rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Natural disasters and the dynamics
            of intangible assets
Empirical evidence suggests that the
            higher-order effects of natural disasters, which affect
            intangible assets, may be even more important than the
            material inter-industry effects.  However, most existing
            general equilibrium models ignore higher order effects
            concerning human capital. Moreover, it is recognized that
            natural resource dependence increases vulnerability to
            natural disasters. Recent studies have indeed shown the
            potential importance of subsistence traps caused by asset
            losses in low-income economies from a partial equilibrium
            perspective.  This paper presents an analysis that allows
            for endogenous investments in real assets (physical capital)
            as well as in human capital, explicitly considering the
            potential for subsistence traps arising from minimum
            consumption and minimum natural resource irreversibility
            thresholds. The general equilibrium ramifications of
            subsistence traps are developed. The main issue is that the
            economy may be subject to hysteresis: A temporary shock such
            as a natural disaster may leave permanent consequences for
            the economy.  An obvious permanent effect of a one-time
            disaster shock is that physical man-made and natural assets
            owned especially by poor households may end up completely
            wiped out. The disaster may not be the direct cause; it may
            be that poor households would have to obtain minimum
            subsistence consumption out of depleted assets.  However,
            not all permanent effects of a one-time shock are negative.
            Under certain conditions, the destruction of man-made
            physical and natural capital may have general equilibrium
            effects that increase the incentives to invest in human
            capital and may even propel a formerly stagnating economy
            into a virtuous path of continuing growth.
The performance of Bulgarian food
            markets during reform
Food policy often depends on markets and
            markets depend on institutions. But how good do institutions
            have to be before reforms can be launched? Relying on well
            timed surveys of agricultural prices and a joint study by
            the Government of Bulgaria and the World Bank on
            agricultural market institutions, this paper presents
            evidence that performance in food markets improved following
            significant policy reforms in Bulgaria, although public
            institutions remained weak. This suggests that even though
            strong institutions are preferred to weak ones, it can be
            costly and impractical to delay policy reforms until work on
            strengthening institutions is finished. Still, measured
            performance varied by place and by commodity, suggesting
            that markets developed at different tempos and that the
            distribution of benefits from improved markets was uneven.
            This points to the need to address the costs of adjustment
            as policies change. The paper introduces a new approach to
            measure market performance based on composite-error techniques.
Health investments and economic
            growth : macroeconomic evidence and microeconomic foundations
This paper reviews the correlations and
            potential links between health and economic growth and
            summarizes the evidence on the role of government in
            improving health status. At the macroeconomic level, the
            evidence of an impact of health on growth remains ambiguous
            due both to difficulties in measuring health, and to the
            methodological challenges of identifying causal links. The
            evidence on the micro linkages from health investments to
            productivity and income are robust. Progress in life
            expectancy over the past two centuries has been spectacular,
            fueled by: improved agriculture that has increased food
            quantity; knowledge of disease transmission, and effective
            public health interventions that have controlled
            communicable diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and
            hookworm; and, most recently and importantly, investments in
            very young children that pay off in healthier and more
            productive adults. Whether public investments in medical
            care affect health hinges on the quality of health
            institutions.  In much of the developing world, factors such
            as chronic absenteeism among public providers, poor budget
            execution, ineffective management, and virtually no
            accountability weaken public efforts. Institutional issues
            are central in efforts to enhance public health investments,
            which in turn have a direct impact on the population's
            welfare and, perhaps over the long term, improvements in
            national income.
The performance of decentralized
            school systems : evidence from Fe y Alegría in Venezuela
This program evaluation estimates the
            effects on standardized test scores of graduating from the
            Fe y Alegría private school system in Venezuela. The authors
            find an Average Treatment Effect on the order of 0.1
            standard deviations (approximately 16 percent of the average
            score), using a control group of public school students.
            These effects are significantly larger for households at the
            bottom of the distribution, and smaller for those at the
            top. The authors posit that the better performance of the Fe
            y Alegría system stems from their labor contract flexibility
            and decentralized administrative structure.
