rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Infrastructure, Economic Growth, and
            Poverty : A Review
How much an economy should invest in its
            physical infrastructure is a crucial question being asked by
            policy makers from developing countries where financial
            resources for economic development are limited. This paper
            aims to address this question by bringing insights from the
            literature that investigates the relationship between
            infrastructure investment, economic growth, and poverty
            alleviation. The study shows that there is no consensus
            among the existing studies, which are mostly focused on
            industrialized economies, on the relationship between public
            investment and economic growth. Studies that investigate the
            relationship between physical infrastructure and economic
            growth mostly conclude that there exists a positive
            relationship. This is also true between physical
            infrastructure and income inequality, as reported by a few
            studies. This study also identifies many gaps in the
            literature and highlights the need for further studies to
            narrow them.
Measuring Monetary Poverty in the
            Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Region : Data Gaps and
            Different Options to Address Them
This paper identifies gaps in
            availability, access, and quality of household budget
            surveys in the Middle East and North Africa region used to
            measure monetary poverty and evaluates ways to fill these
            information gaps. Despite improving public access to
            household budget surveys, the availability and timeliness of
            welfare data in the Middle East and North Africa region is
            poor compared to the rest of the world. Closing the data gap
            requires collection of more HBS data in more countries and
            improving access to data where it exists. However, when
            collection of consumption data is not possible, a variety of
            other second-best strategies can be employed. Using
            imputation methods can help to measure monetary poverty.
            Constructing non-monetary poverty and asset indexes from
            less robust surveys, using non-traditional surveys such as
            phone surveys, and "big data" -- administrative
            records, social networks and communications data, and
            geospatial data -- can help substitute for, or complement
            data from existing traditional survey data.
COVID-19 Mortality in Rich and Poor
            Countries : A Tale of Two Pandemics
COVID-19 can be described as a
            heat-seeking missile speeding toward the most vulnerable in
            society. That metaphor applies not just to the vulnerable in
            the rich world; the vulnerable in the rest of the world are
            not more immune. Yet, despite the extensive spread of the
            virus, the mortality toll remains highly concentrated in
            high-income countries. Developing countries represent 85
            percent of the global population, but only 21 percent of the
            pandemic's death toll. This unusual inequality creates
            the impression that the world is subjected to two different
            pandemics in terms of their impact. This paper documents the
            observed inequality with a new indicator that expresses
            severity relative to pre-pandemic patterns. It argues that
            the excessive skew towards rich countries is inconsistent
            with demography. Simulations based on reasonable ranges for
            infectivity and fatality suggest that the developing country
            share in global fatalities could rise by a factor of three
            (from 21 to 69 percent). Environmental and host-specific
            factors will influence these results but are unlikely to
            overturn them. While data quality has a role in explaining
            ‘excess inequality’, the more compelling explanation is that
            the pandemic has yet to run its course through the age
            distributions of the world.
Measuring Employment : Experimental
            Evidence from Urban Ghana
Using a randomized survey experiment in
            urban Ghana, this paper demonstrates that the length of the
            reference period and the interview modality (in person or
            over the phone) affect how people respond in labor surveys,
            with impacts varying markedly by job type. Survey
            participants report significantly more self-employment
            spells when the reference period is shorter than the
            traditional one week, with the impacts concentrated among
            those in home-based and mobile self-employment. In contrast,
            there is no impact of the reference period on the incidence
            of wage employment. The wage employed report working fewer
            days and hours when confronted with a shorter reference
            period. Finally, interviews conducted on the phone yield
            lower estimates of employment, hours worked, and days worked
            among the self-employed who are working from home or a
            mobile location as compared with in-person interviews.
Applied Services Trade Policy: A
            Guide to the Services Trade Policy Database and the Services
            Trade Restrictions Index
This paper describes the Services Trade
            Policy Database, a joint initiative by the World Bank and
            the World Trade Organization Secretariat, which builds on a
            database developed by the World Bank nearly 10 years ago and
            draws on a recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
            Development database. The Services Trade Policy Database
            offers comparable information on services trade policies for
            68 economies in 23 subsectors across five broad areas --
            financial services, telecommunications, distribution,
            transportation, and professional services. The database
            features several improvements. First, the data are collected
            according to a newly developed policy classification,
            consistent with the earlier World Bank database and the
            current Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
            Development database, enabling a comparison of services
            policies over a significant period and across a large
            cross-section of industrial and developing economies.
