rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Removing impediments to sustainable
            economic development : the case of corruption
This paper examines causes and
            consequences of corruption within the process of economic
            development. It starts by reviewing some of the factors
            that, over the past couple of decades, have transformed
            corruption from a subject on the sidelines of economic
            research to a central preoccupation of policy makers and
            donors in many countries. Drawing on a vast treasure trove
            of experiences and insights accumulated during the postwar
            period and reflected in a growing body of academic research,
            the paper analyzes many of the institutional mechanisms that
            sustain corruption and the impact of corruption on
            development. This paper argues that many forms of corruption
            stem from the distributional attributes of the state in its
            role as the economy's central agent of resource
            allocation. What is the impact of corruption on public
            finances and on the characteristics and performance of the
            private sector? What distortions does corruption introduce
            in the allocation of resources and in the relationships
            among economic agents in the marketplace? The paper also
            addresses the question of what can be done about corruption
            and discusses the role of economic policies in developing
            the right sorts of incentives and institutions to reduce the
            incidence of corruption. Particular attention is paid to
            business regulation, subsidies, the budget process,
            international conventions, and the role of new technologies.
            The paper concludes with some thoughts on the moral
            dimensions of corruption.
Some thoughts on making long-term
            forecasts for the world economy
Countries and international
            organizations working on longer-range development issues
            depend on long-term quantitative projections and scenario
            analysis. Such forecasting has become increasingly
            challenging, thanks to the rapid pace of globalization,
            technological progress, the interplay among them, and
            enhanced connectivity among people. As a result, seemingly
            isolated events can quickly lead to wide-ranging and lasting
            regional or even global consequences. This paper examines
            the problem of long-term economic forecasting in the face of
            increased complexity and uncertainty. With the benefit of
            hindsight, it scrutinizes past long-term qualitative and
            quantitative projections for the 1990s in order to draw
            lessons on how an institution can and should conduct
            long-term forecasting and policy analysis. The main
            conclusions are that policy makers and researchers across
            the world urgently need to see the big picture if they are
            to deal with the specific challenges and opportunities they
            will face over the long term as economies and global
            linkages undergo major structural changes under conditions
            of considerable uncertainty and volatility. Global
            institutions need to have strong research programs that work
            in close collaboration with other international
            organizations, academic centers, and independent experts on
            important long-term development issues ("blue sky"
            issues) and megatrends. These institutions need to build on
            their comparative strengths and form teams of in-house
            researchers and global experts who work on state-of-the-art
            models related to globalization, technological progress and
            innovations, climate change, demographic shifts, population,
            and labor force quality and their policy implications at
            both the global and country levels. Researchers should be
            encouraged to consider how global challenges such as
            financial crises, climate change, and infectious diseases
            can lead to breaks in economic trends and regime change and
            how such breaks affect economic activity. Alternative
            scenarios need to be created that incorporate the views of
            contrarian forecasters, including forecasts of possible shocks.
Starting a foreign investment across sectors
The ease of starting a foreign
            investment in various sectors is a relevant consideration
            for investors seeking to establish an investment project
            abroad. Two thematic areas will be analyzed in this paper to
            answer the following questions: Which economies impose
            equity ownership restrictions on foreign investors and which
            procedural barriers do foreign companies face when
            establishing foreign-owned subsidiaries in these economies?
            The analysis is based on findings from the Foreign Direct
            Investment Regulations indicators, which measure 103
            economies, on whether they restrict foreign ownership across
            economic sectors and on the establishment process they
            impose on foreign-owned companies. Nearly 80 percent of the
            economies covered in the Foreign Direct Investment
            Regulations database restrict foreign companies from
            entering in some sectors of their economies. In addition,
            establishing a foreign-owned company takes longer and
            requires more steps than starting a domestically-owned
            company in 94 percent of the economies observed. Overall,
            economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and high-income
            OECD economies have fewer equity restrictions on foreign
            ownership than economies in the other regions and require
            the least number of additional procedures of foreign
            companies to establish a subsidiary. The findings are
            significantly correlated with inflows of foreign direct
            investment on a per-capita basis.
