of a new
            survey of textile and clothing firms in both countries
            corroborate these findings. Reforms in trade policy
            (including rules of origin), trade facilitation,
            trade-related standards, and institutions could help both
            countries better take advantage of value chain linkages.
Sex, Lies, and Surveys : The Role of
            Interviewer Characteristics
This paper examines how easily
            observable interviewer characteristics, such as gender and
            physical attractiveness, and more difficult to observe
            characteristics, such as attitudes and beliefs, affect
            adolescent girls' disclosure of sexual behavior during
            a baseline survey for an adolescent girls program in
            Liberia. The study finds that girls are more likely to
            report sexual activity to better-looking interviewers, and
            less likely to do so to interviewers holding more
            discriminatory gender attitudes and greater expectations
            about the program. The study finds no evidence that the
            gender of the interviewer matters.
Enhancing Young Children's
            Language Acquisition through Parent-Child Book-Sharing : A
            Randomized Trial in Rural Kenya
Worldwide, 250 million children under
            five (43 percent) are not meeting their developmental
            potential because they lack adequate nutrition and cognitive
            stimulation in early childhood. Several parent support
            programs have shown significant benefits for children's
            development, but the programs are often expensive and
            resource intensive. The objective of this study was to test
            several variants of a potentially scalable, cost-effective
            intervention to increase cognitive stimulation by parents
            and improve emergent literacy skills in children. The
            intervention was a modified dialogic reading training
            program that used culturally and linguistically appropriate
            books adapted for a low-literacy population. The study used
            a cluster randomized controlled trial with four intervention
            arms and one control arm in a sample of caregivers (n = 357)
            and their 24- to 83- month-old children ages 24 to 83 months
            (n = 510) in rural Kenya. The first treatment group received
            storybooks, while the other treatment arms received
            storybooks paired with varying quantities of modified
            dialogic reading training for parents. The main effects of
            each arm of the trial were examined, and tests of
            heterogeneity were conducted to examine differential effects
            among children of illiterate versus literate caregivers.
            Parent training paired with the provision of culturally
            appropriate children’s books increased reading frequency and
            improved the quality of caregiver-child reading interactions
            among preschool-age children. Treatments involving training
            improved storybook-specific expressive vocabulary. The
            children of illiterate caregivers benefited at least as much
            as the children of literate caregivers. For some outcomes,
            the effects were comparable; for other outcomes, there were
            differentially larger effects for children of illiterate caregivers.
What Is State Capacity
Reform leaders who want to pursue
            technically sound policies are confronted with the problem
            of getting myriad government agencies, staffed by thousands
            of bureaucrats and state personnel, to deliver. This paper
            provides a framework for thinking about the problem as a
            series of interdependent principal-agent relationships in
            complex organizations, where one type of actor, the agent,
            takes actions on behalf of another, the principal. Using
            this framework to review and forge connections across a
            large literature, the paper shows how the crux of state
            capacity is the culture of bureaucracies -- the incentives,
            beliefs and expectations, or norms, shared among state
            personnel about how others are behaving. Although this
            characterization might apply generally to any complex
            organization, what distinguishes agencies of the state is
            the fundamental role of politics -- the processes by which
            the leaders who exercise power over bureaucracies, starting
            from the lowest village levels, are selected and sanctioned.
            Politics shapes not only the incentives of state personnel,
            but perhaps more importantly, it coordinates their beliefs
            and expectations, and thereby the performance of government
            agencies. Recognizing these roles of politics, the paper
            offers insights for what reform leaders can do to strengthen
            state capacity for public goods.
Estimation of Poverty in Somalia
            Using Innovative Methodologies
Somalia is highly data-deprived, leaving
            policy makers to operate in a statistical vacuum. To
            overcome this challenge, the World Bank implemented wave 2
            of the Somali High Frequency Survey to better understand
            livelihoods and vulnerabilities and, especially, to estimate
            national poverty indicators. The specific context of
            insecurity and lack of statistical infrastructure in Somalia
            posed several challenges for implementing a household survey
            and measuring poverty. This paper outlines how these
            challenges were overcome in wave 2 of the Somali High
            Frequency Survey through methodological and technological
            adaptations in four areas. First, in the absence of a recent
            census, no exhaustive lists of census enumeration areas
            along with population estimates existed, creating challenges
            to derive a probability-based representative sample.
            Therefore, geospatial techniques and high-resolution imagery
            were used to model the spatial population distribution,
            build a probability-based population sampling frame, and
            generate enumeration areas to overcome the lack of a recent
            population census. Second, although some areas remained
            completely inaccessible due to insecurity, even most
            accessible areas held potential risks to the safety of field
            staff and survey respondents, so that time spent in these
            areas had to be minimized. To address security concerns, the
            survey adapted logistical arrangements, sampling strategy
            using micro-listing, and questionnaire design to limit time
            on the ground based on the Rapid Consumption Methodology.
