rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
**Table** **<u>6: Indicators of Industry Capacity Utilization</u>**

|**Country**|**Net Premium/Capital**<sup>9</sup><br>**(%)**|**Gross Premium per**<br>**Insurer/PCI**|**Retained Non-Life**<br>**Premium (%)**|**Minimum Non-Life**<br>**Capital US $mill.**|
|---|---|---|---|---|
|Algeria|N/A|1.4|67|2.3|
|Bahrain|105|0.1|57|13.3|
|Egypt|75|2.4|49|10.6|
|Jordan|83|0.4|60|11.3|
|KSA|106|0.3|64|26.7|
|Kuwait|38|0.1|N/A|17.4|
|Lebanon|185|0.2|72|1.5|
|Libya|53|0.2|50|7.5|
|Morocco|74|4.5|84|5.5|
|Oman|89|0.1|48|13.0|
|Qatar|32|0.2|43|10.0|
|Syria|98|1.5|N/A|15.4|
|Tunisia|52|1.0|67|7.0|
|UAE|55|0.2|55|27.3|
|Yemen|56|0.0|30|2.0|
|**MENA **|**78**|**0.8**|**57 **|**11.4 **|
|**OECD**|**310**|**1.6**|**83**|**5.9**|
|**Emerging**|**-**|**-**|**-**|**4.4 **|

**The low average premium per insurer in MENA also suggests an excessive number of players.** As shown in Table 6, the average ratio of gross premium per insurer (adjusted for per capita income) is half of the average ratio in the OECD, and some individual countries have extremely low ratios.  On the basis of this measure there is a clear dichotomy, with some Arabian Peninsula countries having issued too many licenses given potential demand.  Combined with heavy minimum capital requirements this can lead to either excessive competition or the existence of faux fronting<sup>10</sup> insurers that are really brokers and/or investment houses in disguise (see Box below).

**Finally, the average retention ratio (ratio of net premium to gross premium) is low in MENA, suggesting lack of underwriting capacity**<sup>**11**</sup> **and the presence of brokers and/or investment houses in disguise among licensed insurers.** A retention ratio of zero suggests that the company is essentially a broker, while a retention ratio of one indicates that the company is doing traditional insurance.  Only a few MENA countries have retention ratios close to 70 percent or above.  This reflects to some extent market fragmentation, as the retention ratio increases more than proportionately with size.  Small companies do not have the capacity to build adequate risk pools, take risk internally, underwrite contracts, and innovate.  Therefore, the current market fragmentation may have been one of the key factors hindering the development of the sector in the MENA region.

> 9 The Egyptian figure is overstated as a significant part of premiums represent single premium investment contracts.

> 10 Much of the original fronting was carried out legitimately by captives of major international firms engaged in the extractive industries and seeking international capacity.   This is becoming a less relevant sub sector under non admitted insurance rules and with the larger local insurers tending to handle this business (albeit with low retentions). 11 The apparent contradiction between high minimum capital levels and limited capacity reflects the very large peak risks in the region associated with the extractive and refining sectors and tourism related construction activities.

16
remotely tied to mining. Although these results require further confirmation and replication for developing countries, they support the notion that entrepreneurship is an important engine of city growth.

To sum up, extant evidence suggests that urban entrepreneurship is an important foundation of the productive advantage of cities. More specifically, the constant entry of new entrepreneurs appears to be a key mechanism that allows cities to sustain their greater productivity.

