rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
How much has Nepal lost in the last
            decade due to load shedding an economic assessment using a
            CGE model
Nepal suffered with severe shortage of
            electricity supply or load shedding in the last decade.
            Electricity load shedding is considered one of the major
            barriers to the country's economic development. This
            study uses a computable general equilibrium model to
            estimate the economic costs of electricity load shedding the
            country faced during 2008-16. The study shows that if there
            had been no load shedding, annual gross domestic product, on
            average, would have been almost 7 percent higher than it was
            during 2008-16. The worst effects of load shedding were on
            the investment environment. If there had been no load
            shedding, investment would have been 48 percent higher than
            it was. Although electricity load shedding has been reduced
            recently in the residential sector through better
            electricity load management and increased electricity
            production and imports, the industrial sector, one of the
            main sources of economic growth in the country, still faces
            load shedding. Unless the electricity load shedding is
            eliminated, Nepal will continue to suffer a heavy economic loss.
The road to recovery : the role of
            poverty in the exposure, vulnerability and resilience to
            floods in Accra
In June 2015, about 53,000 people were
            affected by unusually severe floods in the Greater Accra
            Metropolitan Area, Ghana. The real impact of such a disaster
            is a product of exposure ("Who was affected?"),
            vulnerability ("How much did the affected households
            lose?"), and socioeconomic resilience ("What was
            their ability to cope and recover?"). This study
            explores these three dimensions to assess whether poor
            people were disproportionally affected by the 2015 floods.
            It reaches four main conclusions. (1) In the studied area,
            there is no difference in annual expenditures between the
            households who were affected and those who were not affected
            by the flood. (2) Poorer households lost less than their
            richer neighbors in absolute terms, but more when compared
            with their annual expenditure level, and poorer households
            are over-represented among the most severely affected
            households. (3) More than 30 percent of the affected
            households report not having recovered two years after the
            shock, and the ability of households to recover was driven
            by the magnitude of their losses, sources of income, and
            access to coping mechanisms, but not by their poverty, as
            measured by the annual expenditure level. (4) There is a
            measurable effect of the flood on behaviors, under-mining
            savings and investment in enterprises. The study concludes
            with two policy implications. First, flood management could
            be considered as a component of the poverty-reduction
            strategy in the city. Second, building resilience is not
            only about increasing income. It also requires providing the
            population with coping and recovery mechanisms such as
            financial instruments. A flood management program needs to
            be designed to target low-resilience households, such as
            those with little access to coping and recovery mechanisms,
            even those who are not living in poverty before the shock.
The road to recovery : the role of
            poverty in the exposure, vulnerability and resilience to
            floods in Accra
WPS8469 Policy Research Working Paper 8469

# The Road to Recovery

The Role of Poverty in the Exposure, Vulnerability and Resilience to Floods in Accra _Alvina Erman Elliot Motte Radhika Goyal Akosua Asare Shinya Takamatsu Xiaomeng Chen Silvia Malgioglio Alexander Skinner Nobuo Yoshida Stephane Hallegatte_ Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience Global Practice Poverty and Equity Global Practice June 2018
Crony capitalism in Ukraine :
            relationship between political connectedness and firms' performance
This study combines firm-level data and
            data on politically exposed people to explore correlation
            between firms' political connectedness and their
            economic performance in Ukraine. First, it estimates the
            share of politically connected firms in Ukraine's
            economy. Second, the study looks at how different the
            performance of politically connected firms is from that of
            their nonconnected peers. The analysis finds that 2 percent
            of firms are politically connected, but they control over 20
            percent of the total turnover and over 25 percent of the
            assets of all Ukrainian companies. Over the past two
            decades, politically connected firms used various channels
            to access economic rents: public procurement, subsidized
            loans, transfers from the budget, trade regulations that
            restrict imports, privileged access to state assets through
            privatizations, and beneficial tax regimes. There is a
            strong negative correlation between political connection and
            productivity. Politically connected firms are larger and
            employ more people, but they are less productive and grow
            slower in turnover and job creation. This may likely account
            for lower economic growth and less competitive economy.