Getting incentives right : an impact
            evaluation of district hospital capitation payment in Vietnam
With the movement toward universal
            health coverage gaining momentum, the global health research
            community has made significant efforts to advance knowledge
            about the impact of various schemes to expand population
            coverage. The impacts on efficiency, quality, and gaps in
            service utilization of reforms to provider payment methods
            are less well studied and understood. The current paper
            contributes to this limited knowledge by evaluating the
            impact of a shift by Vietnam's social health insurance
            agency from reimbursing hospitals on a fee-for-service basis
            to making a capitation payment to the district hospital
            where the enrollee lives. The analysis uses panel data on
            hospitals over the period 2005-2011 and multiple
            cross-section data sets from the Vietnam Household Living
            Standards Surveys to estimate impacts on efficiency,
            quality, and equity. The paper finds that capitation
            increases hospitals' efficiency, as measured by
            recurrent expenditure and drug expenditure per case, but has
            no effect on surgery complication rates or in-hospital
            deaths. In response to the shift to capitation, hospitals
            scaled down service provision to the insured and increased
            provision to the uninsured (who continue to pay
            out-of-pocket on a fee-for-service basis). The study points
            to the need to anticipate the intended and unintended
            effects of any payment reform and the trade-offs among
            policy objectives.
Exporter dynamics, firm size and
            growth, and partial year effects
Two otherwise identical firms that enter
            the same market in different months, one in January and one
            in December, will report dramatically different annual sales
            for the first calendar year of operations. This partial year
            effect in annual data leads to downward biased observations
            of the level of activity upon entry and upward biased growth
            rates between the year of entry and the following year. This
            paper examines the implications of partial year effects
            using Peruvian export data. The partial year bias is very
            large: the average level of first-year exports of new
            exporters is understated by 65 percent and the average
            growth rate between the first and second year of exporting
            is overstated by 112 percentage points. This paper
            re-examines a number of stylized facts about firm size and
            growth that have motivated rapidly expanding theoretical and
            empirical literatures on firm export dynamics. Correcting
            the partial year effect eliminates unusually high growth
            rates in the first year of exporting, raises initial export
            levels, and shifts 10 percent of market entrants from below
            to above the median size. Revisiting an older set of facts
            on firm size and growth, the paper finds that correcting for
            partial year biases reduces the number of small firms in the
            firm size distribution and weakens the negative relationship
            between firm growth and firm size.
A comprehensive analysis of poverty
            in India
This paper offers a comprehensive
            analysis of poverty in India. It shows that no matter which
            of the two official poverty lines is used, poverty has
            declined steadily in all states and for all social and
            religious groups. Accelerated growth between fiscal years
            2004-2005 and 2009-2010 led to an accelerated decline in
            poverty rates. Moreover, the decline in poverty rates during
            these years was sharper for the socially disadvantaged
            groups relative to upper caste groups, so that a narrowing
            of the gap in the poverty rates is observed between the two
            sets of social groups. The paper also provides a discussion
            of the recent controversies in India regarding the choice of
            poverty lines.
Decomposing the recent inequality
            decline in Latin America
Over the past decade, 12 of 14 Latin
            American countries have experienced a reduction in
            inequality. Based on a series of counterfactual simulations,
            the observed changes in inequality are decomposed in order
            to identify the main determinants of inequality. In contrast
            to methods that focus on aggregate summary statistics, the
            method adopted in this paper generates counterfactual
            distributions, so that the analysis can account for changes
            related to demographics, occupation, labor earnings and
            transfers, pensions, and other nonlabor income sources. The
            results show that for the majority of countries in the
            sample, the most important contributor to the observed
            decline in inequality has been the relatively strong growth
            in labor earnings at the bottom of the income distribution.
            In particular, most of the reduction in inequality can be
            attributed to an increase in earnings per hour for the
            bottom of the income distribution. The paper also
            contributes to the literature on inequality in Latin America
            by providing the Shapley-Shorrocks value of this decomposition.