# _Factor allocation and reallocation_

Finally, we take a broader view and turn to factor allocation and reallocation. Better factor allocation or factor reallocation in cities may be at the root of the productive advantage of cities. The literature that examines factor allocation and reallocation makes two important claims. The first is that a large fraction of productivity growth at the country level can be accounted for by the reallocation of factors from less productive to more productive firms. Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan (2001) for US manufacturing and Foster, Haltiwanger, and Krizan (2006) for US services show that exiting firms are less productive than continuing ones and that, conditional on survival, start-ups have higher productivity than more mature firms. Put differently, a large share of productivity growth can be accounted for by a churning process in which low productivity firms are replaced by new and more productive start-ups. As shown by Foster, Haltiwanger, and Syverson (2008), considering that start-ups have lower margins (and thus a lower apparent productivity when using standard approaches to the estimation of productivity) only strengthens these results. These important findings have been confirmed for many countries (Bartelsman, Haltiwanger, and Scarpetta 2004), including detailed studies using high-quality data from 26
The odds ratios or factor change coefficients (table 8) illustrate the dynamics among MDG performance outcomes. These coefficients depict the expected change in the probability of a country being on target vs. far from target and on target vs. close to target, following a one standard deviation increase in development drivers and holding all other variables constant.

Economic growth can jump-start countries particularly far from the goals. For countries that are far from the target (starting from a low base), the effects of a one-standard-deviation simulated increase in per capita growth on the probabilities of reaching some MDGs tend to be distinct and large. It would raise 12-fold the probability of reaching the targets for primary completion and gender parity in secondary education, more than double it for under-five child mortality and sanitation, almost double it for extreme poverty and hunger, and increase it by more than half for access to safe drinking water.

**Table 8. Effects of a one-standard-deviation increase in selected development drivers from the multinomial logit estimates (baseline representation)**

||**Due to increas**<br>**capita growt**|**e in GDP per**<br>**h (percent)**|**Due to increase**<br>**(perc**|**in CPIA index**<br>**ent)**|
|---|---|---|---|---|
||_on target vs._<br>_far from target_|_on target vs._<br>_close to target_|_on target vs._<br>_far from target_|_on target vs._<br>_close to target_|
|**MDG 1.a extreme poverty**|**93**|19|12|-19|
|**MDG 1.c hunger**|**88**|15|**281**|**128**|
|**MDG 2.a primary completion rate**|**1111**|**180**|7|16|
|**MDG 3.a gender parity (primary)**|141|-25|**67**|12|
|**MDG 3.a gender parity (secondary)**|**1191**|**143**|-34|16|
|**MDG 4.a child mortality under five**|**163**|68|**152**|36|
|**MDG 5.a maternal mortality**|189|101|**120**|**34**|
|**MDG 7.c access to safe water**|**61**|32|-48|**58**|
|_Source:_Authors’ calculations.<br>**MDG 7.c access to sanitation**|**102**|25|26|-15|

_Source:_ Authors’ calculations.

_Note_ : Bold figures denote significance at 0.10 level or better. Percentage variations are not comparable across indicators. Average standard deviation increase in GDP per capita growth ≈ 1.8. Average standard deviation increase in CPIA index ≈ 0.5.

For countries close to the target, higher growth rates still appear to have a significant impact on primary education completion and gender parity, but not to the same extent as for countries far from the target. This is doubtless because growth is already higher in this group (see table 5), which likely needs better policy to move to a higher plane.

Good policies and institutions are vital for outcome-based MDGs. For lagging countries far from the target, this seems true for several health-related MDGs--under-five mortality, maternal mortality, and hunger--as well as for gender parity in primary education. A one-standarddeviation simulated improvement in the quality of policies and institutions would increase the 19
21 persons per 100 reporting _at least one_ admission in the previous year.<sup>17</sup> In addition to not having a direct measure of need, the hospitalization indicator also presents a major challenge in terms of adjusting for quality: we do not attempt any quality adjustment, and as a result we are making the very heroic assumption that the quality of hospital care is constant across patients within and between countries.

We assign a lower weight to the prevention domain than to the treatment domain. We set  =0.25. This is a good deal higher than the share of prevention in total health spending in the OECD countries and in Asia (around 5-10 percent<sup>18</sup> ) but apparently not much larger than the average share spent in sub-Saharan Africa (Kaplan et al. 2013). Within the prevention domain, we weight indicators equally, but within the treatment domain we assign a 50% weight to inpatient admissions, and split the remaining 50% equally across the other treatment indicators; this is in line with the equal spending split between inpatient and outpatient care in the OECD countries.

