rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Trade and economic growth : evidence
            on the role of complementarities for CAFTA-DR countries
This paper examines the effects of trade
            on growth among Central America-Dominican Republic Free
            Trade Agreement countries. To accomplish this task, the
            authors collected a panel data set of 136 countries over
            1960-2010, and estimated cross-country growth regressions
            using an econometric methodology that accounts for
            unobserved effects and the likely endogeneity of the growth
            determinants. Following recent empirical efforts, they
            tested whether the impact of trade openness on growth may be
            more effective after surpassing a "minimum
            threshold" in specific areas closely related to
            economic development. The analysis finds not only that there
            is a robust causal link from trade to growth, but also that
            the growth benefits from trade are larger in countries with
            higher levels of education and innovation, deeper financial
            markets, a stronger institutional framework, more developed
            infrastructure networks, a high level of integration with
            world capital markets, and less stringent economic
            regulations. On average, rising trade has benefited growth
            in Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement
            countries. However, the lack of progress in structural
            reforms has not allowed these countries to maximize the
            potential benefits from trade.
Cash or condition evidence from a
            cash transfer experiment
Conditional Cash Transfer programs are
            "...the world's favorite new anti-poverty
            device," (The Economist, July 29 2010) yet little is
            known about the specific role of the conditions in driving
            their success. In this paper, we evaluate a unique cash
            transfer experiment targeted at adolescent girls in Malawi
            that featured both a conditional (CCT) and an unconditional
            (UCT) treatment arm. We find that while there was a modest
            improvement in school enrollment in the UCT arm in
            comparison to the control group, this increase is only 43
            percent as large as the CCT arm. The CCT arm also
            outperformed the UCT arm in tests of English reading
            comprehension. The schooling condition, however, proved
            costly for important non-schooling outcomes: teenage
            pregnancy and marriage rates were substantially higher in
            the CCT than the UCT arm. Our findings suggest that a CCT
            program for early adolescents that transitions into a UCT
            for older teenagers would minimize this trade-off by
            improving schooling outcomes while avoiding the adverse
            impacts of conditionality on teenage pregnancy and marriage.
Corruption and productivity :
            firm-level evidence from the BEEPS survey
Using enterprise data for the economies
            of Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS, this study
            examines the effects of corruption on productivity.
            Corruption is narrowly defined as the occurrence of informal
            payments to government officials to ease the day-to-day
            operation of firms. The effects of this "bribe
            tax" on productivity are compared to the consequences
            of red tape, which may be understood as imposing a
            "time tax" on firms. When testing effects in the
            full sample, only the bribe tax appears to have a negative
            impact on firm-level productivity, while the effect of the
            time tax is insignificant. At the same time, unlike similar
            studies using country-level data, firm level analysis allows
            a direct test of the "efficient grease" hypothesis
            by investigating whether corruption may increase
            productivity by helping reduce the time tax on firms.
            Results provide no evidence of a trade-off between the time
            and the bribe taxes, implying that bribing does not emerge
            as a second-best option to achieve higher productivity by
            helping circumvent cumbersome bureaucratic requirements.
            When controlling for EU membership the effects of the bribe
            tax are more harmful in non-EU countries. This suggests that
            the surrounding environment influences the way in which firm
            behaviour affects firm performance. In particular, in
            countries where corruption is more prevalent and the legal
            framework is weaker, bribery is more harmful for firm-level productivity.
Why don't we see poverty convergence
We are not seeing faster progress
            against poverty amongst the poorest developing countries.
            Yet this is implied by widely accepted "stylized
            facts" about the development process. The paper tries
            to explain what is missing from those stylized facts.
            Consistently with models of economic growth incorporating
            borrowing constraints, the analysis of a new data set for
            100 developing countries reveals an adverse effect on
            consumption growth of high initial poverty incidence at a
            given initial mean. A high incidence of poverty also entails
            a lower subsequent rate of progress against poverty at any
            given growth rate (and poor countries tend to experience
            less steep increases in poverty during recessions). Thus,
            for many poor countries, the growth advantage of starting
            out with a low mean ("conditional convergence") is
            lost due to their high poverty rates. The size of the middle
            class--measured by developing-country, not Western,
            standards--appears to be an important channel linking
            current poverty to subsequent growth and poverty reduction.
