rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Human rights based approaches to
            developmen t: concepts, evidence, and policy
This paper assesses the benefits, risks,
            and limitations of human rights based approaches to
            development, which can be catalogued on the basis of the
            institutional mechanisms they rely on: global compliance
            based on international and regional treaties; the policies
            and programming of donors and executive agencies; rights
            talk; and legal mobilization. The paper briefly reviews the
            politics of the first three kinds of human rights based
            approaches before examining constitutionally based legal
            mobilization for social and economic rights in greater
            detail. Litigation for social and economic rights is
            increasing in frequency and scope in several countries, and
            exhibits appealing attributes, such as inclusiveness and
            deliberative quality. Still, there are potential problems
            with this form of human rights based mobilization, including
            middle class capture, the potential counter-majoritarianism
            of courts, and difficulties in compliance. The conclusion
            summarizes what is known, and what remains to be studied,
            regarding human rights based approaches to development.
Systemic oversight frameworks in LAC
            : current practices and reform agenda
The world financial crisis that started
            in the US housing market in 2008 brought into evidence deep
            failures of prudential oversight, linked for the most part
            to a failure to comprehend and handle systemic risk in a way
            that could prevent systemic crises. This paper summarizes
            the responses to the joint World Bank -ASBA survey o the
            state of systemic oversight in the Latin American and
            Caribbean financial sectors and reflects on some of the
            challenges identified by respondents. We found that there is
            broad consensus among regional financial authorities on the
            need to enhance the current systemic oversight framework.
            Improving consolidated supervision to mitigate risk-shifting
            in conglomerates, adjusting prudential regulations to
            account for the accumulation of systemic risks, redefining
            the role of the supervisor to make it more proactive, and
            improving coordination among local supervisors as well as
            with foreign supervisors figure preeminently in the regional
            reform agenda.
Optimal food price stabilization in
            a small open developing country
In poor countries, most governments
            implement policies aiming to stabilize the prices of staple
            foods, which often include storage and trade measures
            insulating their domestic market from the world market. It
            is of crucial importance to understand the precise
            motivations and efficiency of those interventions, because
            they can have consequences worldwide. This paper addresses
            those issues by analyzing the case of a small, open
            developing country confronted by shocks to both the crop
            yield and foreign price. In this model, government
            interventions may be justified by the lack of an insurance
            market for food prices. Considering this market
            imperfection, the authors design optimal public
            interventions through trade and storage policies. They show
            that an optimal trade policy largely consists of subsidizing
            imports and taxing exports, which benefits consumers at the
            expense of producers. Import subsidies alleviate the
            non-negativity of food storage. In other words, when stocks
            are exhausted, subsidizing imports prevents domestic price
            spikes. One striking result: an optimal storage policy on
            its own is detrimental to consumers, since its stabilizing
            benefits leak into the world market and it raises the
            average domestic price. By contrast, an optimal combination
            of storage and trade policies results in a powerful
            stabilizing effect for domestic food prices.
Market-based instruments for
            international aviation and shipping as a source of climate finance
The international aviation and maritime
            sectors today enjoy relatively favorable tax treatment, as
            their fuels are not taxed and the sectors are not subject to
            any value-added tax or turnover tax. Nor are these fuel uses
            subject to any global measures to reduce their associated
            CO2 emissions, even though they represent at least 5 percent
            of the global greenhouse gas emissions. A carbon charge on
            fuels for international aviation and shipping equal to $25
            per tonne of emitted CO2 could raise about $12 billion from
            aviation and about $26 billion from shipping by 2020.
            Market-based instruments ought to be used to raise such
            revenue, preferably charges based on the carbon contents of
            fuels. Such charges would also scale back emissions by at
            least 5-10 percent. Developing countries ought to be able to
            keep their own tax revenue, and additional compensation to
            them for the economic burdens of these carbon charges may be
            warranted. Such compensation would constitute at most 40
            percent of the raised global revenue. Implementing these
            charges can be a challenge, especially for aviation, where a
            large number of bilateral air-service agreements would need
            to be rewritten.