While we have split the service coverage indicators into prevention and treatment domains, in some of the charts below we split them into: (a) interventions prioritized by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) (cf. e.g. Wagstaff and Claeson 2004) and (b) non-MDG indicators. As we will see in the next section,

> 17 Our inpatient admission variable measures whether the respondent has been admitted to hospital at least once in the previous 12 months. On the basis of World Health Survey (WHS) data, we estimate that 10 admissions per 100 persons is equivalent to 9.03 persons per 100 reporting at least one admission in the previous 12 months. We divide our inpatient admission variable by the WHO-SARA benchmark (0.0903) and use this value, or 1, whichever is smaller (a country with more than 9.03% of respondents reporting at least one admission gets a score of 1).

> 18 The OECD figure was calculated by the authors using the OECD Health Statistics online database (consulted in November 2014). In Asia, the share is around 5% except in Bangladesh and Vietnam where it is over 10%. Global data are available at the website of the Institute for Health Metrics at <u>http://vizhub.healthdata.org/nha/</u> (consulted in June 2015).

21
Policy Research Working Paper 6528

# **Abstract**

This paper examines the impact of the recent banking crises in Europe and Central Asia on households’ incomes and consumption patterns. The analysis is based on the 2010 wave of the _Life in Transition Survey,_ which covers 12,704 households in eleven countries that experienced a banking crisis between 2008 and 2011. It finds that households in middle-income crisis countries are more than twice as likely to be hit by an income shock as households in high-income crisis countries. The labor market channel is the predominant source of income shocks, with wage reductions more widespread than job-losses. In reaction to income shocks, households reallocate spending from non-essential goods to staple foods. Reductions in staple-food consumption are, however, prevalent among low-income households. The paper examines potential crisis mitigators and finds that at the macro level a flexible monetary regime is associated with fewer cutbacks in household consumption. At the meso level, it finds no evidence that foreign bank ownership amplified the transmission of banking crises to households in Europe. With respect to micro-level mitigators, the analysis finds that diversified income sources as well as stocks of non-financial and financial assets help households to cushion income shocks. Access to informal and formal credit also mitigates the impact of income shocks on household consumption, with the former especially important in middle-income countries.

This paper—prepared as a background paper to the World Bank’s _World Development Report 2014: Managing Risk for Development_ —is a product of the Development Economics Vice Presidency. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of the World Bank or its affiliated organizations. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The author may be contacted at martin.brown@unisg.ch.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
leadership is supportive of reform. In these cases, technocrats and donors do not need to find ways of forcing or cajoling local elites into adopting teacher management reforms. Rather they simply need to provide them with ideas for reform and political cover and legitimacy by offering support. Among policy initiatives we have analyzed above, the World Bank and Dutch Embassy’s support to District B through the pilot teacher management study and then the _Bermutu_ project provide the best example of this component in action. The key constraint to this approach is that reformist leadership such as that in District B appears to be very rare and may not endure where it emerges. For this reason, proponents of reform should consider taking advantage of ‘moments’ of reformist leadership to enact local regulations ( _perda_ ) providing for the reform. Such regulations will not constrain future governments where the local legislature and executive oppose teacher management reform—in these cases, they will simply overturn the regulations. But they may where opinion is divided.

# _Putting the Components Together_

There are numerous different ways in which these various components might be assembled to produce an overall strategy for promoting teacher management reform in Indonesia. The key constraints in this respect is that the disempowerment component cannot be used in conjunction with any of the other components because it implies direct central government control while the other components imply that district-level governments have primary responsibility for decision-making and the task of central government is accordingly to influence their decisionmaking. Otherwise, however, the components are not mutually exclusive and could be used to devise multi-pronged approaches to addressing specific problems. Table One below summarizes one way in which these components might be assembled to address various teacher management problems based on the analysis above. We have omitted teacher certification from the table because it is a predominantly central government-run scheme.