Trends in household coverage of
            modern infrastructure services in Africa
Household surveys have long been used to
            estimate poverty and inequality trends, as well as trends in
            education and health indicators, but they have not been used
            to the same extent to assess trends in the access to or
            coverage of modern infrastructure services. In this paper,
            we use Demographic and Health Surveys from a larger sample
            of sub-Saharan African countries in order to collect
            comparable information across countries on coverage of piped
            water, flush toilets, electricity, and landline telephones
            over time. The results suggest that coverage rates for
            electricity, flush toilets have improved slightly over the
            last decade. Coverage of piped water has declined, at the
            same time as coverage of landline (as well as cellular)
            telephone has increased rapidly. The decline has been
            primarily in the urban areas while the infrastructure
            coverage has either increased or remained stable in rural
            Africa. For all four services, among the poorest households
            coverage remains virtually inexistent. If business as usual
            continues, it would take a very long time to reach universal
            or widely shared coverage even in countries where coverage
            has improved. These results point to the need to increase
            efforts by governments and international community to
            progressively increase access to modern infrastructure
            services in Africa.
Is low coverage of modern
            infrastructure services in African cities due to lack of
            demand or lack of supply
A majority of sub-Saharan Africas
            population is not connected to electricity and piped water
            networks, and even in urban areas coverage is low. Lack of
            network coverage may be due to demand or supply-side
            factors.  Some households may live in areas where access to
            piped water and electricity is feasible, but may not be able
            to pay for those services. Other households may be able to
            afford the services, but may live too far from the electric
            line or water pipe to have a choice to be connected to it.
            Given that the policy options for dealing with demand as
            opposed to supply-side issues are fairly different, it is
            important to try to measure the contributions of both types
            of factors in preventing better coverage of infrastructure
            services in the population. This paper shows how this can be
            done empirically using household survey data and provides
            results on the magnitude of both types of factors in
            explaining the coverage deficit of piped water and
            electricity services in urban areas for a large sample of
            African countries.
Natural resources and reforms
The authors use a sample of 133
            countries to investigate the link between the abundance of
            natural resources and micro-economic reforms. Previous
            studies suggest that natural resource abundance gives rise
            to governments that are less accountable to the public and
            states that are oligarchic, and that it leads to the erosion
            of social capital. These factors are likely to hamper
            economic reforms. The authors test this hypothesis using
            data on micro-economic reforms from the World Bank's
            Doing Business database. The results provide a robust
            support for the "resource curse" view:  a move
            from the 75th percentile to the 25th percentile on resource
            abundance equals 10.9 percentage points more reform. This is
            a large effect given that the mean probability of reform in
            the sample is 57.1 percent.
Determinants of repayment
            performance in Indian micro-credit groups
Despite their potential importance and
            ease of modification, impacts of monitoring and loan
            recovery arrangements on micro-credit groups' repayment
            performance have rarely been studied. Data on 3,350 expired
            group loans in 300 Indian villages highlight that regular
            monitoring and audits, high repayment frequency, consumption
            smoothing support through rice credit, and having group
            savings deposited with the lender all significantly increase
            repayment rates. Estimated magnitudes of their effects
            vastly exceed those of members' socio-economic
            characteristics. Significantly lower repayment on loans
            originating in externally provided grant resources suggests
            that stringent monitoring will be essential for these to
            have a sustainable impact.
Poverty effects of higher food
            prices : a global perspective
The spike in food prices between 2005
            and the first half of 2008 has highlighted the
            vulnerabilities of poor consumers to higher prices of
            agricultural goods and generated calls for massive policy
            action. This paper provides a formal assessment of the
            direct and indirect impacts of higher prices on global
            poverty using a representative sample of 63 to 93 percent of
            the population of the developing world. To assess the direct
            effects, the paper uses domestic food consumer price data
            between January 2005 and December 2007--when the relative
            price of food rose by an average of 5.6 percent --to find
            that the implied increase in the extreme poverty headcount
            at the global level is 1.7 percentage points, with
            significant regional variation. To take the second-order
            effects into account, the paper links household survey data
            with a global general equilibrium model, finding that a 5.5
            percent increase in agricultural prices (due to rising
            demand for first-generation biofuels) could raise global
            poverty in 2010 by 0.6 percentage points at the extreme
            poverty line and 0.9 percentage points at the moderate
            poverty line. Poverty increases at the regional level vary
            substantially, with nearly all of the increase in extreme
            poverty occurring in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.
