rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Mobile banking and financial
            inclusion : the regulatory lessons
Mobile banking is growing at a
            remarkable speed around the world. In the process it is
            creating considerable uncertainty about the appropriate
            regulatory response to this newly emerging service. This
            paper sets out a framework for considering the design of
            regulation of mobile banking. Since it lies at the interface
            between financial services and telecoms, mobile banking also
            raises competition policy and interoperability issues that
            are discussed in the paper. Finally, by unbundling payments
            services into its component parts, mobile banking provides
            important lessons for the design of financial regulation
            more generally in developed as well as developing economies.
Measuring the impacts of global
            trade reform with optimal aggregators of distortions
Traditional weighted-average measures of
            trade distortions are widely used in analyzing global and
            regional reforms, despite well-known deficiencies. This
            paper develops and applies optimal aggregators for the
            real-world case of multiple countries and commodities with
            much more detailed information on trade than on production
            and consumption. The approach reflects the fact that
            different aggregators are needed for expenditure on imported
            goods and for tariff revenues, and allows for incorporation
            of both intensive and extensive margins of adjustment to
            reform. Applications confirm that the technique is
            straightforward enough for widespread use, and point to
            close to a doubling of the welfare gains at the intensive
            margin when using the highest possible level of
            international commodity disaggregation, with larger gains in
            developing regions than in the industrial countries. The
            measured income gains increase along the entire path of
            liberalization, with slightly larger increases in the
            earlier stages, where the gaps between the responses of the
            expenditure and tariff revenue aggregators are largest.
            Sensitivity analysis suggests that, for global trade reform,
            the ease of substitution between tariff lines is much more
            important than that between varieties from different countries.
Fiscal policy and debt dynamics in
            developing countries
Using a new tax database for 28
            countries and a variety of econometric methods, this paper
            contributes to the debate on the effects of fiscal policy on
            economic activity in a number of ways. The analysis finds
            that tax cuts have a stimulative effect on economic growth
            in developing countries. Lowering the personal income tax
            rate by 1 percentage point, or cutting revenues by 1 percent
            of gross domestic product increases gross domestic product
            by 0.3-0.4 percent on impact and 0.8 percent in the long
            run. The author finds that cuts in personal income taxes are
            more effective in stimulating growth than cuts in corporate
            or valued added tax rates. The author incorporates debt
            dynamics into a fiscal vector autoregression model for a
            number of developing countries. Existing estimates of the
            effects of fiscal policy on growth use linear time-series
            methods, which may assess the effects of fiscal policy along
            a debt-path that is unsustainable. Incorporating the
            non-linear relationship between government expenditure,
            taxes, and debt alters estimates of the impact of fiscal
            policy on gross domestic product in several countries. In
            Brazil, for example, conventional time-series methods may
            overstate the effects of fiscal policy on gross domestic
            product, by ignoring the detrimental effects of debt accumulation.
Incentive compatible reforms : the
            political economy of public investments in Mongolia
Why do politicians distort public
            investments? And given that public investments are poor
            because presumably that is what is politically rational,
            what types of reforms are likely to be both efficiency
            improving and compatible with the interests of politicians?
            This paper explores these two questions in the context of
            Mongolia. It argues that Mongolian members of parliament
            have an incentive to over-spend on smaller projects that
            bring benefits to specific geographical localities and to
            under-spend on large infrastructure that would bring
            economic benefits to Mongolia on the whole. The incentive
            for the former is that members of parliament internalize the
            political benefits from the provision of particular,
            targeted benefits to specific communities. The disincentive
            for the latter is that large infrastructure carries a
            political risk because the political faction in control of
            that particular ministry would have access to huge rents and
            become politically too powerful. The identity of these
            "winners" is uncertain ex ante, given the
            relatively egalitarian and ethnically homogenous nature of
            Mongolia's society and polity. Anticipating this risk,
            members of parliament are reluctant to fund these projects.
            Since these large infrastructure projects are crucial for
            national growth, neglecting them hurts all members of
            parliament. Members of parliament will therefore support
            reforms that collectively tie their hands by safeguarding
            large, strategic investment projects from political
            interference thereby ensuring that no political faction
            becomes too powerful. This protection of mega-projects would
            need to be part of a bargain that also allows geographical
            targeting of some percentage of the capital budget.
Eight questions about brain drain
High-skilled emigration is an emotive
            issue that in popular discourse is often referred to as
            brain drain, conjuring images of extremely negative impacts
            on developing countries. Recent discussions of brain gain,
            diaspora effects, and other advantages of migration have
            been used to argue against this, but much of the discussion
            has been absent of evidence. This paper builds upon a new
            wave of empirical research to answer eight key questions
            underlying much of the brain drain debate: 1) What is brain
            drain? 2) Why should economists care about it? 3) Is brain
            drain increasing? 4) Is there a positive relationship
            between skilled and unskilled migration? 5) What makes brain
            drain more likely? 6) Does brain gain exist? 7) Do
            high-skilled workers remit, invest, and share knowledge back
            home? and 8) What do we know about the fiscal and production
            externalities of brain drain?