            Second, in addition to trade policies, the database contains
            information on licensing conditions and data restrictions.
            Third, policy restrictiveness is quantified following a more
            systematic approach that aggregates the information within a
            single consistent and transparent framework. Building on
            these innovations will make it possible to identify global
            patterns of services trade policies and secular trends in
            policy making over the past decade.
Job Creation and Demand for Skills
            in Kosovo : What Can We Learn from Job Portal Data
In Kosovo, employers report significant
            skill shortages, which limits firm growth and job creation.
            To understand the labor market dynamics and employer needs
            in real time, this paper analyzes the content of job
            postings using data from major online job portals from 2018.
            The findings show that the skills that are most in demand
            are socioemotional skills (especially related to
            extraversion), foreign language skills, and computer skills.
            The importance of these skills is transversal, cutting not
            only across occupations and industries, but also universally
            demanded in all education fields. The need for these skills
            is expressed more often and more explicitly in postings for
            jobs requiring higher levels of experience. Moreover, job
            platforms are used almost exclusively for filling high-skill
            occupations, especially in Kosovo's capital city,
            Pristina, whereas many low- and medium-skill jobs and jobs
            outside the capital are filled through informal channels.
            Overall, online data can be a useful tool for policy makers
            and other stakeholders to help align career services,
            training programs, and educational curricula with the skill
            needs of firms in real time.
Informality, Consumption Taxes and Redistribution
Can consumption taxes reduce inequality
            in developing countries? This paper combines household
            expenditure data from 31 countries with theory to shed new
            light on the redistributive potential and optimal design of
            consumption taxes. It uses the place of purchase of each
            expenditure to proxy for informal (untaxed) consumption
            which enables characterizing the informality Engel curve.
            The analysis finds that the budget share spent in the
            informal sector steeply declines with income, in all
            countries. The informal sector thus makes consumption taxes
            progressive: households in the richest quintile face an
            effective tax rate that is twice that of the poorest
            quintile. The paper extends the standard optimal commodity
            tax model to allow for informal consumption and calibrates
            it to the data to study the effects of different tax
            policies on inequality. Contrary to consensus, the findings
            show that consumption taxes are redistributive, lowering
            inequality by as much as personal income taxes. These
            effects are primarily driven by the shape of the informality
            Engel curve. Taking informality into account, commonly used
            redistributive policies, such as reduced tax rates on
            necessities, have a limited impact on inequality. In
            particular, subsidizing food cannot be justified on equity
            or efficiency grounds in several poor countries.
Winners and Losers from COVID-19 :
            Global Evidence from Google Search
As COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc
            across the world, researchers are attempting to quantify the
            economic fallout from the pandemic as it continues to
            unfold. Estimating the economic impacts of a prevailing
            pandemic is fraught with uncertainties about the
            epidemiology of the disease and the breadth of disruption of
            economic activities. This paper employs historical and near
            real-time Google search data to estimate the immediate
            impacts of COVID-19 on demand for selected services across
            182 countries. The analysis exploits the temporal and
            spatial variations in the spread of the virus and finds that
            demand for services that require face-to-face interaction,
            such as hotels, restaurants and retail trade, has
            substantially contracted. In contrast, demand for services
            that can be performed remotely or provide solutions to the
            challenges of reduced personal interactions, such as
            information and communications technology (ICT), and
            deliveries, has increased significantly. In a span of three
            months, the pandemic has resulted in a 63 percent reduction
            in demand for hotels, while increasing demand for ICT by a
            comparable rate. The impacts appear to be driven by supply
            contractions, due to social distancing and lockdown
            measures, and demand shocks as consumers shelter in place,
            with the latter dominating for most services. The magnitude
            of the changes in demand varies considerably with government
            responses to the pandemic.
