rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Are cities the new growth escalator
Urban areas tend to have much more
            productive labor and higher salaries than rural areas, and
            there are vast differences across urban areas. Areas with
            high salaries and high productivity tend to have employers
            that invest in much more research and development than areas
            with low salaries and low productivity. This paper addresses
            two questions. First, it discusses the causes of these vast
            geographical differences in wages, human capital, and
            innovation. The second part of the paper discusses regional
            economic development policies. The European Union has an
            even more ambitious program transferring its development
            funds to regions with below average incomes. Asian
            countries, especially China, have a variety of special
            economic zones, designed to attract foreign investment to
            specific areas. Such regional development policies, often
            called place-based economic policies, are effectively a form
            of welfare, targeting cities or regions, not individuals.
            While such policies are widespread, the economic logic
            behind them is rarely discussed and even less frequently
            understood. This paper clarifies when these policies are
            wasteful, when they are efficient, and who the expected
            winners and losers are. Understanding when government
            intervention makes sense and when it does not is a crucial
            first step in setting sound economic development policies.
            Local governments can certainly lay a foundation for
            economic development and create all the conditions necessary
            for a city's rebirth, including a business climate
            friendly to job creation.
Housing and urbanization in Africa :
            unleashing a formal market process
The accumulation of decent housing
            matters both because of the difference it makes to living
            standards and because of its centrality to economic
            development. The consequences for living standards are
            far-reaching. In addition to directly conferring utility,
            decent housing improves health and enables children to do
            homework. It frees up women's time and enables them to
            participate in the labor market. More subtly, a home and its
            environs affect identity and self-respect. Commentary on the
            emergence of an African middle class has become common, but
            it is being defined in terms of discretionary spending and
            potential for consumer markets. A politically more salient
            definition of a middle class will be in terms of home
            ownership and the consequent stake in economic stability.
            This paper examines why such a process has not happened in
            Africa. The hypothesis is that the peculiarity of housing
            exposes it to multiple points of vulnerability not found
            together either in private consumer goods or in other
            capital goods. Each point of vulnerability can be addressed
            by appropriate government policies, but addressing only one
            or two of them has little payoff if the others remain
            unresolved. Further, the vulnerabilities faced by housing
            are the responsibility of distinct branches of government,
            with little natural collaboration. Unblocking multiple
            impediments to housing therefore requires coordination that
            can come only from the head of government: ministries of
            housing have neither the political weight nor the analytic
            capacity to play this role effectively. Yet in Africa,
            housing has never received such high political priority.
            This in turn is because the centrality of housing in
            well-being and of housing investment in development has not
            been sufficiently appreciated.
Urbanization and the geography of development
This paper focuses on three interrelated
            questions on urbanization and the geography of development.
            First, although we herald cities with their industrial bases
            as "engines of growth," does industrialization in
            fact drive urbanization? While such relationships appear in
            the data, the process is not straightforward. Among
            developing countries, changes in income or industrialization
            correlate only weakly with changes in urbanization. This
            suggests that policy and institutional factors may also
            influence the urbanization process. In fact, the
            relationship between industrialization and urbanization is
            absent in Sub-Saharan Africa. Second, do development
            policies have a big-city bias and, if so, what does this
            imply for growth and inequality? Intelligent public
            infrastructure investment inevitably involves picking
            winners. One hopes that such choices are based on market
            indicators, such as where industry is starting to
            agglomerate and where there are clear needs. Yet governments
            seem to favor the biggest cities which in turn draw firms
            and migrants to these cities. To try to avoid excessive
            in-migration and oversized, congested cities, favored cities
            might adopt policies that make living conditions for
            migrants more unpleasant. This can result in increased
            inequality and social tension. Finally, the paper examines
            city sizes and city-size distributions. Factors determining
            both aspects are complex and poorly understood. It is hard
            to be proscriptive about either individual city sizes or
            overall city-size distributions. The best policies
            strengthen institutions in the relevant markets so that
            market forces can move the economy toward better outcomes.
