rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
What do we know about preferential
            trade agreements and temporary trade barriers
Two of the most important trade policy
            developments to take place since the 1980s are the expansion
            of preferential trade agreements and temporary trade
            barriers, such as antidumping, safeguards, and
            countervailing duties. Despite the empirical importance of
            preferential trade agreements and temporary trade barriers
            and the common feature that each can independently have
            quite discriminatory elements, relatively little is known
            about the nature of any relationships between them. This
            paper surveys the literature on some of the
            political-economic issues that can arise at the intersection
            of preferential trade agreements and temporary trade
            barriers and uses four case studies to illustrate variation
            in how countries apply the World Trade Organization's
            global safeguards policy instrument. The four examples
            include recent policies applied by a variety of types of
            countries and under different agreements: large and small
            countries, high-income and emerging economies, and free
            trade areas and customs unions. The analysis reveals
            important measurement and identification challenges for
            research that seeks to find evidence of systematic
            relationships between the formation of preferential trade
            agreements, the political-economic implications of their
            implementation, and the use of subsequent temporary trade barriers.
Private non-state sector engagement
            in the provision of educational services at the primary and
            secondary levels in South Asia : an analytical review of its
            role in school enrollment and student achievement
Private (non-state) sector engagement in
            the provision of educational services at the primary and
            secondary levels in South Asia has recently undergone
            remarkable growth. This type of education comes in various
            forms, such as schools financed and managed by the private
            sector, schools financed by the government and managed by
            the private sector, private school vouchers, and tutoring
            outside the classroom. According to recent household survey
            data, almost one-third of school-goers aged 6 to 18 years in
            South Asia go to private schools, with a high concentration
            in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. Data for India,
            Nepal, and Pakistan show that on average, private schools
            perform at least as well as government schools on student
            test scores, after controlling for socioeconomic factors,
            and they do so at significantly lower costs to society.
            However, student achievement varies greatly across schools
            of each type, with many weak private schools as well as
            strong government schools. Substantial, albeit indirect,
            evidence points to teacher behavior and accountability as an
            important driver of the effectiveness of private schools. In
            the long run, however, many factors may play important roles
            in sustaining the private sector's advantage. Another
            risk is that overall poor quality in a large government
            sector may set a low benchmark for the private sector. The
            findings cast doubt on the effectiveness of government
            regulations for private schools, given weak institutional
            capacity. Public-private partnerships with effective
            accountability mechanisms could leverage both equity and
            efficiency. Finally, it appears important to understand and
            customize teaching to the child's individual level.
Strengthening Malaria service
            delivery through supportive supervision and community
            mobilization in an endemic Indian setting : an evaluation of
            nested delivery models
Malaria continues to be a prominent
            global public health challenge, in part because of the slow
            population adoption of recommended preventive and curative
            behaviors. This paper tests the effectiveness of two service
            delivery models designed to promote recommended behaviors,
            including prompt treatment seeking for febrile illness, in
            Odisha India. The tested modules include supportive
            supervision of community health workers and community
            mobilization promoting appropriate health seeking. Program
            effects were identified through a randomized cluster trial
            comprising 120 villages from two purposively chosen
            malaria-endemic districts. Significant improvements were
            measured in the reported utilization of bed nets in both
            intervention arms vis-à-vis the control. Although overall
            rates of treatment seeking were equal across the study arms,
            treatment seeking from community health workers was higher
            in both intervention arms and care seeking from trained
            providers also increased with a substitution away from
            untrained providers. Further, fever cases in both treatments
            were more likely to have received timely medical treatment
            (within 24 hours) from a skilled provider. The study arm
            with supportive supervision was particularly effective in
            shifting care seeking to community health workers and
            ensuring prompt diagnosis and treatment. A community-based
            intervention combining the supportive supervision of
            community health workers with intensive community
            mobilization can be effective in shifting care seeking and
            increasing preventive behavior, and thus may be used to
            strengthen the national malaria control program.