Small area estimation of poverty
            under structural change
Small area poverty maps allow for the
            design of policies based on spatial differences in welfare.
            They are typically estimated based on a consumption survey
            reporting on poverty and a census providing the spatial
            disaggregation. This paper presents a new method which
            allows for the estimation of up-to-date small area poverty
            maps when only a dated census and a more recent survey are
            available and predictors and structural parameters are
            subject to drift over time, a situation commonly encountered
            in practice. Instead of using survey variables to explain
            consumption in the survey, the new approach uses variables
            constructed from the census. The proposed estimator has
            fewer data requirements and weaker assumptions than common
            small area poverty map estimators. Applications to simulated
            data and to poverty estimation in Brazil show an overall
            good performance.
Incentivizing school attendance in
            the presence of parent-child information frictions
Education conditional cash transfer
            programs may increase school attendance in part due to the
            information they transmit to parents about their
            child's attendance. This paper presents experimental
            evidence that the information content of an education
            conditional cash transfer program, when given to parents
            independently of any transfer, can have a substantial effect
            on school attendance. The effect is as large as 75 percent
            of the effect of a conditional cash transfer incentivizing
            parents, and not significantly different from it. In
            contrast, a conditional transfer program incentivizing
            children instead of parents is nearly twice as effective as
            an "information only" treatment providing the same
            information to parents about their child's attendance.
            Taken together, these results suggest that children have
            substantial agency in their schooling decisions. The paper
            replicates the findings from most evaluations of conditional
            cash transfers that gains in attendance achieved by
            incentivizing parents financially do not translate into
            gains in test scores. But it finds that both the information
            only treatment and the alternative intervention
            incentivizing children substantially improve math test scores.
Benchmarking costs of financial
            intermediation around the world
The costs of financial intermediation
            have important consequences for financial development. Using
            bank-level data for 160 countries during 2005-14, this paper
            analyzes the composition and sources of bank net interest
            margins. First, it uses an accounting decomposition
            framework to provide summary statistics on the size of net
            interest margins and highlight the cost and profit
            components in countries, regions, and income groups. Second,
            it uses regression analysis to examine the underlying
            bank-level, structural, macroeconomic, and institutional
            determinants of net interest margins. Finally, the paper
            uses the results of the econometric analysis to construct
            country-level bar charts of relative contributing factors to
            financial intermediation costs. The results provide
            evidence-based guidance on key areas of structural reforms
            to reduce the costs of financial intermediation.
The long-run and gender-equalizing
            impacts of school access : evidence from the first Indochina war
Very few studies currently exist on the
            long-term impacts of schooling policies in developing
            countries. This paper examines the impacts -- half a century
            later -- of a mass education program conducted by the
            Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the occupied areas during
            the First Indochina War. Difference-in-difference estimation
            results suggest that school-age children who were exposed to
            the program obtained significantly higher levels of
            education than their peers who were residing in
            French-occupied areas. The impacts are statistically
            significant for school-age girls and not for school-age
            boys. The analysis finds beneficial spillover and
            inter-generational impacts of education: affected girls
            enjoyed higher household living standards, had more educated
            spouses, and raised more educated children. The paper
            discusses various robustness checks and extensions that
            support these findings.
The long-run and gender-equalizing
            impacts of school access : evidence from the first Indochina war
WPS8480 Policy Research Working Paper 8480 The Long-Run and Gender-Equalizing Impacts of School Access

# Evidence from the First Indochina War

_Hai-Anh H. Dang Trung X. Hoang Ha Nguyen_ Development Economics Development Data Group and Development Research Group June 2018
Crop production, transport
            infrastructure, and agrobusiness nexus : evidence from Madagascar
The literature suggests a wide range of
            impacts of improved transport connectivity on agricultural
            growth. Still, the infrastructure-growth nexus remains
            somewhat mysterious, particularly in the African context,
            because many rural farmers do not have their own transport
            means. Using data from Madagascar, the paper reexamines the
            important roles of agrobusinesses. By applying the spatial
            autoregressive model, it is shown that proximity to
            input-oriented agrobusinesses, such as input dealers and
            equipment suppliers, is particularly important to increase
            rice production. Fertilizer and irrigation use is also found
            important, indicating the needs for intensification in rice
            production. Market accessibility is always found as a
            significant determinant: transport infrastructure connecting
            farmers and markets, especially the capital city,
            Antananarivo, is therefore important to develop and maintain.
