rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Why has energy efficiency not
            scaled-up in the industrial and commercial sectors in
            Ukraine an empirical analysis
Improvement of energy efficiency is one
            of the main options to reduce energy demand and to reduce
            greenhouse gas emissions in Ukraine. However, large-scale
            deployment of energy efficient technologies has been
            constrained by several financial, technical, information,
            behavioral, and institutional barriers. This study assesses
            these barriers through a survey of 500 industrial and
            commercial firms throughout Ukraine. The results from the
            survey were used in a cumulative multi-logit model to
            understand the importance of the barriers. The analysis
            shows that financial barriers caused by high upfront costs
            of energy efficient technologies, higher costs of finance,
            and higher opportunity costs of energy efficiency investment
            are key barriers to the adoption of energy efficiency
            measures in Ukraine. Institutional barriers particularly
            lack government policies, which also contributes to the slow
            adoption of energy efficient technologies in the country.
            The results suggest targeted policy and credit enhancements
            could help trigger adoption of energy efficient measures.
            The empirical analysis shows strong inter-linkages among the
            barriers and finds heterogeneity between industrial and
            commercial sectors on the realization of the barriers.
50 years of urbanization in Africa :
            examining the role of climate change
This paper documents a significant
            impact of climate variation on urbanization in Sub-Saharan
            Africa, primarily in more arid countries. By lowering farm
            incomes, reduced moisture availability encourages migration
            to nearby cities, while wetter conditions slow migration.
            The paper also provides evidence for rural-urban income
            links. In countries with a larger industrial base, reduced
            moisture shrinks the agricultural sector and raises total
            incomes in nearby cities. However, if local cities are
            entirely dependent on servicing agriculture so their
            fortunes move with those of agriculture, reduced moisture
            tends to reduce local urban incomes. Finally, the paper
            shows that climate induces employment changes within the
            rural sector itself. Drier conditions induce a shift out of
            farm activities, especially for women, into non-farm
            activities, and especially out of the workforce. Overall,
            these findings imply a strong link between climate and
            urbanization in Africa.
Institutional investors and
            long-term investment : evidence from Chile
Developing countries are trying to
            develop long-term financial markets and institutional
            investors are expected to play a key role. This paper uses
            unique evidence on the universe of institutional investors
            from the leading case of Chile to study to what extent
            mutual funds, pension funds, and insurance companies hold
            and bid for long-term instruments, and which factors affect
            their choices. The paper uses monthly asset-level portfolios
            to show that, despite the expectations, mutual and pension
            funds invest mostly in short-term assets relative to
            insurance companies. The significant difference across
            maturity structures is not driven by the supply side of debt
            or tactical behavior. Instead, it seems to be explained by
            manager incentives (related to short-run monitoring and the
            liability structure) that, combined with risk factors, tilt
            portfolios toward short-term instruments, even when
            long-term investing yields higher returns. Thus, the
            expansion of large institutional investors does not
            necessarily imply longer-term markets.
Poverty reduction and shared
            prosperity in Tajikistan : a diagnostic
Tajikistan was one of the fastest
            growing countries in the Europe and Central Asia region
            during the last decade. The economic growth was widely
            shared by the population and as a result poverty (measured
            by the national poverty line) declined from 73 percent in
            2003 to 47 percent in 2009 accompanied by falling
            inequality. Consumption growth of the bottom 40 percent of
            the population -- a measure of shared prosperity proposed by
            the World Bank- was positive, pointing out that the growth
            was shared among the less well off. This work presents a
            diagnostic of shared prosperity and poverty reduction in
            Tajikistan during 2003-2009. The paper also focuses on
            quantifying the main drivers of poverty reduction, shared
            prosperity, and intra-generational mobility (class
            transitions). Some of the mechanisms of poverty reduction
            are explored in detail. Finally, main impediments to
            inter-generational mobility are discussed.
