rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Are there lasting impacts of aid to
            poor areas Evidence from rural China
The paper revisits the site of a large,
            World Bank-financed, rural development program in China 10
            years after it began and four years after disbursements
            ended. The program emphasized community participation in
            multi-sectoral interventions (including farming, animal
            husbandry, infrastructure and social services). Data were
            collected on 2,000 households in project and nonproject
            areas, spanning 10 years. A double-difference estimator of
            the program's impact (on top of pre-existing
            governmental programs) reveals sizeable short-term income
            gains that were mostly saved. Only modest gains to mean
            consumption emerged in the longer term-in rough accord with
            the gain to permanent income. Certain types of households
            gained more than others. The educated poor were
            under-covered by the community-based selection
            process-greatly reducing overall impact. The main results
            are robust to corrections for various sources of selection
            bias, including village targeting and interference due to
            spillover effects generated by the response of local
            governments to the external aid.
Integration of markets vs.
            integration by agreements
This paper provides an analysis of the
            two channels of regional integration: integration via
            markets and integration via agreements. Given that East Asia
            and Latin America are two fertile regions where both forms
            of integrations have taken place, the authors examine the
            experiences of these two areas. There are four related
            results. First, East Asia had been integrating via markets
            long before formal agreements were in vogue in the region.
            Latin America, by contrast, has primarily used formal
            regional trade treaties as the main channel of integration.
            Second, despite the relative lack of formal regional trade
            treaties until recently, East Asia is more integrated among
            itself than Latin America. Third, from a purely economic and
            trade standpoint, the proper sequence of integrations seems
            to be first integrating via markets and subsequently via
            formal regional trade agreements. Fourth, regional trade
            agreements often serve multiple constituents. The reason why
            integrating via markets first can be helpful is because this
            can give stronger political bargaining power to the
            outward-looking economic-oriented forces within the country.
Evaluation in the practice of development
Knowledge about development
            effectiveness is constrained by two factors. First, the
            project staff in governments and international agencies who
            decide how much to invest in research on specific
            interventions are often not well informed about the returns
            to rigorous evaluation and (even when they are) cannot be
            expected to take full account of the external benefits to
            others from new knowledge. This leads to under-investment in
            evaluative research. Second, while standard methods of
            impact evaluation are useful, they often leave many
            questions about development effectiveness unanswered.  The
            paper proposes ten steps for making evaluations more
            relevant to the needs of practitioners. It is argued that
            more attention needs to be given to identifying
            policy-relevant questions (including the case for
            intervention); that a broader approach should be taken to
            the problems of internal validity; and that the problems of
            external validity (including scaling up) merit more attention.
Youth risk-taking behavior in Brazil
            : drug use and teenage pregnancy
Using an extensive survey that addresses
            risk factors faced by the population in the shantytowns
            (favelas) of Fortaleza, Brazil, the aim of this paper is to
            study risk-taking behavior by youth, focusing on drug use
            and teenage pregnancy. The paper analyzes the impact of
            factors such as exposure to mass media, the existence of
            support networks, self-esteem, and the occurrence of
            violence at home and in the neighborhood, on the probability
            of risk-taking behavior. A bivariate probit model is
            estimated. The findings indicate that reliance on support
            networks and exposure to mass media are associated with a
            lower probability of either type of risk behavior. Living in
            a violent home increases drug consumption. Race does not
            have a significant impact on either type of behavior.
Managing the radio spectrum :
            framework for reform in developing countries
Bringing management of the radio
            spectrum closer to markets is long overdue. The radio
            spectrum is a major component of the infrastructure that
            underpins the information society. Spectrum management,
            however, has not kept up with major changes in technology,
            business practice, and economic policy that have taken place
            worldwide during the last two decades. For many years
            traditional government administration of the spectrum worked
            reasonably well, but more recently it has led to growing
            technical and economic inefficiencies as well as obstacles
            to technological innovation. Two alternative approaches to
            spectrum management are being tried in several countries,
            one driven by the market (tradable spectrum rights) and
            another driven by technology innovation (spectrum commons).