Demand for “Safe Space” : Avoiding
            Harassment and Complying with Norms
Policy Research Working Paper 9269 Demand for “Safe Space” Avoiding Harassment and Complying with Norms _Florence Kondylis Arianna Legovini Kate Vyborny Astrid Zwager Luiza Andrade_ Development Economics Development Impact Evaluation Group June 2020 A verified reproducibility package for this paper is available at http://reproducibility.worldbank.org, click **here** for direct access.
Power to the Fiscal An Exploration
            of the Use of Credit Ratings to Estimate the Expected Cost
            of a Guarantee of a Power-Purchase Agreement
Ministries of finance are often asked to
            guarantee a state-owned electricity utility's payments
            to an independent power producer under a power-purchase
            agreement. To decide whether to grant the guarantee, the
            ministry should have at least a rough estimate of the
            guarantee's expected cost. Making use of an analogy
            between a power-purchase agreement and a debt contract, this
            paper shows how the ministry can get such an estimate by
            applying a method developed to estimate the expected cost of
            debt guarantees. An estimate of the probability of the
            utility's not being able to meet its obligations under
            the power-purchase agreement can be derived from the
            utility's actual or estimated credit rating in the
            absence of government support. The government's
            expected payments under the guarantee can then be estimated
            by multiplying the utility's payments under the
            power-purchase agreement by this probability. The estimates
            produced by the method will be imprecise, but the method may
            be easier to apply than alternative methods, and an
            imprecise estimate may be better for policy makers than no estimate.
Improved Biomass Cookstove Use in
            the Longer Run : Results from a Field Experiment in Rural Ethiopia
This paper reports on
            electronically-monitored improved use of the
            "Mirt" biomass stove in Ethiopia over a relatively
            long period of three-and-a-half years, using stove use data
            collected at five points in time. The results show that 62
            percent of the households surveyed still retained their
            stoves after more than three years, which is a low level of
            abandonment, as the lifetime of the Mirt stove is
            approximately five years. Dis-adoption of the stove is not
            correlated with any of three monetary incentives provided at
            the time of distribution. With and without adjusting for
            dis-adoption, no longer-run differences in stove retention
            are found across treatments. Among those who retained their
            stoves, average regular stove use increased over time, but
            generally it is statistically the same toward the end of the
            first year. Thus, despite the relatively long timeframe, no
            decline is observed in regular usage. Comparing the
            persistence of the treatment effects, the paper finds that,
            in the longer run, subsidizing the cost most effectively
            promotes increased regular use over time.
Lives and Livelihoods : Estimates of
            the Global Mortality and Poverty Effects of the Covid-19 Pandemic
This paper evaluates the global welfare
            consequences of increases in mortality and poverty generated
            by the Covid-19 pandemic. Increases in mortality are
            measured in terms of the number of years of life lost (LY)
            to the pandemic. Additional years spent in poverty (PY) are
            conservatively estimated using growth estimates for 2020 and
            two different scenarios for its distributional
            characteristics. Using years of life as a welfare metric
            yields a single parameter that captures the underlying
            trade-off between lives and livelihoods: how many PYs have
            the same welfare cost as one LY. Taking an agnostic view of
            this parameter, estimates of LYs and PYs are compared across
            countries for different scenarios. Three main findings
            arise. First, as of early June 2020, the pandemic (and the
            observed private and policy responses) has generated at
            least 68 million additional poverty years and 4.3 million
            years of life lost across 150 countries. The ratio of PYs to
            LYs is very large in most countries, suggesting that the
            poverty consequences of the crisis are of paramount
            importance. Second, this ratio declines systematically with
            GDP per capita: poverty accounts for a much greater share of
            the welfare costs in poorer countries. Finally, the
            dominance of poverty over mortality is reversed in a
            counterfactual "herd immunity" scenario: without
            any policy intervention, LYs tend to be greater than PYs,
            and the overall welfare losses are greater.