            However, high current inequality is only a handicap if it
            entails a high incidence of poverty relative to mean consumption.
Aid quality and donor rankings
This paper offers new measures of aid
            quality covering 38 bilateral and multilateral donors, as
            well as new insights about the robustness and usefulness of
            such measures. The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid
            Effectiveness and the follow-up 2008 Accra Agenda for Action
            have focused attention on common donor practices that reduce
            the development impact of aid. Using 18 underlying
            indicators that capture these practices -- derived from the
            OECD-DAC's Survey for Monitoring the Paris Declaration,
            the new AidData database, and the DAC aid tables -- the
            authors construct an overall aid quality index and four
            coherently defined sub-indexes on aid selectivity,
            alignment, harmonization, and specialization. Compared with
            earlier indicators used in donor rankings, this indicator
            set is more comprehensive and representative of the range of
            donor practices addressed in the Paris Declaration,
            improving the validity, reliability, and robustness of
            rankings. One of the innovations is to increase the validity
            of the aid quality indicators by adjusting for recipient
            characteristics, donor aid volumes, and other factors.
            Despite these improvements in data and methodology, the
            authors caution against overinterpretation on overall
            indexes such as these. Alternative plausible assumptions
            regarding weights or the inclusion of additional indicators
            can still produce marked shifts in the ranking of some
            donors, so that small differences in overall rankings are
            not meaningful. Moreover, because the performance of some
            donors varies considerably across the four sub-indexes,
            these sub-indexes may be more useful than the overall index
            in identifying donors relative strengths and weaknesses.
Self-enforcing trade agreements :
            evidence from time-varying trade policy
The Bagwell and Staiger (1990) theory of
            cooperative trade agreements predicts new tariffs (i)
            increase with imports, (ii) increase with the inverse of the
            sum of the import demand and export supply elasticities, and
            (iii) decrease with the variance of imports. The authors
            find US import policy during 1997-2006 to be consistent with
            this theory. A one standard deviation increase in import
            growth, the inverse of the sum of the import demand and
            export supply elasticity, and the standard deviation of
            import growth changes the probability that the US imposes an
            antidumping tariff by 35 percent, by 88 percent, and by -76
            percent, respectively.
The typology of partial credit
            guarantee funds around the world
This paper presents data on 76 partial
            credit guarantee schemes across 46 developed and developing
            countries. Based on theory, the authors discuss different
            organizational features of credit guarantee schemes and
            their variation across countries. They focus on the
            respective role of government and the private sector and
            different pricing and risk reduction tools and how they are
            correlated across countries. The findings show that
            government has an important role to play in funding and
            management, but less so in risk assessment and recovery.
            There is a surprisingly low use of risk-based pricing and
            limited use of risk management mechanisms.
Migration and education decisions in
            a dynamic general equilibrium framework
With growing international skilled labor
            mobility, education and migration decisions have become
            increasingly inter-related, and potentially have a large
            impact on the growth trajectories of source countries,
            through their effects on labor supply, savings, or the cost
            of education. The authors develop a generic dynamic general
            equilibrium model to analyze the education-migration nexus
            in a consistent framework. They use the model as a
            laboratory to test empirical conditions for the existence of
            net brain gain, that is, greater domestic accumulation of
            human capital (in per capita terms) with greater migration
            of skilled workers. The results suggest that although some
            structural parameters can favor simultaneously greater human
            capital accumulation and greater skilled migration - such as
            high ratio of remittances over domestic incomes, high
            dependency ratios in migrant households, low dependency
            ratios in source countries, increasing returns to scale in
            the education sector, technological transfers and export
            market access with Diasporas, and efficient financial
            markets - this does not necessarily mean that greater
            migration encourages the constitution of greater stocks of
            human capital in source countries.