Sustainable and smart cities
This paper explores the challenges and
            opportunities that government officials face in designing
            coherent 'rules of the game' for achieving urban
            sustainability during times of growth. Sustainability is
            judged by three criteria. The first involves elements of
            day-to-day quality of life, such as having clean air and
            water and green space. The provision of these public goods
            has direct effects on the urban public's health and
            productivity. The second focuses on the city's
            greenhouse gas emissions. Developing cities are investing in
            new infrastructure, from highways and public transit systems
            to electricity generation and transmission. They are
            building water treatment, water delivery, and sewage
            disposal systems. Residents of these cities are
            simultaneously making key decisions about where they live
            and work and whether to buy such energy-consuming durables
            as private vehicles and home air-conditioning units. Given
            the long-lived durability of the capital stock, short-term
            decisions will have long-term effects on the city's
            carbon footprint. The third criterion is a city's
            resilience to natural disasters and extreme weather events.
            This subsection focuses on how the urban poor can be better
            equipped to adapt to the anticipated challenges of climate change.
The great migration : urban aspirations
The great 21st-century migration into
            cities will present both a great challenge for humanity and
            a significant opportunity for global economic growth. This
            paper describes the diverse patterns that define this
            metropolitan migration. It then lays out a framework for
            understanding the costs and benefits of new arrivals through
            migration's externalities and the challenges and policy
            tradeoffs that confront city stakeholders. The paper
            concludes by suggesting ways municipalities, by optimizing
            flexibility, can make migration more productive and less
            destructive in shaping the 'good city' and the
            'smart city.' There are few paths to global
            economic growth that do not run through cities, and even
            fewer that do not depend on growing the city in population
            size, scale, and economic exchange. Historically, cities
            have grown by concentrating the economic advantages of
            number and density, the social potential of innovation, and
            the cultural possibilities of newness. By bringing together
            the factors of production, land, labor, capital, and
            enterprise, in ever more recombinant forms, cities offer the
            possibility of securing new economic advantages and scaling
            them up.
Cash transfers and temptation goods
            : a review of global evidence
Cash transfers have been demonstrated to
            improve education and health outcomes and alleviate poverty
            in various contexts. However, policy makers and others often
            express concern that poor households will use transfers to
            buy alcohol, tobacco, or other "temptation goods."
            The income effect of transfers will increase expenditures if
            alcohol and tobacco are normal goods, but this may be offset
            by other effects, including the substitution effect, the
            effect of social messaging about the appropriate use of
            transfers, and the effect of shifting dynamics in
            intra-household bargaining. The net effect is ambiguous.
            This paper reviews 19 studies with quantitative evidence on
            the impact of cash transfers on temptation goods, as well as
            11 studies that surveyed the number of respondents who
            reported they used transfers for temptation goods. Almost
            without exception, studies find either no significant impact
            or a significant negative impact of transfers on temptation
            goods. In the only (two, non-experimental) studies with
            positive significant impacts, the magnitude is small. This
            result is supported by data from Latin America, Africa, and
            Asia. A growing number of studies from a range of contexts
            therefore indicate that concerns about the use of cash
            transfers for alcohol and tobacco consumption are unfounded.
Rewarding provider performance to
            enable a healthy start to life : evidence from
            Argentina's Plan Nacer
Argentina's Plan Nacer provides
            insurance for maternal and child health care to uninsured
            families. The program allocates funding to provinces based
            on enrollment of beneficiaries and adds performance
            incentives based on indicators of the use and quality of
            maternal and child health care services and health outcomes.
            The provinces use these resources to pay health facilities
            to provide maternal and child health care services to
            beneficiaries. This paper analyzes the impact of Plan Nacer
            on birth outcomes. The analysis uses data from the universe
            of birth records in seven Argentine provinces for 2004 to
            2008 and exploits the geographic phasing in of Plan Nacer
            over time. The paper finds that the program increases the
            use and quality of prenatal care as measured by the number
            of visits and the probability of receiving a tetanus
            vaccine. Beneficiaries' probability of low birth-weight
            is estimated to be reduced by 19 percent. Beneficiaries have
            a 74 percent lower chance of in-hospital neonatal mortality
            in larger facilities and approximately half this reduction
            comes from preventing low birth weight and half from better
            postnatal care. The analysis finds that the cost of saving a
            disability-adjusted life year through the program was $814,
            which is highly cost-effective compared with
            Argentina's $6,075 gross domestic product per capita
            over this period. Although there are small negative
            spillover effects on prenatal care utilization of
            non-beneficiary populations in clinics covered by Plan
            Nacer, no spillover is found on their birth outcomes.