Financial (dis-)information :
            evidence from an audit study in Mexico
An audit study was conducted in
            peri-urban Mexico to understand the quality of information
            and products offered to low-income potential customers.
            Trained auditors visited multiple financial institutions
            seeking credit and savings products. Consistent with Gabaix
            and Laibson (2006), staff voluntarily provides little
            information about avoidable fees, especially to auditors
            trained to reveal little knowledge about the market. In
            addition, clients are almost never offered the cheapest
            product, most likely because staff is incentivized to offer
            more expensive products that are thus more profitable to the
            institution. This suggests that disclosure and transparency
            policies may be ineffective if they undermine the commercial
            interest of financial institutions.
Household cooking fuel choice and
            adoption of improved cookstoves in developing countries : a review
Improving access to affordable and
            reliable energy services for cooking is essential for
            developing countries in reducing adverse human health and
            environmental impacts hitherto caused by burning of
            traditional biomass. This paper reviews empirical studies
            that analyze choices of fuel and adoption of improved stoves
            for cooking in countries where biomass is still the
            predominant cooking fuel. The review highlights the wide
            range of factors that influence households cooking fuel
            choices and adoption of improved stoves, including
            socioeconomic (access and availability, collection costs and
            fuel prices, household income, education and awareness),
            behavioral (food tastes, lifestyle), and cultural and
            external factors (indoor air pollution, government
            policies). The paper also summarizes the evidence on the
            significant adverse health impacts from exposure to indoor
            smoke, especially among women and young children. In
            low-income households, perceived health benefits of adopting
            improved stoves and financial benefits from fuel savings
            tend to be outweighed by the costs of improved stoves, even
            after accounting for the opportunity cost of time spent
            collecting biomass fuel. The paper identifies knowledge and
            evidence gaps on the success of policies and programs
            designed to scale up the adoption of improved cookstoves.
Child labor and learning
This paper uses a unique micro panel
            dataset of Brazilian students to investigate the impact of
            working while in school on learning outcomes. The potential
            endogeneity is addressed through the use of
            difference-in-difference and instrumental variable
            estimators. A negative effect of working on learning
            outcomes in math and Portuguese is found. The effects of
            child work range from 3 to 8 percent of a standard deviation
            decline in test score, which represents a loss of about a
            quarter to a half of a year of learning on average.
Cross-border mergers and
            acquisitions in services : the role of policy and industrial structure
This paper presents evidence on the
            determinants of cross-border mergers and acquisitions in
            services sectors. It develops a stylized model of mergers
            and acquisitions that predicts that the incidence of merger
            and acquisition deals depends, inter alia, on the target
            economy's size, industrial structure and investment
            policies, as well as on bilateral transactions costs. These
            predictions are examined with bilateral merger and
            acquisition flow data and detailed information on policy
            barriers from a new database of restrictions on services
            investment. The analysis finds that: (1) geographical
            factors affect mergers and acquisitions in services and
            manufacturing similarly but cultural factors affect mergers
            and acquisitions in services more than in manufacturing. (2)
            Controlling for these bilateral factors, restrictive
            investment policies reduce the probability of merger and
            acquisition inflows but this negative effect is mitigated in
            countries with relatively large shares of manufacturing and
            (to a lesser extent) services in gross domestic product. The
            same results hold for the number of merger and acquisition
            deals received. These findings suggest that the impact of
            policy is state-dependent and related to the composition of
            gross domestic product in the target economy.
The price of empowerment :
            experimental evidence on land titling in Tanzania
This paper reports on a randomized field
            experiment that uses price incentives to address economic
            and gender inequality in land tenure formalization. During
            the 1990s and 2000s, nearly two dozen African countries
            proposed de jure land reforms extending access to formal,
            freehold land tenure to millions of poor households. Many of
            these reforms stalled. Titled land remains the de facto
            preserve of wealthy households and, within households, men.