Community participation in public
            Schools : the impact of information campaigns in three
            indian states
This study evaluates the impact of a
            community-based information campaign on school performance
            from a cluster randomized control trial. The campaign
            consisted of eight to nine public meetings in each of 340
            treatment villages across three Indian states to disseminate
            information to the community about its state mandated roles
            and responsibilities in school management. The findings from
            the first follow-up 2-4 months after the campaign show that
            providing information through a structured campaign to
            communities had a positive impact in all three states.  In
            two states there was a significant and positive impact on
            reading (14-27 percent) in one of the three grades tested;
            in the third state there was a significant impact on writing
            in one grade (15 percent) and on mathematics in the other
            grade tested (27 percent). The intervention is associated
            with improvement in teacher effort in two states. Some
            improvements occurred in the delivery of certain benefits
            entitled to students (stipend, uniform, and mid day meal)
            and in process variables such as community participation in
            each of the three states. Follow-up research needs to
            examine whether there is a systematic increase in learning
            when the impact is measured over a longer time period and
            whether a campaign sustained over a longer time is able to
            generate greater impact on school outcomes.
Community participation in public
            Schools : the impact of information campaigns in three
            indian states
WPS4776 Policy ReseaRch WoRking PaPeR 4776 imPact evaluation seRies no. 26

# Community Participation in Public Schools

The Impact of Information Campaigns in Three Indian States _Priyanka Pandey Sangeeta Goyal Venkatesh Sundararaman_ The World Bank South Asia Region Human Development Department November 2008
Reform and inequality during the
            transition : an analysis using panel household survey data, 1990-2005
Using for the first time household
            survey data from 26 post-Communist countries, covering the
            period 1990-2005, this paper examines correlates of
            unprecedented increases in inequality registered by most of
            the economies. The analysis shows, after controlling for
            country fixed effects and type of survey used, that economic
            reform is strongly negatively associated with the income
            share of the bottom decile, and positively with the income
            shares of the top two deciles. However, breaking economic
            reform into its component parts, the picture is more
            nuanced. Large-scale privatization and infrastructure reform
            (mostly consisting of privatization and higher fees) are
            responsible for the pro-inequality effect; small-scale
            privatization tends to raise the income shares of the bottom
            deciles. Acceleration in growth is also pro-rich. But
            democratization is strongly pro-poor, as is lower inflation.
            Somewhat surprisingly, the analysis finds no evidence that
            greater government spending as share of gross domestic
            income reduces inequality.
Macro-micro feedback links of
            irrigation water management in Turkey
Agricultural production is heavily
            dependent on water availability in Turkey, where half the
            crop production relies on irrigation. Irrigated agriculture
            consumes about 75 percent of total water used, which is
            about 30 percent of renewable water availability. This study
            analyzes the likely effects of increased competition for
            water resources and changes in the Turkish economy. The
            analysis uses an economy-wide Walrasian Computable General
            Equilibrium model with a detailed account of the
            agricultural sector. The study investigated the economy-wide
            effects of two external shocks, namely a permanent increase
            in the world prices of agricultural commodities and climate
            change, along with the impact of the domestic reallocation
            of water between agricultural and non-agricultural uses.  It
            was also recognized that because of spatial heterogeneity of
            the climate, the simulated scenarios have differential
            impact on the agricultural production and hence on the
            allocation of factors of production including water.  The
            greatest effects on major macroeconomic indicators occur in
            the climate change simulations. As a result of the transfer
            of water from rural to urban areas, overall production of
            all crops declines. Although production on rainfed land
            increases, production on irrigated land declines, most
            notably the production of maize and fruits. The decrease in
            agricultural production, coupled with the domestic price
            increase, is further reflected in net trade. Agricultural
            imports increase with a greater decline in agricultural exports.