            This paper discusses the basic features, advantages and
            limitations, scope of application, and requirements for
            implementation of these three approaches. The paper then
            discusses how these approaches can be made to work under
            conditions that typically prevail in developing countries,
            including weak rule of law, limited markets, and constrained
            fiscal space. Although spectrum reform strategies for
            individual countries must be developed case by case, several
            broadly applicable strategic options are outlined. The paper
            proposes a phased approach to addressing spectrum reform in
            a country. It ends by discussing aspects of institutional
            design, managing the transition, and addressing high-level
            changes such as the transition to digital television, the
            path to third-generation mobile services, launching of
            wireless fixed broadband services, and releasing military
            spectrum. The paper is extensively annotated and referenced.
Productivity growth and economic
            reform : evidence from Rwanda
Trade, financial, and exchange rate
            reforms are shown to have exerted a positive impact on the
            growth of total factor productivity in Rwanda during the
            period 1995-2003.  Based on a constant returns-to-scale
            Cobb-Douglas production function, this paper regresses total
            factor productivity on indices of trade, financial, and
            exchange rate reforms.  The analysis determines that trade
            reforms and financial reforms each contributed positively to
            improvements in total factor productivity.  The data also
            suggest that the allocation of official development
            assistance to human capital made a significant contribution
            to productivity.  In contrast, the appreciation of the real
            exchange rate of the late 1980's hindered productivity
            or the growth of TFP.  Taken together, the findings for
            Rwanda presented in this paper show that the strong growth
            of the past decade has not just been due to a "bounce
            back" effect following the genocide.  The results
            support the notion that policies favorable to trade
            development, a deepening of the financial sector, and
            formation of human capital have been effective for
            increasing aggregate productivity of the economy and
            stimulating growth in Rwanda.  For sustained growth, the
            Rwandan authorities should continue to build on these
            policies, while also taking care to maintain an appropriate
            exchange rate.
The historical foundations of the
            narcotic drug control regime
This paper outlines the institutional
            history of the international narcotic drug control regime.
            It details the evolution of the control system, from its
            foundations at the beginning of the twentieth century - a
            period of mass, unregulated narcotic drug use - to the
            current period. The paper argues that the contemporary
            control model is ill-positioned to address the dynamic and
            rapidly changing nature of the global narcotics trade. The
            persistence of anachronistic guiding first principles,
            specifically the utopian idea of prohibition, is identified
            as the key impediment to the adoption of a more humane and
            effective policy approach. But while there is growing
            pressure for a revision of founding ideas, this is not
            supported by a host of powerful actors that includes the
            United States.
Measuring financial protection in health
Health systems are not just about
            improving health: good ones also ensure that people are
            protected from the financial consequences of receiving
            medical care. Anecdotal evidence suggests health systems
            often perform badly in this respect, apparently with
            devastating consequences for households, especially poor
            ones and near-poor ones. Two principal methods have been
            used to measure financial protection in health. Both relate
            a household's out-of-pocket spending to a threshold
            defined in terms of living standards in the absence of the
            spending: the first defines spending as catastrophic if it
            exceeds a certain percentage of the living standards
            measure; the second defines spending as impoverishing if it
            makes the difference between a household being above and
            below the poverty line. The paper provides an overview of
            the methods and issues arising in each case, and presents
            empirical work in the area of financial protection in
            health, including the impacts of government policy. The
            paper also reviews a recent critique of the methods used to
            measure financial protection.
Helpful Governments
This paper provides an alternative way
            of testing the theory of legal origins, one based on a
            firm's perception of how helpful the government is for
            doing business. The author argues that an approach based on
            firm perceptions offers a number of advantages over existing
            studies. Specifically, the analysis demonstrates that
            heavier regulation in civil law compared with common law
            countries is not viewed by businesses as an efficient and
            socially desirable response to disorder. Further, the
            findings show a strong effect of legal tradition on
            government helpfulness even after controlling for various
            institutional measures known to be correlated with the legal
            tradition of countries. This suggests that there is more to
            legal tradition than what existing studies have unearthed.