# **Table One Proposed Use of Strategy Components**

|**Strategy**<br>**Problem**|**Component 1**|**Component 2**|**Component 3**|
|---|---|---|---|
|**Teacher Numbers and Cost**|_Disciplinary_<br>Continued use of<br>moratorium, possible<br>extension of moratorium<br>to all regions using<br>teacher-student ratio as<br>basisfor imposition|||
|**Teacher Employment and**<br>**Promotion**|_Disempowerment_<br>Continued use of new<br>civil servant recruitment<br>process, extension to<br>school principal<br>promotions|||
|**Teacher Distribution**<br>– Option 1|_Disempowerment_<br>Centralization of<br>decision-making over<br>teacherplacements|||
|- Option 2|_Disciplinary_<br>New central government<br>regulations establishing<br>credible threats/rewards|_Working with the grain_<br>Linking certification<br>program incentives to<br>state audit processes<br>and othercentral|_Facilitative_<br>_(cases with reform-_<br>_minded leadership_<br>_only)_|

50
# **Nature, socioeconomics and adaptation to natural disasters: new evidence from floods**

# **1. Introduction**

Recent studies have analyzed the role of socioeconomic factors in determining fatalities from natural disasters (Kahn 2005, Kellenberg and Mobarak 2008, Cavallo and Noy 2010),<sup>1</sup> earthquakes in particular (Anbarci et al. 2005, Escaleras et al. 2007, Cavallo et al. 2010, Keefer et al. 2010). An appealing and intuitive general finding from these studies is that countries that are richer and have stronger institutions suffer fewer deaths from natural disasters, as they are evidently better able to agree on, invest in, and enforce zoning regulations, building codes, and other preventive measures.

In this paper, we analyze new data on 2,194 flood events in 108 countries during 1985-2008, and our results tell a very different story. Although we find that income is negatively associated with the frequency of floods and, conditional on their magnitude, the fatalities they cause in developing countries, we find that it increases flood frequency, magnitude, and fatalities in developed countries. Also in contrast to the literature, we find that the effect of governance is not uniformly salutary. Its effect on flood frequency and fatalities in developing countries is U-shaped, with improvements in governance reducing the number of floods and deaths when governance is weaker but raising the number when governance is stronger. We find no evidence that governance affects flood magnitude in developing countries or flood frequency, magnitude, or fatalities in developed countries.

> 1 Destructive natural events occur regularly across the world, although most do not cause enough damage to be considered natural disasters. To be included in the widely used EM-DAT global disaster database, an event needs to fulfill at least one of the following criteria: (i) 10 or more people killed, (ii) 100 or more people reported affected (typically displaced), (iii) a declaration of a state of emergency, or (iv) a call for international assistance (OFDA/CRED 2010).

2
# Table. 2 Private Sector Development in World Bank Education Projects (1995-97)