Informality in Latin America and the Caribbean
This paper studies the causes and
            consequences of informality and applies the analysis to
            countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.  It starts
            with a discussion on the definition and measures of
            informality, as well as on the reasons why widespread
            informality should be of great concern. The paper analyzes
            informality's main determinants, arguing that
            informality is not single-caused but results from the
            combination of poor public services, a burdensome regulatory
            regime, and weak monitoring and enforcement capacity by the
            state. This combination is especially explosive when the
            country suffers from low educational achievement and
            features demographic pressures and primary production
            structures. Using cross-country regression analysis, the
            paper evaluates the empirical relevance of each determinant
            of informality. It then applies the estimated relationships
            to most countries in Latin America and the Caribbean in
            order to assess the country-specific relevance of each
            proposed mechanism.
Enabling conditions for second
            pillars of pension systems
This note adds to the existing
            literature by examining the enabling conditions for the
            creation of mandatory funded pension funds, and identifying
            additional factors that are important to consider in the
            early stages of the reform. The note stresses the importance
            of some factors that had already been identified in previous
            literature but not fully observed by reforming countries,
            including the strong and lasting commitment of the
            authorities with the reform, the fiscal commitment with the
            reform, and some basic financial infrastructure. The
            analysis is also extended to analyze the role of supervision
            in the early stages of the reform and the role of the
            government in fostering the development of the domestic
            capital market.
Stockpiles of obsolete pesticides
            and cleanup priorities : a methodology and application for Tunisia
Obsolete pesticides have accumulated in
            almost every developing country or economy in transition
            over the past several decades. Public health and
            environmental authorities are eager to reduce health threats
            by removing and decontaminating stockpile sites, but there
            are many sites, cleanup can be costly, and public resources
            are scarce. Under these conditions, it seems sensible to
            develop a methodology for prioritizing sites and treating
            them sequentially, as budgetary resources permit. This paper
            presents a methodology that develops cleanup priority
            indices for Tunisia. The approach integrates information on
            populations at risk, their proximity to stockpiles, and the
            relative toxic hazards of the stockpiles. The robustness of
            this approach is tested by varying model parameters widely
            and testing for stability in the rank-ordering of results.
Does tougher import competition
            foster product quality upgrading
Over the past two decades,
            globalization, and more specifically the increased exposure
            to competition from low-price producers in China and India,
            has created a new economic environment for other emerging
            economies. The most advantageous way for manufacturing firms
            in those economies to position themselves in domestic and
            international markets is to offer upgraded and
            differentiated rather than "mundane"
            labor-intensive products. This paper investigates whether
            increased competitive pressure from imports forces firms to
            improve the quality of their products. The econometric
            analysis relies on a rich dataset of Chilean manufacturing
            plants and their products. Product quality is measured with
            unit values (average prices) and industry-level transport
            costs are used as an exogenous measure of import
            competition. The authors find a positive and robust effect
            of import competition on product quality. This effect is
            found to be particularly strong for non-exporting plants.
            The results also show that increased import competition from
            less advanced economies is the major cause for the positive
            impact on quality upgrading. The overall evidence points to
            the benefits of trade openness for product innovation but
            demonstrates at the same time that competitive pressure
            alone will not enable local plants to catch up with leading
            world producers.
