rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
As pointed out above, in this paper, the North comprises the G-7 and Western European countries, whereas the South includes all other economies.<sup>7</sup> In order to assess whether the patterns of financial integration of LAC countries differ from those of other South countries, throughout this paper we split the South into LAC and non-LAC countries.

# **3. The Role of LAC in International Financial Transactions**

Although the existing literature has already described how the South has been gaining space in global finance, little is known about the role that LAC countries have played in this process. As mentioned above, South countries have broadened and deepened their connections not only with North countries, but also with other South countries. LAC has participated in this trend as well, though at a lower rate relative to Asia. In fact, across all different types of transactions, LAC has been gaining ground over time, both as a receiver and a sender of these transactions. Table 1 illustrates many aspects of LAC’s financial integration.

LAC countries are increasingly more connected with the rest of the world. While the investments of the rest of the world to LAC have increased in almost all the categories, the largest increases took place in LAC’s investments abroad. LAC countries’ portfolio holdings in the rest of the world (North and South countries) rose from an average annual of $45.3 billion (in 2011 U.S. dollars) in 2001-2005 to an average of $152.5 billion in 2006-2011. Growth in cross-border syndicated loans and M&A flows has been substantial as well.<sup>8</sup> Between 2001–2005 and 2006–2011, the average annual volume of syndicated loan from LAC to the rest of the world jumped from $2.1 billion to $4.0 billion and the volume of M&A flows rose from $4.2 billion $12.9 billion. When using a longer time span the growth is even more impressive. Greenfield growth has been more subdued, but these crossborder investments were already well established at the beginning of the 2000s (compared to syndicated loans and M&A).

Although there has been an important rise in the role played by LAC as a sender region, crossborder flows to LAC countries far outweigh flows from LAC countries. For syndicated loans, M&A, and greenfield investment, total flows to LAC countries from North and South countries in 2006– 2011 were almost nine times larger than flows from LAC countries to North and South countries.

> 7 Western Europe comprise the following countries: Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, San Marin, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. 8 The dataset for syndicated loans also covers 2012; the later period is thus 2006–2012. For simplicity, this period is referred to as 2006–2011 throughout the paper.

7
# **I.  INTRODUCTION**

Fossil fuel exporters are exposed to the vagaries of fossil fuel markets. The collapse in oil prices that started in June 2014 is a stark reminder about the challenges posed by the dependence on oil and other fossil fuels (Chart 1). While the literature on appropriate macroeconomic policies for fossil fuel exporters is extensive, much more attention has been paid to the role of fiscal policy. Part of the reason why monetary policy has been less subject to attention may have to do with the fact that most fossil fuel exporters have pegs or relatively fixed exchange rate regimes and hence have no independent monetary policy. There are however good reasons to take a fresh look at the issue of monetary policy in fossil fuel exporters. Traditionally, the horizon of monetary policy has been limited to that of the business cycle, typically 2-6 years. Considering the degree of wealth concentration, the strong complementarity between fiscal and monetary policies, and the emergence of new risks to fossil fuel assets, there is a need to rethink monetary policy in fossil fuel exporters. In the present paper, I specifically examine the role monetary policy should play at different horizons.

**Chart 1 – 2014‐2016 Oil Price Slump**

<!-- Start of picture text --> Crude Oil Price (APSP)<br>U.S. dollars a barrel<br>120<br>100<br>80<br>60<br>40<br>20<br>0<br>Jan-14 Apr-14 Jul-14 Oct-14 Jan-15 Apr-15 Jul-15 Oct-15 Jan-16 Apr-16 Jul-16 Oct-16<br>Source: IMF, Primary Commodity Price System.<br>Note: APSP = average petroleum spot price—average of U.K. Brent, Dubai, and West Texas<br>Intermediate, equally weighted.<br><!-- End of picture text --> 2
3 data, it is also widely accepted that these data represent the best available source of information on the distribution of living standards for any country where they have been conducted.

Our poverty and inequality measures are constructed for the distributions of household income or consumption per capita, as captured by these surveys. This choice of indicator prompts three caveats. First, by focusing on income or consumption, we end up effectively taking a one-dimensional approach to measuring welfare. It would clearly be desirable to include other important dimensions of welfare not already included in consumption or income (at least directly), such as health status, cognitive functioning, civil and personal freedoms and environmental quality.<sup>3</sup> Even short of a fully multidimensional approach to welfare, it might well be desirable to include in the aggregate indicator of well-being some measure of the value of access to public and publicly provided goods (such as education and health services, personal security, and access to local infrastructure). But extending welfare measurement in either of these two directions in a manner that allows international comparisons is impossible on the basis of the information available to date. We therefore restrict our attention to the narrow realm of people’s ability to consume private goods, as measured by their income or consumption expenditures.