Improving logistics costs for
            transportation and trade facilitation
Access to basic infrastructure services
            - roads, electricity, water, sanitation - and the efficient
            provision of the services, is a key challenge in the fight
            against poverty. Many of the poor (and particularly the
            extreme poor) in rural communities in Latin America live on
            average 5 kilometers or more from the nearest paved road,
            which is almost twice as far as non-poor rural households.
            There have been major improvements in access to water,
            sanitation, electricity, telecommunications, ports, and
            airports,  but road coverage has not changed much, although
            some effort and resources have been invested to improve the
            quality of road networks. This paper focuses on the main
            determinants of logistics costs and physical access to
            services and, whenever possible, provides evidence of the
            effects of these determinants on competitiveness, growth,
            and poverty in Latin American economies. The analysis shows
            the impact of improving infrastructure and logistics costs
            on three fronts - macro (growth), micro (productivity at the
            firm level), and poverty (the earnings of poor/rural
            people). In addition, the paper provides recommendations and
            solutions that encompass a series of policies to reduce the
            prevalent high logistics costs and limited access to
            services in Latin America. The recommendations rely on
            applied economic analysis on logistics and trade facilitation.
Expanding taxable capacity and
            reaching revenue potential : cross-country analysis
An effective tax system is fundamental
            for successful country development.  The first step to
            understand public revenue systems is to establish some
            commonly agreed performance measurements and benchmarks.
            This paper employs a cross-country study to estimate tax
            capacity from a sample of 104 countries during 1994-2003.
            The estimation results are then used as benchmarks to
            compare taxable capacity and tax effort in different
            countries.  Taxable capacity refers to the predicted
            tax-gross domestic product ratio that can be estimated with
            the regression, taking into account a country's
            specific economic, demographic, and institutional features.
            Tax effort is defined as an index of the ratio between the
            share of the actual tax collection in gross domestic product
            and the predicted taxable capacity.  The authors classify
            countries into four distinct groups by their level of actual
            tax collection and attained tax effort.  This classification
            is based on the benchmark of the global average of tax
            collection and a tax effort index of 1 (when tax collection
            is exactly the same as the estimated taxable capacity).  The
            analysis provides guidance for countries with various levels
            of tax collection and tax effort.
Modeling services liberalization :
            the case of Kenya
This paper employs a 55 sector small
            open economy computable general equilibrium model of the
            Kenyan economy to assess the impact of the liberalization of
            regulatory barriers against foreign and domestic business
            service providers in Kenya. The model incorporates
            productivity effects in both goods and services markets
            endogenously, through a Dixit-Stiglitz framework. It
            estimates the ad valorem equivalent of barriers to foreign
            direct investment based on detailed questionnaires completed
            by specialists in Kenya. The authors estimate that Kenya
            will gain about 11 percent of the value of Kenyan
            consumption in the medium run (or about 10 percent of gross
            domestic product) from a full reform package that also
            includes uniform tariffs. The estimated gains increase to 77
            percent of consumption in the long-run steady-state model,
            where the impact on the accumulation of capital from an
            improvement in the productivity of capital is taken into
            account. Decomposition exercises reveal that the largest
            gains to Kenya will derive from liberalization of costly
            regulatory barriers that are non-discriminatory in their
            impacts between Kenyan and multinational service providers.
