rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Sources of Manufacturing
            Productivity Growth in Africa
This paper investigates the sources of
            growth in manufacturing productivity in Cote D’Ivoire,
            Ethiopia and Tanzania in comparison with the case of
            Bangladesh. Based on the analysis of establishment census
            data since the mid-1990s, it finds that reallocation of
            market share between firms contributed substantially to
            productivity growth in each of the four countries, although
            to a varying extent. In Ethiopia, the impact of market share
            reallocations among survivors tended to be larger than those
            associated with increases in within-plant productivity. In
            addition, plant closure (or exit) boosted productivity more
            than new plant openings (or entry) did in the sense that the
            relative productivity of survivors (or continuing plants)
            was higher relative to that of closing plants (or exit
            cases) than it was relative to the productivity of newly
            opening plants (or new entrants). Reallocation of market
            share plays an important role in raising aggregate
            productivity in Côte d’Ivoire as well. But the pattern here
            is opposite to that in Ethiopia in that in Côte d’Ivoire
            entering (or newly opening) plants have larger impact on
            aggregate productivity growth than closing (or exiting)
            plants. Unlike the case with Cote D’Ivoire and of Ethiopia,
            the reallocation of market share among surviving plants is a
            smaller source of manufacturing productivity growth in
            Tanzania than the new plant openings and plant closure. The
            data suggest that the reallocation of market share among
            surviving plants and exiting plants has larger impact on
            productivity growth in Bangladesh than the productivity gap
            between new plants and survivors, as in the case of Ethiopia.
Fiscal Rules for the Western Balkans
Policy toward fiscal rules is an
            important issue in the countries of the Western Balkans
            (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North
            Macedonia, and Serbia). According to a rough estimate, the
            countries with rules (all but North Macedonia) have complied
            with their debt and overall-deficit rules a little more than
            half the time. An online survey, conducted for this paper,
            suggests that public understanding of the rules is limited,
            which may reduce the political pressure for compliance. To
            get debt down to prudent levels, Albania and Montenegro will
            need a strong commitment to complying with their fiscal
            rules and will often have to do more than their deficit
            rules require. The following principles should guide future
            policy toward fiscal rules: more emphasis should be given to
            ensuring that fiscal rules are widely understood and enjoy
            the support of a broad range of stakeholders; policy toward
            the rules should be consistent with accession to the
            European Union, but the rules should be simpler than the
            European Union's and the debt limits lower; limits in
            rules should not be mistaken for targets; and public
            financial management should be improved to support the
            implementation of rules.
Manufacturing in Structural Change
            in Africa
This paper investigates the scale,
            causes, and timing of significant episodes of
            industrialization and deindustrialization in Sub-Saharan
            Africa. Recent studies have argued that the turning point of
            manufacturing output and employment shares tends to occur
            prematurely in this region. The analysis is performed using
            panel data methods for fractional responses and data from a
            variety of sources for a panel of 41 African countries. The
            results overwhelmingly do not support the common finding
            that Sub-Saharan African countries have begun to
            deindustrialize. Moreover, the study documents meaningful
            heterogeneity across Sub-Saharan Africa subregions, with the
            Southern region being the only subregion to have witnessed
            deindustrialization. However, this deindustrialization of
            the Southern subregion does not appear to be occurring
            prematurely. The study also explores the potential role of
            the Dutch disease and resource curse hypotheses in
            understanding Sub-Saharan Africa's manufacturing
            experience in resource rich countries.
Revisiting the Trade Impact of the
            African Growth and Opportunity Act : A Synthetic Control Approach
This study examines the impact of the
            African Growth and Opportunity Act using the synthetic
            control method, a quasi-experimental approach. The novelty
            in the approach is that it addresses problems of estimation
            that are prevalent in nonexperimental methods used to
            analyze the impact of preferential trade agreements. The
            findings show that most of the eligible countries registered
            gains in exports due to the African Growth and Opportunity
            Act. However, the results are varied, and the gains were
            largely unsteady. Much of the gains are due to exports of
            petroleum and other minerals, while there are few countries
            that were able to expand into manufacturing and other
            industrial goods. The positive trade impacts were largely
            associated with improvements in information and
            communications technology infrastructure, integrity in the
            institutions of legal and property rights, ease of labor
            market regulations, and sound macroeconomic environment,
            including stable exchange rates and low inflation. Undue
            exposure to a single market, like the United States, or few
            commodities may have also restricted the gains from trade.