Second, income is not the same thing as consumption. Although over the long-run consumption should come quite close to permanent income (except for the limited number of lineages where bequests are important), there can be considerable deviations in the short run, as households either save or dissave. Consumption is thus generally considered a better measure of current welfare than income.<sup>4</sup> In addition, and perhaps of greater practical importance, the questionnaires for income and consumption are perforce quite different, and yield different types of measurement error; see Deaton (1997). As a result of both higher measurement error and of the variance of the transitory component<sup>5</sup> , income inequality tends to be higher than inequality in consumption expenditures in a given distribution. In the description that follows, we use

> 3 The Human Development Index (HDI) is a well-known example of how one can construct an aggregate index that combines income and certain “non-income” dimensions of welfare. The HDI does not directly reflect inequality within countries and also imposes some questionable aggregation conditions (including trade offs); for further discussion see Ravallion (1997). Grimm et al. (2006) provide an ambitious attempt to differentiate the HDI by income groups.

> 4 It is sometimes claimed that this argument carries less weight in developed countries, but for a counter argument see Slesnick (1998).

> 5 There tend to be more people dissaving than saving at the bottom of the distribution, and more people saving than dissaving at the top.
senior most head teacher among the schools, and three parents of children in these schools. The _pradhan_ and the head teacher jointly operate the school account. The school account receives annual grants for repair and maintenance, school development, TLM, money for school dress, money for civil works- school building, rooms, toilet, drinking water etc if authorized and contract teachers’ salary. The _gram panchayat_ account which is cosigned by the VEC head receives scholarship funds and mid day meal funds. The VEC is supposed to manage and monitor funds coming to the school account and to the _gram panchayat_ account (funds earmarked for the school), determine how to use and give consent for use of these funds, request additional funds if civil work etc are required, keep record of accounts, and select contract teachers (called _shiksha mitras_ ). An additional contract teacher can be hired if the pupil-teacher ratio in the school exceeds 40, up to a maximum of two contract teachers and up to a maximum ratio of 3:2 of regular to contract teachers. For selection of contract teachers, VECs are required to follow state guidelines outlining eligibility criterion (18-35 years of age, minimum education of grade 12, preferably a resident of the _gram panchayat_<sup>2</sup> , and if there are reservations by caste, gender) and are expected to rank applicants in order of qualification (grades obtained in grade 12, 10). The contract is for a 10 month period and VEC decides whether to renew the contract to the next year. With a two-thirds majority, the VEC can remove the contract teacher anytime during this contract.

# **3. Methods**

## **Setting**

This study is a cluster randomized controlled trial of 610 _gram panchayats_ (GPs) across three states, Karnataka, MP and UP, randomly allocated to receive or not receive the treatment which is an information campaign. A GP is a cluster of approximately 1-3 adjacent villages and is the smallest unit of local government, which consists of an elected head and council members.

The trial was conducted from February 2006 to August 2007. In each state four districts were chosen purposefully, matched across states in terms of the literacy rate (Figures 2- 4). The districts in order of literacy rate going from low to high literacy are: Sitapur, Pratapgarh, Hathras and Kanpur Dehat in UP, Dhar, Guna, Katni and Raisen in MP, Bellary, Gulberga, Kolar and Chikmagalur in Karnataka (Table 1).

Within a district, 50 _gram panchayats_ (GPs) were randomly selected from two randomly chosen blocks. A block is an administrative unit between a district and a GP. Of these, 25 GPs were randomly chosen to be in the treatment group and another 25 were kept to serve as control. This gives a total of 100 control GPs and 100 treatment GPs per state. We used a random number generator to randomly select the blocks and then GPs within the blocks. The GPs within each block were then randomly assigned to intervention and

> 2 If the VEC cannot find a suitably qualified candidate within the _gram panchayat_ , it can consider candidates from neighboring _panchayats_ .

6
**_50_**

# **VII. VOLATILITY in EXCHANGE RATES and TRADE VOLUMES**

**70. In** addition to taxes and subsidies and the use of multiple exchange systems in international trade directly applicable to the conversion of local currency into foreign exchange, the conversion factor should also encompass volatility in exchange rate and volume of trade during the period in question. The following paragraphs of the paper examines the merchandise-trade weighted conversion factor (MWXR) that captures volatility in the exchange rates and traditional cycles or fluctuations in the volumes of trade transactions. Because of large variations in the official rate, the MWXR encompasses the recommendation stated in Section **II,** para. **13** above: that shorter period data (e.g., quarterly exchange rates and trade volumes) should be used and then summed to derive longer period data, e.g., annual exchange rates and trade volumes.