Zooming in : from aggregate
            volatility to income distribution
In contrast with a growing literature on
            the drivers of aggregate volatility in developing countries,
            its consequences in terms of individual incomes have
            received less attention. This paper looks at the impact of
            cyclical output fluctuations and extreme output events
            (crises) on unemployment, poverty, and inequality. The
            authors find robust evidence that aggregate volatility has a
            regressive, asymmetric, and non linear impact, as reflected
            in the strong influence of extreme output drops. The
            findings show that, in addition to the mitigating role of
            personal wealth, public expenditure and labor protection
            exert a similar benign effect. These findings are in line
            with the income substitutions view of social safety nets,
            and cast a new light on the value of social programs and
            labor market regulation in crisis prone developing countries.
Does higher openness cause more real
            exchange rate volatility
The "New Open Economy
            Macroeconomics" argues that: (a) non-monetary factors
            have gained importance in explaining exchange rate
            volatility, and (b) trade and financial openness may have a
            potential role of mitigating and/or amplifying real and
            nominal shocks to real exchange rates. The goal of the
            present paper is to examine the ability of trade and
            financial openness to exacerbate or mitigate real exchange
            rate volatility. The authors collected information on the
            real effective exchange rate, its fundamentals, and (outcome
            and policy measures of) trade and financial openness for a
            sample of industrial and developing countries for the period
            1975-2005. Using instrumental variables techniques, the
            analysis finds that: (a) High real exchange rate volatility
            is the result of highly volatile productivity shocks, and
            sharp oscillations in monetary and fiscal policy shocks. (b)
            Countries more integrated with international markets of
            goods and services tend to display more stable real exchange
            rate fluctuations. (c) Financial openness seems to amplify
            the fluctuations in real exchange rates. (d) The composition
            of trade and capital flows plays a role in explaining the
            smoothing properties of trade and financial openness.
            Although the former is mainly driven by manufacturing trade,
            the latter depends on the share of debt (and equity) in
            total foreign liabilities. (e) Financial openness would
            attenuate (magnify) real exchange rate volatility, the
            greater the share of equity (debt) in foreign liabilities.
            (f) The composition of flows also matters for explaining the
            smoothing properties of trade and financial openness in
            periods of currency crisis.
Emerging market fluctuations : what
            makes the difference
Aggregate fluctuations in emerging
            countries are quantitatively larger and qualitatively
            different in key respects from those in developed countries.
            Using data from Mexico and Canada, this paper decomposes
            these differences in terms of shocks to aggregate efficiency
            and shocks that distort the decisions of households about
            how much to invest, consume, and work in a standard model of
            a small open economy. The decomposition exercise suggests
            that most of these differences are explained by fluctuations
            in aggregate efficiency, distortions in labor decisions over
            the business cycle, and, most importantly, fluctuations in
            country risk. Other distortions are quantitatively less important.
International migration and gender
            differentials in the home labor market : evidence from Albania
This paper examines the role of
            male-dominated international migration in shaping labor
            market outcomes by gender in migrant-sending households in
            Albania. Using detailed information on family migration
            experience from the latest Living Standards Measurement
            Study survey, the authors find that male and female labor
            supplies respond differently to the current and past
            migration episodes of household members. Controlling for the
            potential endogeneity of migration and for the income
            (remittances) effect, the estimates show that having a
            migrant abroad decreases female paid labor supply and
            increases unpaid work. However, women with past family
            migration experience are significantly more likely to engage
            in self-employment and less likely to supply unpaid work.
            The same relationships do not hold for men. These findings
            suggest that over time male-dominated Albanian migration may
            lead to women's empowerment in access to income-earning
            opportunities at the origin.
Sea-level rise and storm surges : a
            comparative analysis of impacts in developing countries
An increase in sea surface temperature
            is evident at all latitudes and in all oceans. The current
            understanding is that ocean warming plays a major role in
            intensified cyclone activity and heightened storm surges.
            The vulnerability of coastlines to intensified storm surges
            can be ascertained by overlaying Geographic Information
            System information with data on land, population density,
            agriculture, urban extent, major cities, wetlands, and gross
            domestic product for inundation zones likely to experience
            more intense storms and a 1 meter sea-level rise. The
            results show severe impacts are likely to be limited to a
            relatively small number of countries and a cluster of large
            cities at the low end of the international income distribution.