Malaysia's Economic Growth and
            Transition to High Income : An Application of the World Bank
            Long Term Growth Model (LTGM)
This paper studies economic growth in
            Malaysia, with the purpose of assessing the potential to
            attain the status and characteristics of a high-income
            country. Future economic growth is simulated under a
            business-as-usual baseline, where the growth drivers follow
            their historical or recent trends, and under different
            scenarios of reform, using the World Bank Long-Term Growth
            Model (LTGM). Under the business-as-usual baseline,
            Malaysia's GDP growth is expected to decline from 4.5
            to 2.0 percent over the next three decades, following the
            country's transition to high income in 2024 (which
            might be delayed due to the effects of COVID-19). This
            decline is partly due to demographics, but also a declining
            marginal product of private capital and slowing growth rates
            of total factor productivity and human capital. Strong
            reforms are required for Malaysia to grow beyond what is
            expected based on historical trends, especially for human
            capital, female labor force participation, and total factor
            productivity. In the strong reform scenario, based on growth
            drivers achieving a target corresponding to the 75th
            percentile of high-income countries, GDP growth is expected
            to have a substantially higher trajectory, reaching 3.6
            percent by 2050.
Long-Term Shifts in Korean
            Manufacturing and Plant-Level Productivity Dynamics
The Korean manufacturing sector has
            undergone active structural transformation in the past few
            decades. In particular, the composition of core
            manufacturing products has changed over time. In the 1970s,
            textiles, which are used to produce fabric, clothes,
            apparel, and shoes, were the main product. Over time, the
            value added shares have shifted toward electronics, ships,
            and cars. By analyzing plant-level microdata, this paper
            documents the patterns of entry, exit, job creation and
            destruction, and the growth of young plants during the
            industrial shift. This industrial shift involved active job
            reallocations, as well as the entry and exit of plants. The
            paper quantifies the extent to which such plant-level
            dynamics explain aggregate productivity growth. The findings
            show that within-plant productivity growth, which includes
            the effects of fast growth of young plants as well as robust
            growth of large continuing plants, played an important role
            in the productivity growth of the Korean manufacturing
            sector. The contribution of reallocations between continuing
            plants was relatively small. Moreover, productivity growth
            of an industry accompanied an increase of productivity
            dispersion, a measure commonly interpreted as the degree of misallocation.
Community Engagement in Schools :
            Evidence from a Field Experiment in Pakistan
This paper presents the results of a
            field experiment in rural Sindh, Pakistan, where half of the
            school-age children (ages 6-10 years) are out of school. The
            study tests simple and low-intensity approaches to
            strengthen engagement of communities with schools:
            face-to-face dialogue at externally facilitated community
            meetings, and ongoing, anonymous dialogue via text messages.
            The interventions increased communities' interest in
            education as measured through an improvement in the number
            of functioning schools and, in the case of the text message
            treatment, substantial gains in retention of students in
            grades 2, 3, and 4. On the supply side, the schools
            significantly increased staffing and the share of
            one-teacher schools was reduced; however, teacher
            absenteeism increased, and there was no substantial impact
            on basic school infrastructure. Elections and capacity
            building for school committees were implemented in a
            cross-over experimental design. The intervention undermined
            the participation of communities in meetings and reduced
            impacts on all indicators except new admissions and
            availability of toilets in schools. No evidence is found of
            impact on measured test scores for any intervention.
Exports and Productivity : The Role
            of Imported Inputs and Investment in R&D
The empirical evidence on within firm
            productivity improvements from exports has largely been
            understated because the measures of revenue productivity
            used do not account for pricing heterogeneity across firms.
            Using a panel of Indian firms, the analysis in this paper
            controls for firm variation in prices and uses proxy methods
            to retrieve measures of productivity that reflect physical
            productivity. Within-firm productivity changes from export
            entry are computed using a difference-in-differences
            matching estimator. The findings show that, over a six-year
            period, the difference in productivity growth between export
            entrants and their non-exporter counterparts is about 11
            percentage points. Thus, productivity improvements from
            selling in international markets have largely been
            understated in the export-productivity empirical literature.
            This difference in productivity growth is decomposed into
            two channels. About 15 percent of the difference in
            productivity growth is explained by higher imports of
            intermediate inputs, and about 85 percent is explained by
            investment in research and development. The evidence
            suggests that investment in research and development is an
            important source of within-firm productivity gains even in
            developing countries.