Do informed citizens receive
            more...or pay more the impact of radio on the government
            distribution of public health benefits
The government provision of free or
            subsidized bed nets to combat malaria in Benin allows the
            identification of new channels through which mass media
            affect public policy outcomes. Prior research has concluded
            that governments provide greater private benefits to
            better-informed individuals. This paper shows, for the first
            time, that governments can also respond by exploiting
            informed individuals' greater willingness to pay for
            these benefits. Using a "natural experiment" in
            radio markets in northern Benin, the paper finds that media
            access increases the likelihood that households pay for the
            bed nets they receive from government, rather than getting
            them for free. Households more exposed to radio programming
            on the benefits of bed nets and the hazards of malaria place
            a higher value on bed nets. Local government officials
            exercise significant discretion over bed net pricing and
            respond to higher demand by selling bed nets that they could
            have distributed for free. Mass media appears to change the
            private behavior of citizens -- in this case, to invest more
            of their own resources on a public health good (bed nets) --
            but not their ability to extract greater benefits from government.
Human rights as demands for
            communicative action
A key issue with human rights is how to
            allocate duties correlative to rights claims. But the
            philosophical literature, drawing largely on naturalistic or
            interactional accounts of human rights, develops answers to
            this question that do not illuminate actual human rights
            problems. Charles Beitz, in recent work, attempts to develop
            a conception of human rights more firmly rooted in, and
            helpful for, current practice. While a move in the right
            direction, his account does not incorporate the domestic
            practice of human rights, and as a result remains
            insufficiently instructive for many human rights challenges.
            This paper addresses the problem of allocating correlative
            duties by taking the practices of domestic courts in several
            countries as a normative benchmark. Upon reviewing how
            courts in Colombia, India, South Africa, Indonesia, and
            elsewhere have allocated duties associated with
            socio-economic rights, the paper finds that courts urge
            parties to move from an adversarial to an investigative
            mode, impose requirements that parties argue in good faith,
            and structure a public forum of communication. The
            conclusion argues that judicial practice involves requiring
            respondents to engage in communicative, instead of
            strategic, action, and explores the implications of this
            understanding of human rights.
Allocative inefficiencies resulting
            from subsidies to agricultural electricity use : an
            illustrative model
This paper provides an analytical
            discussion of several interconnected resource allocation
            problems from under-pricing of electricity used by farmers
            for groundwater extraction.  In these situations,
            groundwater extraction is inefficiently high even without
            electricity under-pricing. Moreover, part of the electric
            power supply intended for farmers is often diverted to other
            unauthorized uses (notably illicit consumption). The paper
            demonstrates that unless non-price electricity rationing
            imposes severe constraints on demand, the range of resource
            allocation problems includes insufficient incentives to
            provide high-level service by the power utility,
            insufficient incentives for farmers to install and operate
            efficient equipment, and losses due to political "rent
            seeking" activities to influence water allocations. It
            also shows that diversion of electricity to illicit uses can
            increase overall economic efficiency when this leads to less
            electricity use by farmers, thus somewhat ameliorating the
            problem of excessive groundwater extraction as well as the
            inefficiencies related to under-pricing of electricity.
            Systemic reforms for overcoming these problems may face
            severe political obstacles.
Tanzania's infrastructure : a
            continental perspective
Infrastructure contributed 1.3
            percentage points to Tanzania's annual per capital GDP
            growth during the 2000s. If the country's
            infrastructure endowment were improved to the level of the
            African leader, Mauritius, annual per capita growth rates
            could increase by 3.4 percent. Tanzania has made great
            progress in reforming its trunk roads, improving the quality
            of the road network. The country has also seen significant
            gains in ICT networks, and has one of the most competitive
            domestic air transport sectors in Africa. The power sector
            poses Tanzania's most serious infrastructure challenge.