            Beginning in 2010, the study tested whether price
            instruments alone can generate greater inclusion by offering
            formal titles to residents of a low-income, unplanned
            settlement in Dar es Salaam at a range of subsidized prices,
            as well as additional price incentives to include women as
            owners or co-owners of household land. Estimated price
            elasticities of demand confirm that prices -- rather than
            other implementation failures or features of the titling
            regime -- are a key obstacle to broader inclusion in the
            land registry, and that some degree of pro-poor price
            discrimination is justified even from a narrow budgetary
            perspective. In terms of gender inequality, the study finds
            that even small price incentives for female co-titling
            achieve almost complete gender parity in land ownership with
            no reduction in demand.
Hybrid survey to improve the
            reliability of poverty statistics in a cost-effective manner
This paper studies the benefits, in
            terms of reliability and frequency of poverty statistics, of
            conducting a hybrid survey that collects non-consumption
            data from all surveyed households and consumption data from
            only a small subsample. Collecting detailed consumption or
            income data for the purpose of estimating poverty is costly
            and many low-income countries cannot afford to carry out
            such surveys on a regular basis. One option is to collect
            only non-consumption data and use consumption models
            developed from a previous round of household survey data to
            project poverty data. Although this approach is
            cost-effective because collection of non-consumption data is
            much cheaper than collection of consumption data, it is
            vulnerable to a structural change between the current and
            previous household surveys and might produce poverty
            estimates that are not comparable with the previous ones.
            Instead, the hybrid approach creates consumption models from
            a subsample of the current survey and applies them to the
            entire survey to project consumption data for all households
            in the sample. This paper examines the hybrid approach with
            data from the Bangladesh Household Income Expenditure
            Surveys of 2000 and 2005. Improvements in accuracy are
            achieved even with subsamples of just 320 or 640 households.
            Budget simulations confirm that the additional cost of
            collecting consumption data for such small subsamples is minimal.
The long-awaited rise of the middle
            class in Latin America is finally happening
In many developing countries, the supply
            of skilled workers is likely to continue to be stronger than
            demand, and this should drive down the skill premium and
            reduce inequality. Within the limitations of any exercise
            based on simulations, this paper finds that the recently
            observed reduction in inequality in Latin America may
            continue. Building on counterfactual scenarios projecting
            economic and demographic (including age and education)
            growth, the paper also highlights that by 2030 the
            long-awaited rise of the middle class in Latin America will
            be in full swing, as its share will be 43 percent of the
            total population, twice the value in 2005. This achievement
            is not guaranteed, as countries with large initial
            inequalities will have to achieve very high rates of
            inclusive growth. At the same time, a larger middle class is
            likely to exert a stronger influence on international and
            domestic policy making.
Export destinations and input prices
This paper examines the extent to which
            the destination of exports matters for the input prices paid
            by firms, using detailed customs and firm-product-level data
            from Portugal. The authors use exchange rate movements as a
            source of variation in export destinations and find that
            exporting to richer countries leads firms to charge more for
            outputs and pay higher prices for inputs, other things
            equal. The results are supportive of the hypothesis that an
            exogenous increase in average destination income leads firms
            to raise the average quality of goods they produce and to
            purchase higher-quality inputs.
Trade and cities
Many developing countries display
            remarkably high degrees of urban concentration that are
            incommensurate with their levels of urbanization. The cost
            of excessively high levels of urban concentration can be
            very high in terms of overpopulation, congestion, and
            productivity growth. One strand of the theoretical
            literature suggests that such high levels of concentration
            may be the result of restrictive trade policies that trigger
            forces of agglomeration. Another strand of the literature,
            however, points out that trade liberalization itself may
            exacerbate urban concentration by favoring the further
            growth of those large urban centers that have better access
            to international markets. The empirical basis for judging
            this question has been weak so far; in the existing
            literature, trade policies are poorly measured (or are not
            measured, as when trade volumes are used spuriously). Here,
            new disaggregated tariff measures are used to empirically
            test the hypothesis. A treatment-and-control analysis of
            pre- versus post-liberalization performance of the cities is
            also employed in liberalizing and non-liberalizing
            countries. It is found that (controlling for the largest
            cities that have ports and, thus, have better access to
            external markets) liberalizing trade leads to a reduction in
            urban concentration.
