rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
percent of employees must be nationals, and 70 percent of wages be paid to national employees. Furthermore, Peru allows cross-border supply of reinsurance services which it previously did not.

Some of the most significant developments in financial services reform after the commencement of TPP negotiations were witnessed in Malaysia, and are reflected in its TPP commitments. In 2008, primary entry as the branch of a financial institution was not allowed, and entry through a subsidiary was temporarily not allowed, since no new licenses were being issued. Although there was no limit on foreign ownership in a subsidiary, the limit on foreign ownership was 30 percent for acquisition of a local bank. With the enactment of the Financial Services Act 2013 and the Islamic Financial Services Act 2013 in June 2013, there has been a comprehensive modernization and streamlining of Malaysia’s regime on licensing and foreign equity limits in the banking and insurance sector (conventional and Islamic). In both conventional and Islamic finance, application for a license is now based on the prudential and “best interest of Malaysia” criteria. Similarly, the acquisition of a significant foreign equity interest in Malaysian banks and insurance companies could be up to 100 percent, subject to meeting the aforementioned criteria.

# **Figure 2: STRI for Financial services - Doha Offers, ‘Best PTA’, TPP Commitments and Applied Policy of 2015**

<!-- Start of picture text --> Financial: Doha, PTA, TPP and applied policy<br>BRN MYS CHL SGP MEX CAN VNM USA PER JPN AUS NZL<br>Doha PTA<br>TPP Policy '15<br>Note: Absense of a bar means there are no restrictions (STRI score is zero)<br>100<br>75<br>50<br>25<br>Services trade restrictiveness index<br>0<br><!-- End of picture text --> Source: The World Bank TPP Database, 2016 Malaysia’s TPP commitment enhances transparency and predictability of applied policies. Although the commitment states that the license is subject to “best interest” of Malaysia, it spells out the criteria that the Minister or the Bank will use to determine whether the investment will meet the “best interest” criteria.<sup>14</sup> Furthermore, the Central bank is mandated to make a decision

> 14 The criteria include (a) the effect of the investment on the level and nature of economic activity in Malaysia, including on productivity, efficiency and quality of financial services; (b) the contribution towards enhancing

13
purchased (kg) is negative across the same set of countries, but only significant in Tanzania (see Table A21).

# **4. Discussion and Policy Implications**

During the 2020-2024 period multiple factors were in play, and farmers faced unusually high prices as a result. Using nationally representative, longitudinal, and cross-country microdata from household surveys in six Sub-Saharan African countries, we unpack the implications of the price shocks on farmers, and the heterogeneous strategies employed by households with respect to inorganic fertilizer use.

The share of farming households utilizing inorganic fertilizer does not appear to have been harshly dampened during this period, with statistically significant negative time trends in Burkina Faso and Malawi but with moderate magnitudes, a finding potentially contrary to expectation. Though incidence of use was relatively stable, those that did not apply fertilizer were on the poorer end of the wealth distribution and reported affordability as a key barrier to adoption, potentially hinting at longer-run issues of input affordability beyond this crisis period.

While we do not find large changes in fertilizer use at the extensive margin, important insights emerge with respect to the intensive margin. A significant share of fertilizer-using households, up to 70 percent in Malawi and more than 45 percent in Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, and Tanzania, reported a shortfall in the quantity of fertilizer acquired. These shortfalls were predominantly due to affordability as opposed to availability-related constraints, and tended to affect poorer households more than those at the upper end of the wealth distribution. In light of price shocks and related fertilizer shortfalls, farming households employed a variety of coping strategies. Some farmers reduced the intensity with which they applied fertilizer (i.e., reduced the application rate) while others reduced the area in which it was applied. Some households, in the face of price shocks, sold assets or borrowed money from friends and relatives to purchase the input. These strategies threaten to reduce agricultural productivity, while also indebting households and/or depleting their savings.