Escaping the capability trap:
            turning "small" development into "big" development
The international development community
            has been grappling with the challenges of implementing
            development programs and, consequently, with the design of
            practical approaches to attaining program objectives. This
            paper contributes to the emerging discussion on addressing
            the implementation capacity gap in developing countries. It
            presents the post-conflict experience of Burundi in building
            the capacity of its public sector to deliver basic services
            and demonstrates a practical approach to implementing what
            has been called problem-driven iterative adaptation. The
            Leadership for Results approach shows that a results-focused
            process of learning through disciplined experimentation
            enables local officials and stakeholders to more willingly
            learn and adopt new ways of doing things. This approach can
            be structured to address the time inconsistency between a
            development program and political or electoral concerns,
            both of which are critical to overcome implementation challenges.
Size and age of establishments:
            evidence from developing countries
Survey data from 120 developing
            countries are used to examine the relation between
            establishment size and age in the formal sector. Existing
            research suggests that manufacturing establishments in
            developing countries do not grow over time, most likely
            because of market imperfections and regulations. To the
            contrary, this paper finds that the average plant in
            developing countries that is more than 40 years old employs
            almost five times as many workers as the average plant that
            is five years old or younger. The analysis finds consistent
            evidence when it looks within a large country, India, based
            on detailed manufacturing census data over 23 years. It also
            finds that differences in financial development across
            Indian states, while substantial, have a minor effect on
            firm growth, consistent with inefficiency of state-owned
            financial systems. These results hold controlling for
            differences in labor regulations across states, capital
            intensity, labor regulations, and firms born before and
            after the major reforms.
Global income distribution : from
            the fall of the Berlin Wall to the great recession
The paper presents a newly compiled and
            improved database of national household surveys between 1988
            and 2008. In 2008, the global Gini index is around 70.5
            percent having declined by approximately 2 Gini points over
            this twenty year period. When it is adjusted for the likely
            under-reporting of top incomes in surveys by using the gap
            between national accounts consumption and survey means in
            combination with a Pareto-type imputation of the upper tail,
            the estimate is a much higher global Gini of almost 76
            percent. With such an adjustment the downward trend in the
            Gini almost disappears. Tracking the evolution of individual
            country-deciles shows the underlying elements that drive the
            changes in the global distribution: China has graduated from
            the bottom ranks, modifying the overall shape of the global
            income distribution in the process and creating an important
            global "median" class that has transformed a
            twin-peaked 1988 global distribution into an almost
            single-peaked one now. The "winners" were
            country-deciles that in 1988 were around the median of the
            global income distribution, 90 percent of whom in terms of
            population are from Asia. The "losers" were the
            country-deciles that in 1988 were around the 85th percentile
            of the global income distribution, almost 90 percent of whom
            in terms of population are from mature economies.
The method of randomization and the
            role of reasoned intuition
The method of randomization has been a
            major driver in the recent rise to prominence of empirical
            development economics. It has helped uncover patterns and
            facts that had earlier escaped attention. But it has also
            given rise to debate and controversy. This paper evaluates
            the method of randomization and concludes that, while the
            method of randomization is the gold standard for
            description, and does uncover what is here called
            'circumstantial causality,' it is not able to
            demonstrate generalized causality. Nor does it, in itself,
            lead to policy conclusions, as is often claimed by its
            advocates. To get to policy conclusions requires combining
            the findings of randomized experiments with human intuition,
            which, being founded in evolution, has innate strengths.
            Moreover, even non-randomized empirical methods combined
            with reasoned intuition can help in crafting development policy.