Inequality of opportunity and
            economic growth : a cross-country analysis
Income differences arise from many
            sources. While some kinds of inequality, caused by effort
            differences, might be associated with faster economic
            growth, other kinds, arising from unequal opportunities for
            investment, might be detrimental to economic progress. This
            study uses two new metadata sets, consisting of 118
            household surveys and 134 Demographic and Health Surveys, to
            revisit the question of whether inequality is associated
            with economic growth and, in particular, to examine whether
            inequality of opportunity -- driven by circumstances at
            birth -- has a negative effect on subsequent growth. The
            results are suggestive but not robust: while overall income
            inequality is generally negatively associated with growth in
            the household survey sample, we find no evidence that this
            is due to the component associated with unequal
            opportunities. In the Demographic and Health Surveys sample,
            both overall wealth inequality and inequality of opportunity
            have a negative effect on growth in some of the preferred
            specifications, but the results are not robust to relatively
            minor changes. On balance, although the results are
            suggestive of a negative association between inequality and
            growth, the data do not permit robust conclusions as to
            whether inequality of opportunity is bad for growth.
Climate change, conflict, and
            cooperation : global analysis of the resilience of
            international river treaties to increased water variability
Although water variability has already
            been observed across river basins, climate change is
            predicted to increase variability. Such environmental
            changes may aggravate political tensions, especially in
            regions that are not equipped with an appropriate
            institutional apparatus. Increased variability is also
            likely to challenge regions with existing institutional
            capacity. This paper argues that the best attempts to assess
            the ability of states to deal with variability in the future
            rest with considering how agreements have fared in the past.
            The paper investigates to what extent particular mechanisms
            and institutional designs help mitigate inter-country
            tensions over shared water. The analysis specifically
            focuses on identifying which water allocation mechanisms and
            institutional features provide better opportunities for
            mitigating conflict given that water allocation issues tend
            to be most salient among riparians. Water-related events
            from the Basins at Risk events database are used as the
            dependent variable to test hypotheses regarding the
            viability, or resilience, of treaties over time. Climatic,
            geographic, political, and economic variables are used as
            controls. The analysis is conducted for the years 1948-2001
            with the country dyad as the level of observation. Findings
            pertaining to the primary explanatory variables suggest that
            country dyads governed by treaties with water allocation
            mechanisms exhibiting both flexibility and specificity
            evince more cooperative behavior. Country dyads governed by
            treaties with a larger sum of institutional mechanisms
            likewise evince a higher level of cooperation, although
            certain institutional mechanisms are more important than others.
Do government private subsidies
            crowd out entrepreneurship
Although several studies have found a
            negative relationship between government spending and
            entrepreneurship, much debate remains regarding the
            components of government spending responsible for this
            association. This paper contributes to the literature by
            specifically exploring the relationship between government
            private subsidies and entrepreneurship. By combining
            macroeconomic government spending data with individual level
            entrepreneurship data, the paper finds a negative
            association between the share of private subsidies and
            entrepreneurship. However, findings are less straightforward
            when the analysis delves deeper into the components of
            private subsidies and their association with different kinds
            of entrepreneurship.
Regional diversity and inclusive
            growth in Indian cities
This paper examines the employment
            growth of Indian districts from 2000 to 2010 in the
            manufacturing and services sectors. Specialization and
            diversity metrics that combine industries in both sectors
            are calculated and related to subsequent job growth. The
            analysis finds robust and consistent evidence that the
            diversity of industries in the district across the two
            sectors links to subsequent job growth. Somewhat
            surprisingly, this link finds its strongest expression
            outside typical stories about the role of diversity. For
            example, the growth is strongest in rural areas of districts
            and in districts with low population density. Diversity
            correlates with disproportionately higher employment growth
            in the informal sector and plays a role in generating
            employment in the district's smaller industries. These
            findings point toward the "inclusive" nature of
            diversity-driven growth and highlight a potentially
            important agenda item for policy makers concerned with
            inclusive development.