Many farming households, in the recent period of global crises and observed shocks to fertilizer prices, have been pushed to take measures that could dampen productivity and/or increase their vulnerability to future shocks. While many different interventions were implemented in different countries during the crisis period (Amaglobeli et al., 2023), most of the policy responses 18
**Table 4. Proportions of Non-Zero Investments Among Firms in Six African** **<u>Countries</u>**

|Employment|Cameroon|Ghana|Kenya|Uganda|Zambia|Zimbabwe|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|1≤ ≤5|0.21|0.31|0.44|n.a.|0.29|0.53|
|5<≤20|0.29|0.44|0.40|n.a.|0.29|0.51|
|20<≤100|0.24|0.48|0.41|n.a.|0.28|0.63|
|>100|0.38|0.20|0.44|n.a.|0.38|0.71|
|Total|0.29|0.32|0.42|0.52|0.31|0.66|

_Note:_ The table is based on data from a sample of 821 firms. _Source:_ Bigsten et al. (2005).

One of the main objectives of carrying out investment is to get access to better technology. There are other ways by which African firms can access better technology, however. Foreign direct investment (FDI) can lead to transfers of technology if multinational enterprises transfer technological information to their subsidiaries. Firms that export learn about general conditions and available technology in the international market. Technology licensing arrangements can be established to transfer technology directly. However, so far direct transfers of technology via technology-contracts and the like to African manufacturing firms have been very limited (see e.g. Bigsten and Kimuyu, 2002, on Kenya). Because of this, trade or FDI are potentially important channels for technology transfers in Africa. While there is fairly strong evidence that African firms become more productive as a result of exporting (see Section 3.5), we do not yet know if this is due primarily to technological innovations, exposure to foreign competition, or something else. In any case, for technology transfers to be effective firms must be able to absorb the technology. This will be facilitated by the existence of an intellectual infrastructure such as laboratories and universities. Also required is an ability to adapt imported technology to local circumstances (Tybout, 2000). Why technology transfer to Africa’s manufacturing sector is slow is as yet unclear. However, it would not seem unreasonable to assume that market failures play a role. Asymmetric information, for instance, makes it hard for buyers to asses the value of technological information.

29
# **7 Conclusion**

In this paper, we leverage a combination of case-level court data, monthly firm tax records and primary firm survey data to show that a simple procedural reform can have large impacts on the speed of justice, and that such efficiency gains can translate into meaningful economic impacts. A decree that imposed a new four-month deadline on the pre-trial, a key phase in the Senegalese civil and commercial court procedure, reduced its duration by 46 days relative to the pre-decree mean of 157 days. In other words, imposing a reduction in delays by one day reduced mean delays by 1.24 days (46 days / [157 days - 120 days]). These large gains in speed are not due to procedural intensification but are true efficiency gains, and they do not come at a cost in terms of quality. We show that bringing pre-trial duration under a four-month deadline has substantial economic impacts on firms involved in court disputes. While firms with longer pre-trials experience an average 11% decline in monthly revenues over the six months immediately following the start of the pre-trial, this negative impact is significantly reduced when pre-trial completes in under four months. While reduced-form estimates of the decree impact on firms’ monthly revenues are small and imprecise, results from our survey show that firms positively value the gains in speed produced by the reform and that firms affected by it have a more positive perception of the justice system than those not These results contribute direct, micro-level evidence on the link between legal reform, court efficiency, and economic performance, complementing a literature that has relied on more aggregate variation (Djankov et al., 2003; La Porta et al., 2008; Chemin, 2018; Alencar & Ponticelli, 2016; Lilienfeld-Toal et al., 2012). There are two central contributions. First, this study shows that simple procedural changes can meaningfully combat court inefficiencies in contexts of high legal formalism, such as Senegal. The richness of our court data allows us to establish the direction of causality and to detail the mechanisms at play, namely a 30
Policy Research Working Paper 7010

# **Abstract**

Using a panel of administrative data and regression discontinuity analysis, this paper examines how the introduction of preferential tax regimes for Georgian micro and small businesses in 2010 affects formal firm creation and tax compliance. The results show that the new tax regime for micro businesses increased the number of newly registered formal firms by 18–30 percent below the eligibility threshold during the first year of the reform, but not in subsequent years. The analysis does not find an effect of the new tax regime for small businesses on formal firm creation in any year. Policy makers are often concerned about abuse risks stemming from differentiated tax treatment of micro and small businesses. The analysis in this paper reveals reduced tax compliance in 2010 around the micro business eligibility threshold, but does not find significant evidence of reduced compliance by Georgian firms in later years. The results also do not show any significant evidence of strategic sorting around the regime eligibility thresholds.