            Third, poverty in completely inaccessible areas had to be
            estimated by other means. Therefore, the Somali High
            Frequency Survey relies on correlates derived from satellite
            imagery and other geo-spatial data to estimate poverty in
            such areas. Finally, the nonstationary nature of the nomadic
            population required special sampling strategies.
Pollution and City Competitiveness :
            A Descriptive Analysis
As cities grow, the negative effects of
            congestion start to play their part, often affecting the
            cities' ability to become and remain competitive.
            Although many studies have focused on these negative
            effects, the links between pollution and city
            competitiveness are less explored. This paper focuses on
            this relationship, particularly the links between air
            pollution and city growth, and how it correlates with city
            competitiveness. Although high-income cities are usually
            better at managing pollution, the paper finds successful
            examples of fast-growing, lower-income cities that are able
            to tackle this issue. The evidence shows that cities can be
            competitive and still manage pollution, as long as they have
            a proactive attitude and focus on developing a green agenda
            to support this journey.
Does Automation in Rich Countries
            Hurt Developing Ones? : Evidence from the U.S. and Mexico
Following a couple of decades of
            offshoring, the fear today is of reshoring. Using
            administrative data on Mexican exports by municipality,
            sector and destination from 2004 to 2014, this paper
            investigates how local labor markets in Mexico that are more
            exposed to automation in the U.S. through trade fared in
            exports and employment outcomes. The results show that an
            increase of one robot per thousand workers in the U.S. --
            about twice the increase observed between 2004-2014 --
            lowers growth in exports per worker from Mexico to the U.S.
            by 6.7 percent. Higher exposure to U.S. automation did not
            affect wage employment, nor manufacturing wage employment
            overall. Yet, the latter is the result of two counteracting
            forces. Exposure to U.S. automation reduced manufacturing
            wage employment in areas where occupations were initially
            more susceptible to being automated; but exposure increased
            manufacturing wage employment in other areas. Finally, the
            analysis also finds negative impacts of exposure to local
            automation on local labor market outcomes.
Parental Beliefs, Investments, and
            Child Development : Evidence from a Large-Scale Experiment
This paper experimentally evaluates a
            large-scale and low-cost parenting program targeting poor
            families in Chile. Households in 162 public health centers
            were randomly assigned to three groups: a control group, a
            second group that was offered eight weekly group parenting
            sessions, and a third group that was offered the same eight
            group sessions plus two sessions of guided interactions
            between parents and children focused on responsive play and
            dialogic reading. Three years after the end of the
            intervention, the receptive vocabulary and the
            socio-emotional development of children of families
            participating in either of the treatment arms improved (by
            0.43 and 0.54 standard deviation, respectively) relative to
            children of nonparticipating families. There were no
            statistically detectable impacts on other types of skills.
            The treatments also led to improvements in home environments
            and parenting behaviors of comparable magnitudes, which far
            outlasted the short duration of the intervention. A simple
            mediation analysis suggests that up to 13 percent of
            treatment impacts on language, and up to 36 percent of
            impacts on child socio-emotional development, can be
            attributed to changes in the home environment, as well as in
            nurturing and discipline parenting behaviors.
Investment Needs for Irrigation
            Infrastructure along Different Socioeconomic Pathways
This paper conducts an assessment of the
            global costs for expanding, upgrading, and improving
            irrigation infrastructure in developing countries, along
            different future scenarios toward 2050. It uses the GLobal
            BIOsphere Management Model, a partial equilibrium model of
            the global agricultural and forestry sectors. It examines
            the impacts of irrigation expansion on the agriculture and
            food system, from the perspective of different Sustainable
            Development Goals, in particular food security (goal 2),
            land use change and biodiversity (goal 15), greenhouse gas
            emissions (goal 13), and sustainable water use (goal 6). It
            finds that irrigation support policies improve food security
            globally and can reduce the burden on land by limiting
            expansion of cropland area. However, the effectiveness of
            irrigation to achieve a larger set of goals depends on the
            regional context. In South Asia and the Middle East and
            North Africa, the expansion of irrigation increases
            unsustainable water extraction practices. A sensitivity
            analysis is conducted to evaluate the uncertainty of the
            infrastructure costs and impacts under different
            socioeconomic developments, levels of radiative forcing and
            climate change scenarios, dietary patterns, trade openness,
            and efficiencies of irrigation systems. The findings
            indicate that irrigation systems could play an important
            role in adaptation to the most adverse climate change;
            however, increased water scarcity may also limit adaptation potentials.