Twenty Years of Wage Inequality in
            Latin America
This paper documents an inverse U-shape
            in the evolution of wage inequality in Latin America since
            1995, with a sharp reduction starting in 2002. The Gini
            coefficient of wages increased from 42 to 44 between 1995
            and 2002 and declined to 39 by 2015. Between 2002 and 2015,
            the 90/10 log hourly earnings ratio decreased by 26 percent.
            The decline since 2002 was characterized by rising wages
            across the board, but especially among those at the bottom
            of the wage distribution in each country. Triggered by a
            rapid expansion of educational attainment, the wages of
            college and high school graduates fell relative to those
            with primary education. The premium for labor market
            experience also fell significantly. But the compression of
            wages was not entirely driven by changes in the wage
            structure across skill groups. Two-thirds of the decline in
            the variance of wages took place within skill groups.
            Changes in the sectoral, occupational, and formal-informal
            composition of jobs matter for the process of reduction in
            inequality, but do not fully account for the fall in
            within-skill variance. Evidence using longitudinal matched
            employer-employee administrative data suggests that an
            important driver was falling wage dispersion across firms.
The Entertaining Way to Behavioral
            Change : Fighting HIV with MTV
This paper tests the effectiveness of an
            entertainment education television series, MTV Shuga, aimed
            at providing information and changing attitudes and
            behaviors related to HIV/AIDS. Using a simple model, the
            paper shows that “edutainment” can work through an
            individual or a social channel. This study is a randomized
            controlled trial conducted in urban Nigeria, where young
            viewers were exposed to MTV Shuga or a placebo television
            series. Among those exposed to MTV Shuga, the trial created
            additional variation in the social messages they received
            and the people with whom they watched the show. The study
            finds significant improvements in knowledge and attitudes
            toward HIV and risky sexual behavior. Treated subjects are
            twice as likely to get tested for HIV eight months after the
            intervention. The study also finds reductions in sexually
            transmitted diseases among women. These effects are stronger
            for viewers who reported being more involved with the
            narrative, consistent with the psychological underpinnings
            of edutainment. The trial’s experimental manipulations of
            the social norm component did not produce significantly
            different results from the main treatment. The individual
            effect of edutainment thus seems to have prevailed in the
            context of this study.
Long-Term Effects of PROSPERA on Welfare
The long-term effects of Mexico's
            conditional cash transfer program, PROSPERA, on poor
            households are of great interest to policy makers and
            academics alike. This paper analyzes the long-term effects
            on the welfare of the original participant households and
            their offspring, about 20 years after the inception of the
            program. To complement other studies that look into the
            effects on schooling and health, the analysis focuses on a
            utilitarian definition of welfare and employs two empirical
            strategies. The first uses the 1997-2000 experiment as the
            cleanest, albeit limited, source of variation. The analysis
            finds that by 2017–18, the offspring of original beneficiary
            households are more likely to have formed their own
            households, to have migrated to different localities, and to
            have more durable assets and larger consumption expenditures
            than their control counterpart. The second strategy confirms
            and expands those findings using a difference-in-difference
            methodology based on the localities' rollout of the
            program and the age of the individuals, as a proxy of
            exposure. This second approach covers a much larger and
            representative sample, while also directly observing
            self-reported vulnerability in food consumption. The
            findings confirm the generally positive outlook in terms of
            durable assets and lower food vulnerability. Perhaps more
            interestingly and relevant for evaluating the success of the
            program is that it improved intergenerational mobility.
            Using the 1997-2000 experiment, the analysis finds that the
            young adults who benefited from the program improved with
            respect to their parents in education, assets holding, and
            income. They appear to be climbing the ladder of assets and income.
The Social Value of Health Insurance
            Results from Ghana
This paper uses the roll-out of the
            national health insurance in Ghana to assess the cushioning
            effect of coverage on the financial consequences of health
            shocks and resulting changes in coping behaviors. The
            analysis finds a strong reduction in medical expenditures,
            preventing households from cutting non-food consumption and
            causing a decrease in the volume of received remittances as
            well as the labor supply of healthy adult household members.