This paper is a product of the Finance and Private Sector Development Team, Development Research Group; and the Business Taxation and Impact Evaluation Team, Trade and Competitiveness Global Practice Group. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The authors may be contacted at mbruhn@worldbank.org and jloeprick@worldbank.org.

_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
37 rates of adt and women and fertility levels is consistent with these generalfzations.

Increases in a couple's wealth adds to its economic opportunities, permitting it to consum more goods that do not b."e superior substitutes. Children **seem** to fall in this category. honearned income that is derived from nonhuman capital such **as** land and physical property tends, therefore, to be positively related to fertility, at least In traditional rural societies (Mueller, 1984; Schultz, 1988).

Land and physical assets that can be employed in home production may also enhance the productivity of child labor for parents, and encourage landowners in particular to have additional children. At **the** frontiers of settlement in North and South America, Scandinavia, and Africa, people with more land and less labor have tonded to be relatively fartile, **as** noted by Malthus two centuries ago and reconfirosd in studies of low income countries today (e.g. Nerrick, 1978). But these tendencies may be offset if wealthier parents are inclined to spend more on the human capital and property of their offspring, which may deter them from indulging in a larger family.

A critical, but largely untested, hypothesis is- that the private returns on human capital increased in the last century throughout the world, and this development has encouraged parents to invest more in the 'quality' of their children and less in the quantity of them (T. W. Schultz, 1967, 1974, 1975, 1981; Becker, 1981). Contamporary evidence does not contradict this hypothesis. But sarious gaps in our knowledge prevent us from assessing how =ich of the observed decline in fertility can **be** attributad to this factor. Rarely is there documentation of how private rates of return on schooling have changed over time during the full course of the demographic transition. Nor is it
2012, to expand the time range to include papers from 2010 and 2011. The amendment yielded 235 additional results<sup>8</sup> .

2. Within these results, we further limited eligibility by two criteria:

- a. We included only articles reporting results of prospectively

- randomized studies. As we are evaluating study design, it would be inappropriate to include studies not designed as trials (e.g., natural experiments).

- b. To limit heterogeneity of study quality, we further restricted eligibility to articles published in the top 50 journals as rated by journal impact within economics, taken from a Boston Fed working paper which ranks economics journals (Kodrzycki and Yu 2006). In the 2012 search amendment, we added papers from the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics and the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, from the journals’ inception in 2009 onward, in light of their prestige and the volume of RCT reports they publish.

In total, this yielded 54 articles published between 2001 and 2011.

We then conducted a search to collect studies reporting RCTs in three top peerreviewed medical journals for assessment. This served two purposes—one, to calibrate

> 8. We recognize that this is not the universe of published RCTs but believe it is a good approximation. Scanning the abstracts of all articles in these journals published over the period would have been prohibitively time-consuming. Including the word “experiment” in the search terms raises the number of initial results well into the thousands.