Optimal locational choice for
            agrobusinesses in Madagascar : an application of spatial
            autoregressive Tobit regression
The traditional location theory predicts
            that firms' locational choice is independent of the
            output demand. However, firms are often concentrated in
            large markets. In Africa, agrobusinesses are expected to
            play an important role to facilitate agricultural growth but
            are hardly available in rural areas. This paper examines the
            question of why agribusinesses are not located in local
            production areas despite the clear benefits expected from
            close proximity to their inputs. By applying the spatial
            autocorrelation Tobit model, the paper estimates the impacts
            of market and farm accessibility on agglomeration of new
            agrobusinesses in Madagascar. The findings show that market
            accessibility and agglomeration economies are important for
            attracting more agrobusinesses. The quality of labor is also
            an important determinant for their locational choice. The
            findings are consistent with some models of location theory:
            firms move away from rural areas where they may still have
            monopsony power, toward urban areas where productivity is higher.
Piloting the use of network analysis
            and decision-making under uncertainty in transport
            operations : preparation and appraisal of a rural roads
            project in Mozambique under changing flood risk and other
            deep uncertainties
This paper presents a methodology to
            identify key priority areas for transport investments. The
            methodology uses a geospatial data-driven approach and then
            proposes an innovative economic analysis for project
            appraisal.  The two main steps involve (i) prioritization of
            road interventions based on a set of economic, social, and
            risk reduction criteria; and (ii) assessment of monetized
            and nonmonetized costs and benefits of road interventions
            under many scenarios covering the uncertainty on future
            risks and other factors. This methodology is used at
            different stages of project preparation for a rural roads
            lending operation to the Government of Mozambique. In the
            two regions of Mozambique considered, the analysis
            prioritizes regions along the coast when combining
            agriculture, fisheries, poverty, network criticality, and
            hazard risk criteria. With a limited budget of US$15 million
            per district, the results show that investing in repairing
            and rehabilitating culverts and bridges is the intervention
            that performs better under most of the scenarios.
Deep trade agreements and global
            value chains
Preferential trade agreements have
            become deeper over time, often encompassing policy areas
            that go beyond traditional trade policy, such as investment,
            competition, and intellectual property rights protection. In
            the literature, a prominent argument why countries sign
            "deep" agreements is to promote and facilitate the
            operation of global value chains. This paper exploits a new
            data set on the content of trade agreements and data on
            trade in value added and in parts and components, to
            quantify the impact of the depth of trade agreements on
            bilateral cross-border production linkages. The results show
            that adding a policy area to a trade agreement increases the
            domestic value added of intermediates (forward global value
            chain linkages) and the foreign value added of intermediates
            (backward global value chain linkages) by 0.48 and 0.38
            percent, respectively. At the sectoral level, the positive
            impact of deep trade agreements is higher for higher
            value-added industries, suggesting that deep agreements help
            countries to integrate in industries with higher levels of
            value added. For a larger sample of countries and years, the
            results confirm that an additional provision in a trade
            agreement increases bilateral trade in parts and components
            by 0.3 percent. The content of trade agreements also matters
            for global value chain integration, but the impact varies by
            income group. Provisions outside the current mandate of the
            World Trade Organization (investment and competition policy)
            drive the effect of trade agreements on North-South trade in
            parts and components. Provisions under the current World
            Trade Organization mandate (tariff reduction and customs
            facilitation) drive the effect of trade agreements on
            South-South trade in parts and components.