Proving incentives for long-term
            investment by pension funds : the use of outcome-based benchmarks
A fundamental goal of any pension system
            is to ensure that members receive an adequate income when
            they retire. Although traditional defined benefit pension
            plans set out how pension income will be determined in
            advance and then strive to deliver this, the growing number
            of defined contribution plans accumulate a sum of assets
            which can then be turned into a pension income on
            retirement. However, the amount of this retirement income is
            not predefined This frequently leads to a focus by not only
            most pension providers, but also regulators and pension plan
            members themselves on the short-term accumulation of pension
            assets rather than the longer-term goal of securing an
            adequate retirement income. This paper discusses a possible
            solution to this challenge: the use of benchmarks to
            encourage pension funds to invest with the longer-term goal
            of delivering adequate retirement income in mind. Examples
            are provided of leading pension funds that already work with
            long-term, outcome-based benchmarks. The paper suggests a
            methodology for pension regulators to use in order to
            incentivize pension funds in their jurisdictions to adopt a
            similar approach.
Informal economy and the World Bank
Many countries have expressed an
            interest in the size, performance and motivation of the
            informal sector, especially where the informal sector
            provides the livelihood and employment for a critical
            segment of the population. This essay reviews recent
            literature, methodologies, and relevant Bank studies as a
            way to share information with country teams interested in
            expanding their knowledge of the informal sector and related
            policy debates. Research in a number of regions points to
            four main areas where development policy can be improved by
            taking the informal sector into account. First, improvements
            should be made along a continuum; the heterogeneity among
            informal firms points to different policy approaches for
            different types of firms. Second, there should be
            public-private collaboration on mutual reforms. Many efforts
            to improve firm performance focus on elements of the
            production function (labor skills, credit) while treating
            government mainly as a cost (taxes, cost of compliance with
            regulations). Yet research reveals that many characteristics
            of the public regime strongly influence the decisions of
            firms regarding informality. Third, research indicates a
            strong relation between basic skills and labor outcomes,
            particularly in the informal sector, despite the
            sector's lower average returns. Research also indicates
            the benefits of targeted training programs. Business
            services programs have a decidedly mixed record, yet ongoing
            research is refining results on what works best. Fourth,
            informal trade is pervasive in developing countries and the
            networks developed in informal trade -- wholesalers, credit
            suppliers and money-changers, transporters -- are a strong
            presence in the informal sector. Yet these kinds of complex
            and nontransparent trading systems can be discouraging to
            foreign investors and can otherwise undermine trade policy
            and the international competitiveness of developing
            countries. The paper concludes with recommendations.
Updating the poverty estimates in
            Serbia in the absence of micro data : a microsimulation approach
The continued poverty impact of the
            financial crisis in Serbia is difficult to establish beyond
            2010 because of the lack of survey data. This paper tackles
            this difficulty. It uses a micro-simulation approach that
            accounts for a key pathway of the financial crisis in
            Serbia, the labor market. The results suggest a further
            increase in poverty in 2011 on account of a continued
            deterioration of the labor market indicators and despite a
            recovering gross domestic product. In order to evaluate the
            forecast, the model is applied to generate forecasts for
            previous years (2009 and 2010), which are compared with
            realized poverty estimates. The micro-simulation model
            performs well in predicting poverty dynamics during 2009-10
            and less so during 2008-09. The accuracy of the predictions
            improves when the response of the social protection system
            is accounted for.
Ecosystems -- burden or bounty
This paper presents a somewhat novel
            approach to explore the economic contribution of ecosystems.