24
<!-- Start of picture text --> Figure S1.4: Residuals with Time Trend, CO at ITO<br>2004-2006<br>Source: Based on data described in the text<br>2.5<br>2<br>1.5<br>1<br>.5<br>0<br>-.5<br>-1<br>-1.5<br>-2<br>-2.5<br>-3<br>-3.5<br>-4<br>1Jan2004 20Feb2004 10Apr2004 30May2004 19Jul2004 7Sep2004 27Oct2004 16Dec2004 4Feb2005 26Mar2005 15May2005 4Jul2005 23Aug2005 12Oct2005 1Dec2005 20Jan2006 11Mar2006 30Apr2006 19Jun2006 8Aug2006 27Sep2006 16Nov2006 5Jan2007<br><!-- End of picture text --> <!-- Start of picture text --> Figure S1.5a: Residuals with Time Trend, NO2 at ITO<br>2004-2006<br>Source: Based on data described in the text<br>2.5<br>2<br>1.5<br>1<br>.5<br>0<br>-.5<br>-1<br>-1.5<br>-2<br>-2.5<br>-3<br>-3.5<br>-4<br>-4.5<br>-5<br>1Jan2004 20Feb2004 10Apr2004 30May2004 19Jul2004 7Sep2004 27Oct2004 16Dec2004 4Feb2005 26Mar2005 15May2005 4Jul2005 23Aug2005 12Oct2005 1Dec2005 20Jan2006 11Mar2006 30Apr2006 19Jun2006 8Aug2006 27Sep2006 16Nov2006 5Jan2007<br><!-- End of picture text --> 56
The overall impact of each scenario on Africa’s poverty rate will depend on each household’s final position with respect to the poverty line. Table 4 summarizes these effects. Again and by design, the most important differences between Baseline and the alternative scenarios occur in the short-run. The Conflict and Drought scenarios inflict greater damage in terms of forgone poverty reduction – the poverty headcount for PPP$1.25/day is greater than the Baseline by 2.3 and 1.2 percentage points respectively. The Oil scenario provides a slightly positive effect on poverty reduction in both the short and the longrun.

.

**<u>Table 4 Poverty Headcounts for Six Scenarios in SSA, (%)</u>**

|||**Base**|**line**|**Prolo**<br>**reces**|**nged**<br>**sion**|**Colla**<br>**cap**<br>**flo**|**pse of**<br>**ital**<br>**ws**|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||**2010**|**2015**|**2025**|**2015**|**2025**|**2015**|**2025**|
|PPP$1.25/day|48.5|41.9|30.1|42.0|30.4|41.9|30.7|
|PPP$2.00/day|64.6|57.0|43.2|57.1|43.5|57.1|44.3|
|||**Oil S**|**hock**|**Dro**|**ught**|**Con**|**flict**|
||**2010**|**2015**|**2025**|**2015**|**2025**|**2015**|**2025**|
|PPP$1.25/day|48.5|41.4|29.7|42.9|30.8|44.0|31.2|
|PPP$2.00/day|64.6|56.7|42.8|58.2|44.1|59.3|44.8|

Source: Authors’ simulations and calculations.

Note: The poverty rate projections may differ from other sources such as World Bank (2013). This is because these correspond to the scenarios in this study; they are derived from the micro-simulations in the GIDD model, which does not assume distribution neutrality and will incorporate the general equilibrium effects on relative prices, wages, and quantities.

# **Conclusions**

Will Africa’s recent and impressive upward trajectory in growth and poverty reduction persist in the long run, especially if the environment turns really negative? The results of the stress tests we introduce in this paper are mixed but cautiously positive. Our findings show that Africa’s growth and poverty records are relatively robust to external shocks that arise from the global economy, such as a prolonged recession in high-income countries or even a disruption of capital flows to the region. That conclusion assumes that whatever policy reform achievements as well as economic and trade diversification that were in place prior to the recession will continue in order to shield economic performance against adverse external shocks.

Internal shocks, such as drought and civil conflicts, will pose the greater risks to Africa’s performance. Because of the economic dominance of the agriculture sector and the share of food in household budgets, the region will need to increase the resilience of agriculture against the unfavorable 22
forwarders might be worse off, but data do not necessarily show a much better performance by large ones.

Rightly or not, the natural tendency of a public agency or terminal operator is to allocate the responsibility for long delays to the users or their agent. They will tend to dismiss the tail of the distribution as non-representative and use lead time indicators close to the median or even the mode to benchmark their own efficiency when dealing with efficient operators.

_A contrario_ , a quality driven shipper, will look at the probability of a container coming late to assess the induced inventory or opportunity cost. For them the relevant indicators will not be the mean, but the 95<sup>th</sup> or 99<sup>th</sup> percentile lead time and exporters will likely be more demanding than importers. The next section (model) will provide a precise formulation of the link between inventory and distribution of lead time. However, we can already indicate that given the shape of the typical p.d.f., switching from the median to the 95<sup>th</sup> percentile translates into a twofold to fivefold difference.