Burley tobacco clubs in Malawi :
            nonmarket institutions for exports
This paper studies nonmarket
            institutions that facilitate exports. In Malawi, as in many
            other developing countries, farmers face numerous
            constraints that disconnect them from export markets. The
            paper explores the role of a local institution, the burley
            tobacco clubs, in bridging smallholders to exports. Burley
            clubs potentially enable farmers to increase their tobacco
            farming productivity by providing services related to
            institutional access, collective action, economies of scale,
            and supporting network. Using matching methods and
            instrumental variable techniques, the authors find that
            tobacco club membership causes an increase of between 40-74
            percent in output per acre and an increase of between 45-89
            percent in tobacco sales per acre. Instead, neither the land
            share allocated to tobacco nor the unit value obtained by
            the producers is affected by club membership.
Social exclusion and the gender gap
            in education
Despite a sharp increase in the share of
            girls who enroll in, attend, and complete various levels of
            schooling, an educational gender gap remains in some
            countries. This paper argues that one explanation for this
            gender gap is the degree of social exclusion within these
            countries, as indicated by ethno-linguistic heterogeneity,
            which triggers both economic and psycho-social mechanisms to
            limit girls' schooling. Ethno-linguistic heterogeneity
            initially was applied to explaining lagging economic growth,
            but has emerged in the literature more recently to explain
            both civil conflict and public goods. This paper is a first
            application of the concept to explain gender gaps in
            education. The paper discusses the importance of female
            education for economic and social development, reviews the
            evidence regarding gender and ethnic differences in
            schooling, reviews the theoretical perspectives of various
            social science disciplines that seek to explain such
            differences, and tests the relevance of ethnic and
            linguistic heterogeneity in explaining cross-country
            differences in school attainment and learning. The study
            indicates that within-country ethnic and linguistic
            heterogeneity partly explains both national female primary
            school completion rates and gender differences in these
            rates, but only explains average national learning outcomes
            when national income measures are excluded.
A general equilibrium analysis of
            demand side management programs under the clean development
            mechanism of the kyoto protocol
This paper analyzes the economic and
            environmental consequences of a potential demand side
            management program in Thailand using a general equilibrium
            model. The program considers replacement of less efficient
            electrical appliances in the household sector with more
            efficient counterparts. The study further examines changes
            in the economic and environmental effects of the program if
            it is implemented under the clean development mechanism of
            the Kyoto Protocol, which provides carbon subsidies to the
            program. The study finds that the demand side management
            program would increase economic welfare if the ratio of unit
            cost of electricity savings to price of electricity is 0.4
            or lower even in the absence of the clean development
            mechanism. If the program's ratio of unit cost of
            electricity savings to price of electricity is greater than
            0.4, registration of the program under the clean development
            mechanism would be needed to achieve positive welfare
            impacts. The level of welfare impacts would, however, depend
            on the price of carbon credits the program generates. For a
            given level of welfare impacts, the registration of the
            demand side management program under the clean development
            mechanism would increase the volume of emission reductions.
Can production and trafficking of
            illicit drugs be reduced or merely shifted
The production of cocaine and heroin,
            the two most important drugs economically, has been
            concentrated in a small number of poor nations for 25 years.
            A slightly larger number of developing nations have been
            affected by large-scale trafficking in these two drugs.
            This paper reviews what is known about drug control programs
            and considers non-traditional options.  The usual array of
            programs for suppressing drug problems, enforcement,
            treatment, harm reduction and prevention have been assessed
            almost exclusively in wealthy nations.  Although treatment
            has been shown to be cost-effective, it is of minimal
            relevance for reducing the drug problems of nations such as
            Afghanistan, Colombia, Mexico or Tajikistan, which are
            primarily harmed by production and trafficking rather than
            consumption. Efforts to reduce drug production and
            trafficking have not been subject to systematic evaluation
            but the best interpretation of the available evidence is
            that they have had minimal effect on the quantities produced
            or trafficked.  It is reasonable to conclude that
            international drug control efforts can do more to affect
            where these drugs are produced rather than the quantity.  If
            that is the case, and given that spreading a specific level
            of production or trafficking to more rather than fewer
            nations probably decreases global welfare, it may be
            appropriate to consider a less aggressive stance to current
            producers and to make strategic decisions about the location
            of an industry producing a global bad.