Reliability of recall in
            agricultural data
Despite the importance of agriculture to
            economic development, and a vast accompanying literature on
            the subject, little research has been done on the quality of
            the underlying data. Due to survey logistics, agricultural
            data are usually collected by asking respondents to recall
            the details of events occurring during past agricultural
            seasons that took place a number of months prior to the
            interview. This gap can lead to recall bias in reported data
            on agricultural activities. The problem is further
            complicated when interviews are conducted over the course of
            several months, thus leading to recall of variable length.
            To test for such recall bias, the length of time between
            harvest and interview is examined for three African
            countries with respect to several common agricultural input
            and harvest measures. The analysis shows little evidence of
            recall bias impacting data quality. There is some indication
            that more salient events are less subject to recall decay.
            Overall, the results allay some concerns about the quality
            of some types of agricultural data collected through recall
            over lengthy periods.
Biofuels and climate change
            mitigation : a CGE analysis incorporating land-use change
The question of whether biofuels help
            mitigate climate change has attracted much debate in the
            literature. Using a global computable general equilibrium
            model that explicitly represents land-use change impacts due
            to the expansion of biofuels, this study attempts to shed
            some light on this question. The study shows that if biofuel
            mandates and targets currently announced by more than 40
            countries around the world are implemented by 2020 using
            crop feedstocks, and if both forests and pasture lands are
            used to meet the new land demands for biofuel expansion,
            this would cause a net increase of greenhouse gas emissions
            released to the atmosphere until 2043, since the cumulative
            greenhouse gas emissions released through land-use change
            would exceed the reduction of emissions due to replacement
            of gasoline and diesel until then. However, if the use of
            forest lands is avoided by channeling only pasture lands to
            meet the demand for new lands, a net increase of cumulative
            greenhouse gas emissions would occur but would cease by
            2021, only a year after the assumed full implementation of
            the mandates and targets. The study also shows, contrary to
            common perceptions, that the rate of deforestation does not
            increase with the rate of biofuel expansion; instead, the
            marginal rate of deforestation and corresponding land-use
            emissions decrease even if the production of biofuels increases.
World oil price and biofuels : a
            general equilibrium analysis
The price of oil could play a
            significant role in influencing the expansion of biofuels.
            However, this issue has not been fully investigated yet in
            the literature. Using a global computable general
            equilibrium model, this study analyzes the impact of oil
            price on biofuel expansion, and subsequently, on food
            supply. The study shows that a 65 percent increase in oil
            price in 2020 from the 2009 level would increase the global
            biofuel penetration to 5.4 percent in 2020 from 2.4 percent
            in 2009. A doubling of oil price in 2020 from its baseline
            level, or a 230 percent increase from the 2009 level, would
            increase the global biofuel penetration in 2020 to 12.6
            percent. The penetration of biofuels is highly sensitive to
            the substitution possibility between biofuels and their
            fossil fuel counterparts. The study also shows that
            aggregate agricultural output drops due to an oil price
            increase, but the drop is small in major biofuel producing
            countries as the expansion of biofuels would partially
            offset the negative impacts of the oil price increase on
            agricultural outputs. An increase in oil price would reduce
            global food supply through direct impacts as well as through
            diversion of food commodities and cropland toward the
            production of biofuels.
Students today, teachers tomorrow
            identifying constraints on the provision of Education
With an estimated 115 million children
            not attending primary school in the developing world,
            increasing access to education is critical. Resource
            constraints limit the effectiveness of demand-based
            subsidies. This paper focuses on the importance of a
            supply-side factor -- the availability of low-cost teachers
            -- and the resulting ability of the market to offer
            affordable education. The authors first show that private
            schools are three times more likely to emerge in villages
            with government girls' secondary schools (GSS).
            Identification is obtained by using official school
            construction guidelines as an instrument for the presence of
            GSS. In contrast, there is little or no relationship between
            the presence of a private school and girls' primary or
            boys' primary and secondary government schools. In
            support of a supply-channel, the authors then show that, for
            villages that received a GSS, there are over twice as many
            educated women and that private school teachers' wages
            are 27 percent lower in these villages. In an environment
            with poor female education and low mobility, GSS
            substantially increase the local supply of skilled women
            lowering wages locally and allowing the market to offer
            affordable education. These findings highlight the prominent
            role of women as teachers in facilitating educational access
            and resonate with similar historical evidence from developed
            economies. The students of today are the teachers of tomorrow.
Collective action, political parties
            and pro-development public policy
Broad consensus exists that the ability
            of political actors to make credible commitments is key to
            development. An important and little-explored determinant of
            the credibility of political commitments is the existence of
            organizations that facilitate citizen collective action to
            sanction political actors who renege. This paper focuses on
            one essential organization, the political party. Three
            measures of political parties are used to assess
            cross-country differences in the degree to which politicians
            facilitate the ability of citizens to act in their
            collective interest. Each of these measures is associated
            with superior development outcomes, above and beyond the
            effects of competitive elections. These results have
            implications for understanding the extraordinary economic
            success of some East Asian countries and notable lags among
            others: East Asian non-democracies exhibit more
            institutionalized ruling parties than other non-democracies,
            while East Asian democracies exhibit equally or less
            institutionalized parties. The evidence suggests that
            greater research and policy emphasis be placed on the
            organizational characteristics of countries that allow
            citizens to hold leaders accountable.