This question is still very much open especially for port-dwell time, and is worth further investigation based on individual shipment dataset: one may consider alternative model, where different shippers have different p.d.f. of lead time. Although we do think (as was indicated above) that in the case of transit in LDCs observed distributions of lead-time are essentially process dependent, to avoid shipper’s bias, we have used data and information provided by international freight-forwarders who are experiencing stochastic lead-time, independent of the shipper.

# **6.3 The Curse of Small Shipments**

High land transportation costs may be partially attributed to the fact that (i) landlocked countries export less than they import and (ii) low trade volume from/to landlocked countries prevent economies of scale.

40
Table 6: The role of firm ownership

|Depend|ent variable: dum|my equal to one if|the frm_i_imports|capital goods in_t_.|||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||(1)|(2)|(3)|(4)|(5)|(6)|
||MNF s|pillovers|Without|MNF frms|Privat|e frms|
|Input tariff(s)(t-1) x MNF(r,s,t)|-0.086*|-0.072|||||
||(0.044)|(0.058)|||||
|MNF(r,s,t)|0.057*|0.070|||||
||(0.034)|(0.044)|||||
|Input tariff(s)(t-1)|-0.119*||-0.185**||-0.150**||
||(0.070)||(0.081)||(0.067)||
|Input tariff(s)(t-1)_×_Low initial TFP||-0.130||-0.205||-0.163|
|||(0.107)||(0.119)||(0.105)|
|Input tariff(s)(t-1)_×_Middle initial TFP||-0.323***||-0.416***||-0.340***|
|||(0.106)||(0.115)||(0.103)|
|Input tariff(s)(t-1)_×_High initial TFP||-0.025||-0.089||-0.039|
|||(0.158)||(0.161)||(0.143)|
|Capital goods and output tariff(s)(t-1)|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Herfndahl index(s)(t-1)|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Industry level controls|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Firm level controls|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Firm fxed effects|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Year fxed effects|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|Yes|
|Observations|14,680|7,861|13,300|6,817|14,247|7,593|
|R-squared|0.094|0.089|0.097|0.093|0.096|0.091|

_Notes_ : The dependent variable is a dummy for firm _i_ having positive imports of capital goods in year _t_ . MNF(r,s,t) is the logarithm of the number of foreign affiliates located in the same region (r) and industry (s). All other control variables are defined in table 3. Heteroskedasticity-robust standards errors are reported in parentheses. Errors are corrected for clustering at the 3-digit industry level.<sup>_∗∗∗_</sup> ,<sup>_∗∗_</sup> , and<sup>_∗_</sup> indicate significance at the 1, 5 and 10 percent levels respectively.

Moreover, previous works using the same firm-level dataset have emphasized the role of state-owned firms relative to private companies in India (Topalova, 2004; Alfaro and Chari, 2009). One could argue that state-owned companies might have a greater lobby power to induce the government to reduce tariff on those goods that they use as intermediate ones in the production of final goods. In order to address 43
- 22 -

period to a still higher average of 28.2 percent in the period of reform. Of the five countries being compared, this makes Tanzania the country with the highest level of investment in the period of reform.

Flgure 9 <!-- Start of picture text --> EFFICIENCY OF INVESTMENT<br>GOP growth an ratio of GOI/OO(<br>70 -<br>80 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~53.2<br>so<br>50 ~~35.0- 0<br>40<br>30<br>20<br>10<br>10<br>Ghano Kowya l1IwI Tarsanla Uganda<br>CAnnuali av.reo)<br>1981-95 1\\ 988-90<br><!-- End of picture text --> Source: IMF and World Banlk data, and authors' estimates.

Figure 9 presents data on the efficiency of investment, and reveals one of the shortcomings of the Tanzanian reform program. It shows that both in the pre-reform period and during the period of reform, Tanzania has had the lowest efficiency of investment of all five countries. When compared with Uganda, in particular, tne results are especially striking: the efficiency of investment in Tanzania in the reform period is only about a quarter of that in Uganda. Uganda, with an average investment share of only 11.0 percent of GDP in the reform period, has been able to achieve an average growth rate of 6.5 percent per annum during that period. In contrast, during the same period, Tanzania with an average investment share of 28.2 percent of GDP, has only been able to achieve an average growth rate of 4.2 percent per annum.