Foreign professionals and domestic regulation
Changes in demographics and patterns of
            investment in human capital are creating increased scope for
            international trade in professional services. The scope for
            mutually beneficial trade is, however, inhibited not only by
            quotas and discriminatory taxation, but also by domestic
            regulation - including a range of qualification and
            licensing requirements and procedures. To illustrate the
            nature and implications of these regulatory impediments,
            this paper presents a detailed description of the regulatory
            requirements faced in the United States market by four types
            of Indian professionals:  doctors, engineers, architects,
            and accountants. India is one of the largest exporters of
            skilled services, and the United States is one of the
            largest importers of skilled services, so these two
            countries reflect broader global trends. The paper argues
            that regulatory discrimination, for example through
            preferential recognition agreements, has implications both
            for the pattern of trade and for welfare. It presents some
            illustrative estimates that suggest the economic cost of
            regulations may be substantial. The paper concludes by
            examining how the trade-inhibiting impact of regulatory
            requirements could be addressed through bilateral and
            multilateral negotiations.
Social transfers, labor supply and
            poverty reduction : the case of Albania
In 1993, in response to persistent
            unemployment, and rising poverty and social unrest, the
            government of Albania introduced an anti-poverty program,
            namely Ndihma Ekonomike; in 1995 it was extended to all poor
            households. This paper estimates the separate effects of
            participation in this income support program and the old-age
            pension program on objective and subjective measures of
            household poverty. The analysis uses the nationally
            representative Albanian Living Standards Measurement Surveys
            carried out in 2002 and 2005. Using propensity score
            matching methods, the paper finds that Ndihma Ekonomike
            households, particularly urban residents, have lower per
            capita consumption and are more likely to be discontented
            with their lives, financial situation, and consumption
            levels than their matched comparators. In contrast,
            households receiving pensions are not significantly
            different from their matched comparators in reference to the
            same set of outcomes. The paper finds that the negative
            impact of Ndihma Ekonomike participation on welfare is
            driven by a negative labor supply response among
            work-eligible individuals. This negative labor response is
            larger among women and urban residents. In contrast to
            Ndihma Ekonomike, the receipt of old-age pension income
            transfers does not significantly impact the labor supply of
            prime-age individuals living in pension households
Factors affecting levels of
            international cooperation in carbon abatement projects
The Clean Development Mechanism, a
            provision of The Kyoto Protocol, allows countries that have
            pledged to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to gain
            credit toward their treaty obligations by investing in
            projects located in developing (host) countries. Such
            projects are expected to benefit both parties by providing
            low-cost abatement opportunities for the investor-country,
            while facilitating capital and technology flows to the host
            country. This paper analyzes the Clean Development Mechanism
            market, emphasizing the cooperation aspects between host and
            investor countries.  The analysis uses a dichotomous
            (yes/no) variable and three continuous variants to measure
            the level of cooperation, namely the number of joint
            projects, the volume of carbon dioxide abatement, and the
            volume of investment in the projects.  The results suggest
            that economic development, institutional development, the
            energy structure of the economies, the level of country
            vulnerability to various climate change effects, and the
            state of international relations between the host and
            investor countries are good predictors of the level of
            cooperation in Clean Development Mechanism projects. The
            main policy conclusions include the importance of
            simplifying the project regulation/clearance cycle;
            improving the governance structure host and investor
            countries; and strengthening trade or other long-term
            economic activities that engage the countries.
Pension funds and capital market development
This paper studies the relation between
            institutional investors and capital market development by
            analyzing unique data on monthly asset-level portfolio
            allocations of Chilean pension funds between 1995 and 2005.
            The results depict pension funds as large and important
            institutional investors that tend to hold a large amount of
            bank deposits, government paper, and short-term assets; buy
            and hold assets in their portfolios without actively trading
            them; hold similar portfolios at the asset-class level;
            simultaneously buy and sell similar assets; and follow
            momentum strategies when trading. Although pension funds may
            have contributed to the development of certain primary
            markets, these patterns do not seem fully consistent with
            the initial expectations that pension funds would be a
            dynamic force driving the overall development of capital
            markets. The results do not appear to be explained by
            regulatory restrictions. Instead, asset illiquidity and
            manger incentives might be behind the patterns illustrated
            in this paper.