Implications of the Doha market
            access proposals for developing countries
This paper uses detailed data on bound
            and applied tariffs to assess the consequences of the World
            Trade Organizations December 2008 Modalities for tariffs
            levied and faced by developing countries, and the welfare
            implications of these reforms. The authors find that the
            tiered formula for agriculture would halve tariffs in
            industrial countries and lower them more modestly in
            developing countries. In non-agriculture, the formulas would
            reduce the tariff peaks facing developing countries and cut
            average industrial country tariffs by more than a third. The
            authors use a political-economy framework to assess the
            implications of flexibilities for the size of the tariff
            cuts and find they are likely to substantially reduce the
            outcome. However, despite the flexibilities, there are
            likely to be worthwhile gains, with applied tariffs facing
            developing countries cut by about 20 percent in agriculture
            and 27 percent in non-agriculture, and sizeable cuts in
            tariffs facing industrial countries. The welfare impacts of
            reform are evaluated using a new approach to aggregation
            that improves on the traditional, flawed approach of
            weighted-average tariffs. This substantially increases the
            estimated benefits of an agreement along the lines of these
            modalities, with estimated global income gains of up to $160
            billion per year from market access reform.
Under what conditions does a carbon
            tax on fossil fuels stimulate biofuels
A carbon tax is an efficient economic
            instrument to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide released
            from fossil fuel burning. Its impacts on production of
            renewable energy depend on how it is designed --
            particularly in the context of the penetration of biofuels
            into the energy supply mix for road transportation. Using a
            multi-sector, multi-country computable general equilibrium
            model, this study shows first that a carbon tax with the
            entire tax revenue recycled to households through a lump-sum
            transfer does not stimulate biofuel production
            significantly, even at relatively high tax rates. This
            reflects the high cost of carbon dioxide abatement through
            biofuels substitution, relative to other energy substitution
            alternatives; in addition, the carbon tax will have negative
            economy-wide consequences that reduce total demand for all
            fuels. A combined carbon tax and biofuel subsidy policy,
            where part of the carbon tax revenue is used to finance a
            biofuel subsidy, would significantly stimulate market
            penetration of biofuels. Although the carbon tax and biofuel
            subsidy policy would cause higher loss in global economic
            output compared with the carbon tax with lump sum revenue
            redistribution, the incremental output loss is relatively small.
Development Economics and the
            International Development Association : Development
            Economics and the International Development Association
Prevailing economic ideas -- and
            fashions -- about development have influenced the
            International Development Association (IDA) since its
            creation in 1960. The creation of the organization itself is
            the result of two contemporaneous facts: an urgent need to
            channel development finance to least-developed countries and
            an increasing pressure on World Bank management to directly
            address the issue of poverty in developing countries.
            Changing views, over time, have been a rationale -- and, at
            times, a justification -- for emphasizing poverty and social
            sectors; for providing grants to particular groups of
            countries; and for strategic choices and sectoral
            priorities. IDA has been influential in development debates
            and been an advocate for specific views about development
            policy. This paper gives an overview of these views and
            documents how they have shaped the activities of the
            organization since its creation. After a brief review of
            development thinking and of the organization of research at
            the World Bank, the paper documents the shifts that have
            taken place in country allocations and in sector emphasis in
            IDA over the past 50 years and highlights the strategic
            themes that have guided its development agenda: toward
            increasing country selectivity; from projects to programs;
            from conditionality to country ownership of reforms; and
            from input-based to results-based performance.
Assessing the long-term effects of
            conditional cash transfers on human capital : evidence from Colombia
Conditional cash transfers are programs
            under which poor families get a stipend provided they keep
            their children in school and take them for health checks.
            Although there is significant evidence showing that they
            have positive impacts on school participation, little is
            known about the long-term impacts of the programs on human
            capital. This paper investigates whether cohorts of children
            from poor households that benefited up to nine years from
            Familias en Acción, a conditional cash transfer program in
            Colombia, attained more school and performed better on
            academic tests at the end of high school. Identification of
            program impacts is derived from two different strategies
            using matching techniques with household surveys, and
            regression discontinuity design using a census of the poor
            and administrative records of the program. The authors show
            that, on average, participant children are 4 to 8 percentage
            points more likely than nonparticipant children to finish
            high school, particularly girls and beneficiaries in rural
            areas. Regarding long-term impact on tests scores, the
            analysis shows that program recipients who graduate from
            high school seem to perform at the same level as equally
            poor non-recipient graduates, even after correcting for
            possible selection bias when low-performing students enter
            school in the treatment group. Although the positive impacts
            on high school graduation may improve the employment and
            earning prospects of participants, the lack of positive
            effects on test scores raises the need to further explore
            policy actions to couple the program's objective of
            increasing human capital with enhanced learning.