            Moreover, the paper presents evidence that the insurance
            scheme reduced the likelihood that households experiencing a
            health shock pulled their children out of school to put them
            to work. Avoidance of such costly coping mechanisms is
            potentially an important part of the social value of formal
            health insurance.
Self-Employment and Migration
There is a widespread policy view that a
            lack of job opportunities at home is a key reason for
            migration, accompanied by suggestions of the need to spend
            more on creating these opportunities to reduce migration.
            Self-employment is widespread in poor countries, and faced
            with a lack of existing jobs, providing more opportunities
            for people to start businesses is a key policy option. But
            empirical evidence to support this idea is slight, and
            economic theory offers several reasons why the self-employed
            may be more likely to migrate. This paper puts together
            panel surveys from eight countries to descriptively examine
            the relationship between migration and self-employment,
            finding that the self-employed are indeed less likely to
            migrate than wage workers or the unemployed. The paper then
            analyzes seven randomized experiments that increased
            self-employment, and finds that their causal impacts on
            migration are negative on average, but often small in magnitude.
Eurobonds : A Quantitative Analysis
            of Joint-Liability Debt
This paper assesses the consequences of
            implementing a joint liability debt system in a two-country
            small open economy model. With joint liability a default of
            one country makes the other participant liable for its debt.
            The results highlight a trade-off between the contagion
            risk, in the sense that this instrument may push some member
            states to default even though they are individually solvent,
            and cheaper access to credit on average, since lenders are
            at risk only if no participating sovereign is willing to
            service the debt. The findings suggest that the welfare
            consequences of this policy proposal hinge critically on the
            timing of its introduction: Introducing such instruments at
            the peak of the Eurozone crisis would have helped the
            Periphery and harm the Core member states, while its
            adoption during normal times has the potential to make all
            participants better-off.
The Moroccan New Keynesian Phillips
            Curve : A Structural Econometric Analysis
The Phillips curve is central to
            discussions of inflation dynamics and monetary policy. In
            particular, the New Keynesian Phillips Curve is a valuable
            tool to describe how past inflation, expected future
            inflation, and real marginal cost or an output gap drive the
            current inflation rate. However, economists have had
            difficulty applying the New Keynesian Phillips Curve to
            real-world data due to empirical limitations. This paper
            overcomes these limitations by using an
            identification-robust estimation method called the Tikhonov
            Jackknife instrumental variables estimator. Data from
            Morocco are used to examine the ability of the New Keynesian
            Phillips Curve to explain Moroccan inflation dynamics. The
            analysis finds that by adding more information to the hybrid
            version of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve model by
            increasing the number of moment conditions, the inflation
            dynamics in Morocco can be well-described by the New
            Keynesian Phillips Curve. This framework suggests that the
            New Keynesian Phillips Curve would be a strong candidate for
            short-run inflation forecasting.
Entry Barriers, Idiosyncratic
            Distortions, and the Firm-Size Distribution
This paper studies the interaction
            between barriers to firm entry and distortions to allocative
            efficiency in a standard model of firm dynamics. It derives
            a strategy to infer entry barriers based on cross-country
            differences in the firm size distribution, cross-country
            estimates of idiosyncratic distortions, and equilibrium
            conditions of the model. The strategy yields entry barriers
            that are well captured by regulation-based indicators in
            advanced economies but are largely underestimated in middle-
            and low-income countries. Regulation-based indicators cannot
            account for cross-country differences in average firm size
            and underestimate the aggregate productivity gains
            associated with their removal by up to 8 percent on average.
Capital Allocation in Developing Countries
This paper investigates the sources of
            capital misallocation across a group of 11 developing and
            developed countries. The main findings are (i) technological
            frictions, namely, adjustment costs and uncertainty, account
            for only a modest share of observed misallocation, leaving
            ample scope for other factors; (ii) heterogeneity in
            firm-level technologies potentially explains between
            one-quarter and one-half; but (iii) dispersion in markups is
            much smaller; and (iv) after accounting for these factors,
            on average, at least 50 percent of misallocation within each
            of these countries remains unexplained, suggesting a large
            role for additional, potentially distortionary factors.