The impact of high school financial
            education : experimental evidence from Brazil
This paper studies the impact of a
            comprehensive financial education program spanning six
            states, 868 schools, and approximately 20,000 high school
            students in Brazil through a randomized control trial. The
            program increased student financial knowledge by a quarter
            of a standard deviation and led to a 1.4 percentage point
            increase in saving for purchases, better likelihood of
            financial planning, and greater participation in household
            financial decisions by students. "Trickle-up"
            impacts on parents were also significant, with improvements
            in parent financial knowledge, savings, and spending
            behavior. The study also finds evidence that the program
            affected students' inter-temporal preferences and attitudes.
Evidence gap maps - a tool for
            promoting evidence-informed policy and prioritizing future research
Evidence-gap maps present a new addition
            to the tools available to support evidence-informed policy
            making. Evidence-gap maps are thematic evidence collections
            covering a range of issues such as maternal health,
            HIV/AIDS, and agriculture. They present a visual overview of
            existing systematic reviews or impact evaluations in a
            sector or subsector, schematically representing the types of
            interventions evaluated and outcomes reported. Gap maps
            enable policy makers and practitioners to explore the
            findings and quality of the existing evidence and facilitate
            informed judgment and evidence-based decision making in
            international development policy and practice. The gap map
            also identifies key "gaps" where little or no
            evidence from impact evaluations and systematic reviews is
            available and where future research should be focused. Thus,
            gap maps can be a useful tool for developing a strategic
            approach to building the evidence base in a particular
            sector. This paper provides an introduction to evidence-gap
            maps, outlines the gap-map methodology, and presents some examples.
Opportunity-sensitive poverty measurement
This paper offers an axiomatic
            characterization of two classes of poverty measures that are
            sensitive to inequality of opportunity, one a strict subset
            of the other. The proposed indices are sensitive not only to
            income shortfalls from the poverty line, but also to
            differences in the opportunities faced by people with
            different predetermined characteristics, such as race or
            family background. Dominance conditions are established for
            each class of measures and a sub-family of scalar indices,
            based on a rank-dependent aggregation of type-specific
            poverty levels, is also introduced. In empirical analysis
            using household survey data from eighteen European countries
            in 2005, substantial differences in country rankings based
            on standard Foster-Greer-Thorbecke indices and on the new
            opportunity-sensitive indices are found. Cross-country
            differences in opportunity-sensitive poverty are decomposed
            into a level effect, a distribution effect, and a population
            composition effect.
Intrinsic motivation, effort and the
            call to public service
Pay schemes in the public sector aim to
            attract motivated, high-ability applicants. A nascent
            literature has found positive effects of higher pay on
            ability and no or slightly positive effects on motivation.
            This paper revisits this issue with a novel subject pool,
            students destined for the private and public sectors in
            Indonesia. The analysis uses dictator games and real effort
            tasks to examine wage effects on a measure of motivation
            that exactly matches the mission of the public sector task.
            The model and experimental design allow for precisely
            measuring (1) the distribution of ability over the effort
            task; (2) the distribution of motivational preferences for
            public sector missions; and (3) outside options when
            choosing to work for public sector missions. Three novel
            conclusions emerge. First, more pro-social workers do, in
            fact, exert higher effort in a pro-social task. Second, in
            contrast to previous research, motivated individuals are
            more likely to join the public sector when public sector pay
            is low than when it is high. Third, real public sector
            workers exhibit greater pro-sociality than private sector
            workers, even for entrants into the Indonesian Ministry of Finance.
Crime and growth convergence :
            evidence from Mexico
Scholars have often argued that crime
            deters growth, but the empirical literature assessing such
            effect is scarce. By exploiting cross-municipality income
            and crime data for Mexico -- a country that experienced a
            high increase in crime rates over the past decade -- this
            study circumvents two of the most common problems faced by
            researchers in this area. These are: (i) the lack of a
            homogenous, consistently comparable measure of crime and
            (ii) the small sample problem in the estimation. Combining
            income data from poverty maps, administrative records on
            crime and violence, and public expenditures data at the
            municipal level for Mexico (2005-2010), the analysis finds
            evidence indicating that drug-related crimes indeed deter
            growth. It also finds no evidence of a negative effect on
            growth from crimes unrelated to drug trafficking.