World Bank lending and the quality
            of economic policy
This study investigates the impact of
            World Bank development policy lending on the quality of
            economic policy. It finds that the quality of policy
            increases, but at a diminishing rate, with the cumulative
            number of policy loans. Similar results hold for the
            cumulative number of conditions attached to policy loans,
            although quadratic specifications indicate that additional
            conditions may even reduce the quality of policy beyond some
            point. The paper measures the quality of economic policy
            using the World Bank's Country Policy and Institutional
            Assessments of macro, debt, fiscal and structural policies,
            and considers only policy loans targeted at improvements in
            those areas. Previous studies finding weaker effects of
            policy lending on macro stability have failed to distinguish
            loans primarily intended to improve economic policy from
            other loans targeted at improvements in sector policies or
            in public management. The paper also shows that investing in
            economic policy does not "crowd out" policy
            improvements in other areas such as public sector governance
            or human development. The results are robust to using
            alternative indicators of policy quality, and correcting for
            endogeneity with system generalized methods of moments and
            cross-sectional two-stage least squares. The more positive
            results in the study relative to some previous studies based
            on earlier loans are consistent with claims by the World
            Bank that it has learned from its mistakes with traditional
            adjustment lending.
Economic development and female
            labor participation in the Middle East and North Africa : a
            test of the u-shape hypothesis
The Middle East and North Africa region
            is known for having low female labor market participation
            rates as compared with its level of economic development. A
            possible explanation is that these countries find themselves
            at the turning point of the U-shape hypothesis when
            countries transition from declining to rising female
            participation rates. This paper tests the U-shape hypothesis
            in countries in the Middle East and North Africa. It finds
            that the region has outperformed other world regions in
            terms of the main drivers of the U-shape hypothesis,
            including gross domestic product per capita, economic
            transformation away from the agricultural sector, female
            education, and fertility rates. These facts are consistent
            with nonparametric evidence that shows countries in the
            region are distributed over a U-shaped curve. However,
            parametric tests of the hypothesis point in a different
            direction. The region shows an inverted U-shape overall and
            great heterogeneity across countries and age cohorts that
            defies any law on the relation between gross domestic
            product and female participation rate. The explanation
            behind these findings may be economic and cultural. Jobless
            growth and the lack of growth in employment sectors such as
            manufacturing and services, which proved critical for female
            employment in other countries, weaken labor demand and
            strengthen the role of institutions that may discourage
            female participation, such as marriage, legislation, and
            gender norms.
Who will feed China in the 21st
            century income growth and food demand and supply in China
This paper uses resource-based cereal
            equivalent measures to explore the evolution of China's
            demand and supply for food. Although demand for food
            calories is probably close to its peak level in China, the
            ongoing dietary shift to animal-based foods, induced by
            income growth, is likely to impose considerable pressure on
            agricultural resources. Estimating the relationship between
            income growth and food demand with data from a wide range of
            countries, China's demand growth appears to have been
            broadly similar to the global trend. On the supply side,
            output of food depends strongly on the productivity growth
            associated with income growth and on the country's
            agricultural land endowment, with China appearing to be an
            out-performer. The analyses of income-consumption-production
            dynamics suggest that China's current income level
            falls in the range where consumption growth outstrips
            production growth, but that the gap is likely to begin to
            decline as China's population growth and dietary
            transition slow down. Continued agricultural productivity
            growth through further investment in research and
            development, and expansion in farm size and increased
            mechanization, as well as sustainable management of
            agricultural resources, are vital for ensuring that it is
            primarily China that will feed China in the 21st century.
Assessing energy price induced
            improvements in efficiency of capital in OECD manufacturing industries
To assess how capital stocks adapt to
            energy price changes, it is necessary to account for the
            impacts on different vintages of capital and to account
            separately for price-induced and autonomous improvements in
            the energy efficiency of capital stock. The results of
            econometric analysis for five manufacturing industries in 19
            OECD countries between 1990 and 2005 indicate that higher
            energy prices resulted in smaller energy use due to both
            improved energy efficiency of capital stock and reduced
            demand for the energy input. The investment response to
            energy prices varied considerably across manufacturing
            industries, being more significant in energy-intensive
            sectors. The results of policy simulations indicate that a
            carbon tax can deliver significant reductions in energy
            consumption in the medium run with modest declines in
            energy-using capital stock.
Confronting the
            food-energy-environment trilemma : global land use in the
            long run
Economic, agronomic, and biophysical
            drivers affect global land use, so all three influences need
            to be considered in evaluating economically optimal
            allocations of the world's land resources. A dynamic,
            forward-looking optimization framework applied over the
            course of the coming century shows that although some
            deforestation is optimal in the near term, in the absence of
            climate change regulation, the desirability of further
            deforestation is eliminated by mid-century. Although adverse
            productivity shocks from climate change have a modest effect
            on global land use, such shocks combined with rapid growth
            in energy prices lead to significant deforestation and
            higher greenhouse gas emissions than in the baseline.