# **Merchandise-Weighted Conversion Factors**

> **71.** Each average quarterly exchange rate from the **IFS** is weighted **by** the respective shares of the corresponding quarterly total merchandise trade (exports plus imports) in the

> annual total trade according to this relationship:
25

# Notes

1. There is a large literature on the sc-heme, including Acharya and Panwalkar (1988), Basu (1981), Bhende et al., (1990), Dandekar and Sathe (1980), Dreze (1990), Echeverri-Gerit (1988), Herring and Edwards (1983), and Lieberman (1985). More general discussions of the economics of this type of policy can be found in Besley and Coate (1990), Dreze and Sen (1990), Narayana et al., (1988), Ravallion (1990b), and World Bank (1990, Chapter 6).

2. The existing evidence is more conclusive on porformance in screening poor from non-poor, than on transfer and stabilization benefits, recognizing that the latter are net of participants' forgone incomes, whicn are difficult to measure. See Ravallion (1990b) for a recent survey of the evidence on the scheme's performance in poverty alleviation.

3. Exceptions can arise if non-wage cost per worker is sufficiently high, or if a high value is placed on participants crossing the poverty line (rather than raising the lowest incomes). Ravallion (1990a) examines the theoretical case for and against wide coverage in a poverty alleviation scheme.

4. A Times of India News Service report from Pune, October 18, 1988, stated that: "Slums mushrooming on the periphery of several towns in Maharashtra's sugar belt indicate the large scale migration of landless laborers from the drought-hit areas in search of livelihood. The migration does not appear to be seasonal like the earlier ones, with the result that the slums may well develop into permanent settlements." The report identifies failure to find EGS work as the main cause.

5. Prior to this period, only limited data are available on a monthly basis. From April 1987, computerized records have been kept of person-days of employment and other variables, such as works in progress. Prior to this date, only an attendance count is available on a monthly basis. There were clear errors in a few observations, usually under-reported employment evident as extreme average wage rates; 15 of the 875 district/month observations in the data set (25 districts bv 35 months) had to be deleted for this reason. Our aggregate series on EGS were built up from the district data, deleting these obvious errors.

6. For example, suppose (to simplify the exposition) that there are just two activities, "digging" and "shifting", with the rate for digging set above that for shifting. The relative wage is fixed (it did not change before and after May 1988), and we shall assume that the administrator cannot influence total employment. The value of output is f(s,l-s) per unit of total employment, where s denotes the proportion of labor allocated to shifting which is paid at the rate W. (The production function is quasi-concave and homogeneous of degree one.) The surplus per unit of employment is then f(s,l-s)-[s+(l-s)r]W where r > 1 denotes the wage relativity (digging/shifting). The surplus is maximized when the difference in marginal, social products between shifting and
scores in FISS on FIMS. The constant in the regression captures the potential difference between the two subjects. In addition, we estimate the score of countries which took part in FISS and SISS based on the variation of their performance, instead of only using the level, capturing trends in schooling performance over time. The data for trends between FIMS and SIMS comes from Robitaille and Garden (1989) while the data concerning FISS and SISS can be found in Keeves (1992).

For countries that took part in a PIRLS assessment, without participating in a TIMSS test we estimate scores for countries which took part in both PIRLS 2001 and TIMSS 2003, and then compute performance by using the growth rate between PIRLS 2001 and PIRLS 2006 (instead of estimating the PIRLS 2006 scores based on the TIMSS 2007 dataset). A similar process was used for data between PIRLS 2006 and PIRLS 2011.

Anchoring for PISA 2000 was made with a similar approach. Scores from PISA 2000 were estimated in mathematics using the TIMSS 1999 assessment. For countries which took part in both TIMSS 2003 and TIMSS 2007, we use the growth rate of scores between PISA assessments to estimate performance. When a country took part in both PISA and TIMSS assessments, we used only results from TIMSS. When possible, PISA trends are directly used. PISA assessments permit over-time comparability for reading between 2000 and 2015, for mathematics between 2003 and 2015 and for science between 2006 and 2015<sup>15</sup> .

It should be noted that to conduct all linking methods, we need to access to the micro data of all assessments. Unfortunately, this is not always possible. Therefore, when the micro data is not available, we restrict our anchoring methodology to the pseudo-linear method used by Altinok _et al._ (2014) and Angrist, Patrinos and Schlotter (2013). This is the case for MLA assessments for which raw data is not available.