||**Types of assi**|**stance**||
|---|---|---|---|
|**Country & Year**|**Institutional development**|**Alternate funding**<br>**mechanisms**|**Level**|
|Dominican Republic<br>1995|Strengthening public entity to better<br>manage and assist private providers of<br>education. Opportunities for training<br>private sector school teachers.||Primary and secondary<br>Education|
|Maldives<br>1995||Fellowship program for pfivate<br>sector teacher development on<br>cost recovery basis|Primary and Secondary<br>education|
|Chile<br>1995|Strengthening sector managerial capacity<br>to improve internal & external efficiency,<br>quality and equity of municipal &<br>government subsidized private secondary<br>schools|<br>|Secondary technical and<br>vocational education|
|Mauritania<br>1995|Modifying legal framework to facilitate<br>private sector expansion<br>Expanding training opportunities for<br>private school teachers||All levels except higher<br>education|
|Argentina<br>1995|<br>Self evaluation of public and private<br>sector universities|Competition for funding through<br>permanent instrument FOMEC|Higher education|
|Senegal<br>1996|Strengthening capacity of non-<br>govemment sector to deliver effective<br>programs; capacity of public sector to<br>monitor, evaluate and coordinate sectoral<br>investments||Adult education|
|Burkina Faso<br>1996||Matching public-private grant<br>scheme for additional private<br>school classrooms|Lower secondary<br>education|
|Mali<br>1996|Assisting private sector employers to<br>develop human resource plans;<br>Private sector participation in<br>negotiations to move informal training<br>into formal training|Vocational Training Skills Fund<br>(VTSF) for skills upgrading to<br>bring informal into formal sector.<br>Govemment tax for sustaining<br>project benefits|Vocational and technical<br>training|
|Indonesia<br>1996|<br>Competitive principles to encourage<br>private-public institutions;<br>TA to assist govemment in articulating<br>competitive & decentralized strategy for<br>assisting graduate research||Higher education|
|El Salvador<br>1997|<br>Quality improvement in teacher training<br>and curriculum programs for private<br>schools.|Public funding of scholarship<br>program as opposed to student<br>loans (high cost of administration<br>and low collection rates) for<br>private sector.<br>Private banks to transfer funds to<br>students.|Secondary education|
|Comoros<br>1997||Vocational Training Fund (VTF)<br>for private sector participation;<br>Contract training program: sub-<br>projects by public & private<br>institutions through competition<br>for VTF resources based on pre-<br>defined qualifications and<br>selection criteria. Partial cost<br>recovery from beneficiaries.|Vocational and technical<br>training|

14
from privatization of government-owned banks around the globe are that it is important to open the books early in the process to thus make the cost of continuous government ownership to the taxpayer clear to the public and thus potentially create political pressure for privatization.

However, this also points to the recommendation to not recapitalize a bank before privatizing to thus not ease the political pressure to privatize. While privatization should not be delayed to minimize fiscal and efficiency losses, fire sales might lead to privatizations to investors that are not fit and proper or have not adequately assessed the situation of the bank, which might result in subsequent fragility. There are advantages to divest to a strategic investor who can bring the necessary management and financial know-how, especially in a weak institutional environment and to open the privatization process to both qualified domestic and foreign bidders. By selling to reputable foreign banks, financial systems can benefit from expertise and from additional resources. Finally, country studies have shown the advantages of full rather than partial privatization to reduce possible future government influence. By giving up any ownership stake, government signals that it does not plan to intervene after privatization and that it will not bail out the new private investors should things go wrong. Privatization, however, is not a panacea, as privatizing into a non-competitive environment where other elements of the framework discussed earlier are not in place will not necessarily bring benefits in terms of more private sector lending.

Credit quotas and interest caps and floors have impeded the efficient allocation of society’s savings to its most productive uses and have especially hurt “smaller” depositors and borrowers (Fry, 1988). In case of binding ceilings, banks are prevented from charging adequate risk premiums for riskier and more opaque borrowers or from recovering fixed transaction costs through a mark-up on smaller loan amounts. Further, competition between credit institutions and 24
# **Simulating Welfare Impacts of Changes in the Monthly Social Allowance Scheme and Heating Allowances in Bulgaria**<sup>*****</sup>

Monica Robayo-Abril Maynor Cabrera JEL classification: H22, H31, I31, I38, D31, D63 Keywords: Guaranteed Minimum Income, means testing, poverty, fiscal incidence, social spending, Bulgaria

> ∗ This analysis was prepared as part of the Poverty and Equity Program of the World Bank in Bulgaria. The study was carried out by a team composed of Monica Robayo-Abril (Senior Economist, World Bank), and Maynor Cabrera (Senior Consultant, World Bank and Commitment to Equity Institute). The authors are grateful for the valuable comments given by <mark>Lucian Bucur and Desislava Nikolova.</mark>