            These factors are largely attributable to a component that
            is correlated with firm size/productivity and one that is
            essentially permanent to the firm. The paper reports a broad
            set of moments describing firm-level investment dynamics and
            detailed parameter estimates on a country-by-country basis,
            with an eye toward future work in this area.
Domestic Government Spending on
            Human Capital : A Cross-Country Analysis of Recent Trends
Using a new data set comprised of
            publicly available information, this paper provides
            cross-country evidence on domestic government spending for
            human capital in recent years. Creating a measure of social
            spending that covers the three sectors of health, education,
            and social protection has proven to be a challenging task.
            Only for health spending is there high data coverage over
            time and across countries. Education and, especially, social
            protection display large gaps. Increases in social sector
            spending have generally been slow and unsteady. Although
            education spending in low-income countries has seen a stable
            and steady increase, spending on health has been remarkably
            flat. Human capital outcomes are only weakly correlated with
            spending in the three sectors. Finally, this paper discusses
            future research required to provide guidance on how much and
            what type of investment is needed to achieve high levels of
            human capital.
Innovations in Tax Compliance :
            Conceptual Framework
This paper presents a conceptual
            framework for developing more effective approaches to tax
            reform and compliance. The framework proposes that by
            combining complementary investments in enforcement,
            facilitation, and trust, reformers can not only strengthen
            enforced compliance but can also (a) encourage
            quasi-voluntary compliance, (b) generate sustainable
            political support for reform, and (c) create conditions that
            are more conducive to the construction of stronger fiscal
            contracts. A key challenge for governments lies in finding
            the right combination of these three measures --
            enforcement, facilitation, and trust—to achieve revenue and
            broader development goals. The framework proposes greater
            reliance on locally grounded binding constraints analysis,
            coupled with careful attention to understanding politics and
            the drivers of trust in particular contexts, to guide
            analysis of how best different investments may be combined,
            prioritized, or sequenced. This framework can help policy
            makers to think about the right combination of strategies in
            specific contexts, and thus to allocate resources most effectively.
Is Informality Good for Business The
            Impacts of IDP Inflows on Formal Firms
This paper examines the effects of large
            inflows of internally displaced persons (IDP), who are
            primarily absorbed by the informal sector, on the behavior
            of formal manufacturing firms in Colombia. To identify
            causal effects, the analysis employs annual, firm-level
            panel data between 1995 and 2010 and exploits that when
            conflict intensifies, forcefully displaced individuals tend
            to migrate to municipalities where people from their origin
            locations settled earlier. The paper finds that large
            inflows of IDP induce sizable, negative effects on the
            intensive and extensive margins of production of formal
            firms. These effects are stronger for firms operating in
            sectors that face a stronger competition from the informal economy.
Trade Policy to Catalyze Export
            Diversification : What Should Landlocked Fragile Countries
            Do The Cases of Mali, Chad, and Niger
The landlocked and fragile countries
            Mali, Niger, and Chad have suffered, to varying degrees,
            from Dutch Disease, with high export concentration in
            natural resource commodities and in a few foreign markets,
            and little development of their non-resource economies. The
            three countries' ability to create a sustainable path
            to economic growth and poverty reduction is inextricably
            linked to their connectivity with external markets, in the
            region and beyond. Thus, Mali, Niger, and Chad are first
            challenged by their geography -- their landlocked nature
            creates a barrier to market access beyond their immediate
            neighbors, while their vast and thinly populated lands serve
            to isolate the most vulnerable communities from external and
            internal markets. Adding to these geographic disadvantages,
            the incentive environment -- defined by high and variable
            customs common external tariff regimes resulting from
            multiple overlapping regional trade arrangements -- places a
            wedge between domestic and international prices that
            provides a disincentive to exports in favor of non-tradable
            and domestic-oriented sectors. By bringing greater coherence
            and convergence between the many common external tariff
            regimes in operation and the rationalization of their
            structures, and improving connectivity within and between
            markets, Mali, Niger, and Chad can better promote the
            reallocation of resources toward tradable goods and
            services, putting the countries on a path toward greater
            economic inclusion and sustainable growth.