# _3.2.4 Inclusion of Standard Errors_

We include standard errors for each test based on definitions provided in each test’s technical report. This enables us to quantify to an extent the uncertainty around our estimates. For doubloon countries, we use the standard error of the original assessment. In future iterations of this dataset, we aim to include additional metrics of uncertainty to provide a series of plausible bounds on our estimates.

# _3.2.5 Construction of Proficiency Thresholds_

> 15 Given the fact that some countries took part in the PISA 2009 study in 2010, their results have been adjusted for 2009 by predicting their performance level in 2010.

21
# **Telecoms and internet connectivity**

Apart from physical infrastructure development, the government has also implemented policies to develop an information communications sector and has aspirations for Singapore to be the information hub for the region. The state owned monopoly, Singapore Telecoms, was partially privatized through listing on the stock exchange in 1993 to help realize greater efficiency. Market liberalization and a pro-competition framework were established, with regulatory functions performed by the InfoComm Development Authority (IDA). Competition has lowered prices and spurred demand in the telecoms sector. As of September 2003, the mobile phone penetration rate in Singapore had reached 82%, the highest in Asia.

The Singapore ONE project, launched by the government in 1998, provides broadband infrastructure of high capacity networks and switches, with the goal of making broadband access available to 99% of the population. Between 2000 and 2002, the household and corporate broadband penetration rates grew from 8% to 24 % and 15% to 41%, respectively. By June 2003, the household broadband penetration rate had increased to 31%, in step with the IDA’s target of 50% by 2006.

The Singapore government is also one of the earliest in the world to implement the e- government system. The IT2000 Masterplan provided a blueprint for the use of IT in nearly every government department. The Ge-BIZ portal on the e-government site was the world’s first Internet-based government procurement system. At the eCitizen centre, Singaporeans obtain information and bid for certificates to register a vehicle, file their taxes, download forms to file for bankruptcy, register a marriage, baby, car or a pet, apply for a passport, housing or utilities, check their provident fund accounts or their child’s school registration status, etc.<sup>16</sup>

# **Energy and water**

Despite being devoid of energy resources and dependent on neighboring Malaysia for half of its daily water needs, disruption of utilities supply is a rare occurrence in Singapore. The electricity and piped gas industries had traditionally been vertically integrated and governmentowned, managed by the Public Utilities Board (PUB). In 1995, the various undertakings of the

> 16  In its 22 June 2000 edition, the Economist magazine remarked, “When it comes to e-government, there is nothing to match Singapore”.  In the annual survey by consultancy firm Accenture, Singapore has retained its position as having the second best e-government service in the world for 4 consecutive years starting from 1999, after Canada.

8
# **2. Analytical Framework**

## **_Development Trajectories_**

8. We begin by contextualizing the risk of violent conflict in a resource-dependent setting in terms of vicious versus virtuous development trajectories (see Figure 1).<sup>1</sup> This stylized view suggests that countries may be on very different developmental trajectories. On the one hand, the ―prosperity‖ path emerges after the harnessing of resource rents to develop robust economies and effective states. Here, the risk of prolonged violent conflict is reduced. However, abundant resource rents may lead countries to ―muddle along‖ in economic and political terms, stable but failing to innovate or diversify. The lower trajectory is where economic decline in the form of the ―resource curse‖ is matched with violent conflict, especially as ―greed or grievance‖ begins to erode stability (Collier 2009). Of course, it should be recognized that economic decline can exist without violent conflict or conflict can exist in spite of prosperity.

**Figure 1. Stylized Development Trajectories**

<!-- Start of picture text --> Performance<br><!-- End of picture text --> <!-- Start of picture text --> “Prosperity” and Low Levels<br>of Violent Conflict<br>Low-level equilibrium History /<br> Time<br>Economic “Resource<br>Curse” and High Levels<br>of Violent Conflict<br><!-- End of picture text --> _Source:_ Barma, Kaiser, Le and Vinuela (2010) 9. There has been growing emphasis on the extent to which oil, gas, and mining-rich countries pursue sustainable and effective policies for development and diversification, coupled with a recognition that political economy factors are central to understanding observed outcomes and reform prospects (Benn Eifert et al. 2002). Various forms of public sector distribution – energy and food subsidies, public sector employment, housing, subnational allocations – often represent integral elements of the state-society compact in resource rich settings. The MENA region suggests that these types of programs can often be integral to stability, but over time also pose particular challenges for prospective political and

> 1 This section draws from the forthcoming book, _Rents to Riches? The Political Economy of Natural Resourceled Group_ (Barma et al. 2010).

3