            Despite significant improvements in pricing and operational
            performance in recent years, inefficiency still absorbs
            about 1.4 percent of GDP. Moreover, due to heavy reliance on
            hydro-power the sector remains vulnerable to climate
            variability. The port of Dar es Salaam also suffers from
            performance problems as rapid traffic growth has
            increasingly exposed deficiencies in storage and access to
            the port. Poor access to safe water is another challenge,
            exacerbated by poor budget execution in the sector. Tanzania
            would need to invest $2.4 billion annually for 10 years to
            meet its infrastructure targets. Spending at that level
            would absorb just over 20 percent of the country's GDP.
            Existing spending stands at $1.2 billion a year. Tanzania
            loses $0.5 billion each year to inefficiencies such as
            underpricing, undercollection of revenue, overstaffing, and
            lack of budget prioritization. But even if inefficiencies
            could be fully captured, an annual funding gap of $0.7
            billion would remain. That gap could be shrunk to $0.4
            billion if lower-cost technologies were adopted and if
            regional power trade could be further developed.
Uganda's infrastructure : a
            continental perspective
Uganda has made substantial progress on
            its infrastructure agenda in recent years. The early and
            successful ICT reform detonated a huge expansion in mobile
            coverage and penetration resulting in a highly competitive
            market. Power sector restructuring has paved the way for a
            rapid doubling of power generation capacity. Uganda is doing
            well on the water and sanitation MDGs, and has made
            effective use of performance contracting to improve utility
            performance. However, a number of important challenges
            remain. Despite reforms, the power sector continues to
            hemorrhage resources due to under-pricing and high
            distribution losses, while electrification rates are still
            very low. Providing adequate resources for road maintenance
            remains a challenge, and further investment is needed to
            increase rural connectivity and improve road safety.
            Addressing Uganda's infrastructure challenges will
            require sustained expenditure of around $1.4 billion per
            year over the next decade, strongly skewed towards capital
            expenditure. Uganda already spends approximately $1 billion
            per year on infrastructure, equivalent to about 11 percent
            of GDP. A further $0.3 billion a year is lost to
            inefficiencies, the bulk of which are associated with
            underpricing and distribution losses in the power sector.
            Uganda's annual infrastructure funding gap is about
            $0.4 billion per year, most of which is associated with
            irrigation as well as water and sanitation infrastructure.
Multidimensional poverty analysis:
            Looking for a middle ground
Widespread agreement that poverty is a
            multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing deprivations along
            multiple dimensions, clashes with often vociferous
            disagreement about how best to measure these deprivations.
            Drawing on the recent literature, this short note proposes
            three methodological alternatives to the false dichotomy
            between scalar indices of multidimensional poverty, on the
            one hand, and a "dashboard" approach that looks
            only at marginal distributions, on the other. These
            alternatives include simple Venn diagrams of the overlap of
            deprivations across dimensions, multivariate stochastic
            dominance analysis, and the analysis of copula functions,
            which capture the extent of interdependency across
            dimensions. Examples from the literature on both developing
            and developed countries are provided.
Child labor, schooling, and child ability
Using data collected in rural Burkina
            Faso, this paper examines how children's cognitive
            abilities influence households' decisions to invest in
            their education. To address the endogeneity of child ability
            measures, the analysis uses rainfall shocks experienced in
            utero or early childhood to instrument for ability. Negative
            shocks in utero lead to 0.24 standard deviations lower
            ability z-scores, corresponding with a 38 percent enrollment
            drop and a 49 percent increase in child labor hours compared
            with their siblings. Negative education impacts are largest
            for in utero shocks, diminished for shocks before age two,
            and have no impact for shocks after age two. The paper links
            the fetal origins hypothesis and sibling rivalry literatures
            by showing that shocks experienced in utero not only have
            direct negative impacts on the child's cognitive
            ability (fetal origins hypothesis), but also negatively
            impact the child through the effects on sibling rivalry
            resulting from the cognitive differences.