The effect of immigration on
            natives' school achievement : does length of stay in
            the host country matter
Using a rich data set of primary school
            students, this paper estimates the effects of immigrant
            concentration in the classroom on the academic achievement
            of natives. In contrast with previous contributions, it
            exploits rare information on age-at-migration to estimate
            separate spillover effects by duration of stay of immigrant
            classmates. To identify treatment effects, it uses
            cohort-by-cohort deviations in immigrant concentration
            within schools combined with attractive features of the
            Dutch school system. Overall, the paper finds no effect of
            the concentration of immigrant students on natives’ test
            scores. However, although immigrant students who have been
            in the country for some time have virtually no effect on
            natives, the analysis finds a small negative effect of
            recent immigrants in the classroom on natives’ test scores.
            The effect is significant only for language test scores, but
            insignificant for mathematics test scores. When significant,
            effect sizes are quite small compared to other educational
            interventions and classroom peer effects estimated in other contexts.
The role of major emerging markets
            in global commodity demand
Rapid growth among the major emerging
            markets over the past 20 years has boosted global demand for
            commodities. The seven largest emerging markets accounted
            for almost all the increase in global consumption of metals,
            and two-thirds of the increase in energy consumption over
            this period. As emerging market economies mature and shift
            towards less commodity-intensive activities, their demand
            for commodities may plateau. This paper estimates income
            elasticities of demand for a range of energy, metal and food
            commodities, and finds evidence of plateauing among several
            commodities. Looking ahead, as economies mature and GDP
            growth slows, growth in demand for commodities may also
            slow. Based on current population and GDP growth forecasts,
            this paper produces scenarios of potential growth in demand
            for commodities over the next decade. While global energy
            consumption growth may remain broadly steady, growth in
            global demand for metals and food could slow by one-third
            over the next decade. This would dampen global commodity
            prices. Despite an expected slowdown in its growth rate,
            China would likely remain the single largest consumer of
            many commodities. For the two-thirds of emerging market and
            developing economies that depend on raw materials for
            government and export revenues, these prospects reinforce
            the need for economic diversification and the strengthening
            of policy frameworks.
Funding and financing infrastructure
            : the joint-use of public and private finance
The paper addresses the issue of the
            feasible level of private finance in a contracting model of
            infrastructure finding and financing. It characterizes the
            structure of financial contracts, deriving the conditions
            under which both public and private finance coexist. A key
            feature is that access to outside finance and the regulatory
            decision on pricing and the amount of public subsidy, hence
            the extent of price recovery, are jointly determined.
            Mobilizing private finance requires a combination of price
            for the service and subsidy to the service provider that is
            large enough, exacerbating the fundamental tensions between
            financial viability through cost recovery and social
            inclusion. The paper then shows that the feasibility
            trade-off responds in non-trivial ways to changes in the
            economic and institutional environment likely to occur along
            the development path. While improvements along some of these
            dimensions, notably in the efficiency of bankruptcy
            procedures, appear to ease access to private finance,
            others, such as the cost of public funds, actually makes
            public finance more efficient. Using project data from the
            PPI database including information on the financial
            structure, the authors uncover an inverse U-shaped pattern
            in the share of private finance, peaking for countries in
            the upper-middle income range, which echoes their
            theoretical findings.
Improved cook stoves for climate
            change mitigation evidence of values, preferences and carbon
            savings from a choice experiment in Ethiopia
This paper investigates household
            preferences for improved cook stoves using a choice
            experiment administered in rural Ethiopia, and the
            cost-effectiveness of an improved stove for reducing global
            greenhouse gas emissions. In Ethiopia, about 96 percent of
            household energy demand is fulfilled by biomass. Improved
            stoves use less firewood and produce less smoke, and they
            have been touted as a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
            and health effects from indoor air pollution, as well as to
            improve forest conservation. Although there are many studies
            on the adoption of improved stoves, there is limited
            information on the willingness to pay for particular
            attributes of stoves, information that is vital for
            designing effective stoves and improving stove adoption. The
            paper finds that households have a positive willingness to
            pay for the durability, fuelwood use reduction, smoke
            reduction, and cooking time reduction of improved stoves. It
            also shows that the stove used in this experiment can be
            cost-effective for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which
            suggests that programs providing payments for reducing
            greenhouse gas emissions could strengthen stove adoption if
            they are well implemented. The main reason the stoves are
            not being adapted is the lack of availability, which is a
            key message to policy makers.