            It develops linked models to capture connections between
            resource stocks and flows and the resulting microeconomic
            and macroeconomic impacts. A bioeconomic model is developed
            that is imbedded into a computable general equilibrium (CGE)
            model. Incorporating imperfect regulation, the bioeconomic
            model characterizes optimal policies, while the CGE model
            explores the economy-wide consequences of possible changes
            to the ecosystem. The model is parameterized and calibrated
            to the case of the Serengeti ecosystem which is perhaps the
            most intensively researched biome with a relative abundance
            of data. This ecosystem is also undergoing rapid change from
            a host of factors related to developments within and around
            the protected area system. The analysis identifies the
            contribution of the ecosystem to the economy and finds that
            changes in tourism and bushmeat hunting have surprisingly
            diffuse economy-wide impacts, that are especially large in
            the rural sector. To guard against overstatement, ecosystem
            impacts are under-stated relative to other effects. The
            results suggest that linkages to the natural resource sector
            (backward and forward multipliers) are important and
            neglecting these may lead to biased estimates.
Episodes of unemployment reduction
            in rich, middle-income, and transition economies
This paper studies the incidence and
            determinants of episodes of drastic unemployment reduction,
            defined as swift, substantial, and sustained declines in
            unemployment. Forty-three episodes are identified over a
            period of nearly three decades in 94 rich, middle-income,
            and transition countries. Unemployment reductions often
            coincide with an acceleration of growth and an improvement
            in macroeconomic conditions. Episodes are much more
            prevalent in countries with higher levels of unemployment
            and, given unemployment, are more likely in countries with
            better regulation. An efficient legal system that enforces
            contracts expeditiously is particularly important for
            reducing unemployment. The results imply that while
            employment is largely related to the business cycle, better
            regulation reduces the likelihood of high unemployment and
            facilitates a more rapid recovery in the event unemployment
            builds up.
Progress toward the health MDGs :
            are the poor being left behind
This paper looks at differential
            progress on the health Millennium Development Goals between
            the poor and better-off within countries. The findings are
            based on original analysis of 235 Demographic and Health
            Surveys and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys, spanning 64
            developing countries over the period 1990-2011. Five health
            status indicators and seven intervention indicators are
            tracked for all the health Millennium Development Goals. In
            most countries, the poorest 40 percent have made faster
            progress than the richest 60 percent. On average, relative
            inequality in the Millennium Development Goal indicators has
            been falling. However, the opposite is true in a sizable
            minority of countries, especially on child health status
            indicators (40-50 percent in the cases of child malnutrition
            and mortality), and on some intervention indicators (almost
            40 percent in the case of immunizations). Absolute
            inequality has been rising in a larger fraction of countries
            and in around one-quarter of countries, the poorest 40
            percent have been slipping backward in absolute terms.
            Despite reductions in most countries, relative inequalities
            in the Millennium Development Goal health indicators are
            still appreciable, with the poor facing higher risks of
            malnutrition and death in childhood and lower odds of
            receiving key health interventions.
Directing remittances to education
            with soft and hard commitments : evidence from a
            lab-in-the-field experiment and new product take-up among
            Filipino migrants in Rome
This paper tests how migrants'
            willingness to remit changes when given the ability to
            direct remittances to educational purposes using different
            forms of commitment. Variants of a dictator game in a
            lab-in-the-field experiment with Filipino migrants in Rome
            are used to examine remitting behavior under varying degrees
            of commitment. These range from the soft commitment of
            simply labeling remittances as being for education, to the
            hard commitment of having funds directly paid to a school
            and the student's educational performance monitored.
            The analysis finds that the introduction of simple labeling
            for education raises remittances by more than 15 percent.
            Adding the ability to directly send this funding to the
            school adds only a further 2.2 percent. The information
            asymmetry between migrants and their most closely connected
            household is randomly varied, but no significant change is
            found in the remittance response to these forms of
            commitment as information varies. Behavior in these games is
            shown to be predictive of take-up of a new financial product
            called EduPay, designed to allow migrants to pay remittances
            directly to schools in the Philippines. This take-up seems
            largely driven by a response to the ability to label
            remittances for education, rather than to the hard
            commitment feature of directly paying schools.