Mines, migration and HIV/AIDS in
            southern Africa
Swaziland and Lesotho have the highest
            HIV prevalence in the world. They also share another
            distinct feature: during the last century, they sent a large
            numbers of migrant workers to South African mines. This
            paper examines whether participation in mining in a
            bordering country affects HIV infection rate. A job in the
            mines means leaving for long periods away from their
            families and living in an area with an active sex industry.
            This creates potential incentives for multiple, concurrent
            partnerships. Using Demographic and Health Surveys, the
            analysis shows that migrant miners ages 30-44 are 15
            percentage points more likely to be HIV positive, and women
            whose partner is a migrant miner are 8 percentage points
            more likely to become infected. The study also shows that
            miners are less likely to abstain or use condoms, and female
            partners of miners are more likely to engage in extramarital
            sex. The authors interpret these results as suggesting that
            miners' migration into South Africa has increased the
            spread of HIV/AIDS in their countries of origin. Consistent
            with this interpretation, the association between HIV
            infection and being a miner or a miner's wife are not
            statistically significant in Zimbabwe, a country where the
            mining industry is local and does not involve migrating to
            South Africa.
Regional integration and natural
            resources : who benefits evidence from MENA
This paper builds on theoretical
            predictions that show that gains from regional integration
            are unevenly distributed between resource rich and poor
            countries. It explores the effects of different integration
            schemes in the Middle East and North Africa. The results
            suggest that within the Pan Arab Free Trade Agreement, there
            is significant trade creation for resource poor countries
            associated with regional integration, and no evidence of
            trade diversion. In resource rich countries, however, there
            is evidence of pure trade diversion in both
            resource-rich/labor-abundant countries and
            resource-rich/labor-importing countries. This underscores
            the idea that regional integration can help to spread the
            benefits of unevenly distributed resource wealth among the
            region's economies.
A tale of two species : revisiting
            the effect of registration reform on informal business
            owners in Mexico
Different views have been put forward to
            explain why most firms in developing countries operate
            informally. One view argues that informal-business owners
            are entrepreneurs who do not register their firm because the
            regulation process is too complex. Another argues that
            informal-business owners are people trying to make a living
            while searching for a wage job. This paper contributes to
            recent literature that argues that both factors are at work.
            The author uses discriminant analysis to separate informal
            business owners into two groups: those with personal
            characteristics similar to wage workers, and those with
            traits similar to formal-business owners. The paper then
            examines how the two groups were affected by a business
            registration reform in Mexico. Informal-business owners from
            the second group were more likely to register their business
            after the reform. By contrast, informal-business owners from
            the first group were less likely to register but more likely
            to become wage workers after the reform. This is consistent
            with the finding in Bruhn (2008 and 2011) that the reform
            led to job creation. It also explains why the earlier papers
            find that the reform didnt affect the number of new
            registrations by all informal business owners.
Islamic inheritance law, son
            preference and fertility behavior of Muslim couples in Indonesia
This paper examines whether the son
            preference and fertility behavior of Muslim couples respond
            to the risk of inheritance expropriation by their extended
            family. According to traditional Islamic inheritance
            principles, only the son of a deceased man can exclude his
            male agnates from inheritance and preserve his estate within
            the nuclear household. The paper exploits cross-sectional
            and time variation in the application of the Islamic
            inheritance exclusion rule in Indonesia: between Muslim and
            non-Muslim populations affected by different legal systems,
            across men with different sibling sex composition, and
            before and after a change in Islamic law that allowed female
            children to exclude male relatives. The analysis finds that
            Muslim couples more affected by the exclusion rule exhibit
            stronger son preference, practice sex-differential fertility
            stopping, attain a higher proportion of sons, and have
            larger families than non-Muslims or Muslims for whom the
            exclusion rule is less binding.