            Imposition of a global greenhouse gas emissions constraint
            further heightens the competition for land, as fertilizer
            use declines and land-based mitigation strategies expand.
            However, anticipation of the constraint largely dilutes its
            environmental effectiveness, as deforestation accelerates
            prior to imposition of the target.
Does involvement of local NGOs
            enhance public service delivery cautionary evidence from a
            Malaria-prevention evaluation in India
Using data from an experimental
            supportive intervention to India's malaria control
            program, this paper studies the impact of leveraging local
            non-state capacity to promote mosquito net usage and
            recommended fever care-seeking patterns. The supportive
            activities were conducted simultaneously by three
            nongovernmental organizations in two endemic districts in
            the state of Orissa. The study finds that program impact
            varied significantly by location. Examining three potential
            sources of this variation (differential population
            characteristics, differential health worker characteristics,
            and differential implementer characteristics), the analysis
            provides evidence that both population and nongovernmental
            organization characteristics significantly affected the
            success of the program. The paper discusses these findings
            as they relate to the external validity of development
            policy evaluations and, specifically, for the ability of the
            health system to benefit from limited non-state capacity in
            under-resourced areas.
Radio's impact on preferences
            for patronage benefits
Citizens in developing countries support
            politicians who provide patronage or clientelist benefits,
            such as government jobs and gifts at the time of elections.
            Can access to mass media that broadcasts public interest
            messages shift citizens' preferences for such benefits?
            This paper examines the impact of community radio on
            responses to novel survey vignettes that make an explicit
            trade-off between political promises of jobs for a few
            versus public services for all. The impact of community
            radio is identified through a natural experiment in the
            media market in northern Benin, which yields exogenous
            variation in access across villages. Respondents in villages
            with greater radio access are less likely to express support
            for patronage jobs that come at the expense of public health
            or education. Gift-giving is not necessarily traded off
            against public services; correspondingly, radio access does
            not reduce preferences for candidates who give gifts. The
            pattern of results is consistent with a particular mechanism
            for radio's impact: increasing citizens' demand
            for broadly delivered health and education and thereby
            shaping their preferences for clientelist candidates.
Deposit insurance database
This paper provides a comprehensive,
            global database of deposit insurance arrangements as of
            2013. The authors extend their earlier dataset by including
            recent adopters of deposit insurance and information on the
            use of government guarantees on banks' assets and
            liabilities, including during the recent global financial
            crisis. They also create a Safety Net Index capturing the
            generosity of the deposit insurance scheme and government
            guarantees on banks' balance sheets. The data show that
            deposit insurance has become more widespread and more
            extensive in coverage since the global financial crisis,
            which also triggered a temporary increase in the government
            protection of non-deposit liabilities and bank assets. In
            most cases, these guarantees have since been formally
            removed but coverage of deposit insurance remains above
            pre-crisis levels, raising concerns about implicit coverage
            and moral hazard going forward.
Asymmetric punishment as an
            instrument of corruption control
The control of bribery is a policy
            objective in many developing countries. It has been argued
            that asymmetric punishments could reduce bribery by
            incentivizing whistle-blowing. This paper investigates the
            role played by asymmetric punishment in a setting where
            bribe size is determined by Nash bargaining, detection is
            costly, and detection rates are set endogenously. First,
            when detection rates are fixed, the symmetry properties of
            punishment are irrelevant to bribery. Bribery disappears if
            expected penalties are sufficiently high; otherwise, bribe
            sizes rise as expected penalties rise. Second, when
            detection rates are determined by the bribe-giver, a switch
            from symmetric to asymmetric punishment either eliminates
            bribery or allows it to persist with larger bribe sizes.
            Furthermore, when bribery persists, multiple bribe sizes
            could survive in equilibrium. The paper derives parameter
            values under which each of these outcomes occurs and
            discusses how these could be interpreted in the context of
            existing institutions.
Benchmarking public policy :
            methodological insights from measurement of school based management
This working paper presents a
            benchmarking analysis of School Based Management (SBM) using
            empirical data from the Philippines. School based management
            is widely used as a policy tool in many countries that seek
            to improve the quality of service delivery through
            decentralization. School based management typically takes
            many years to have an impact on educational outcomes, but
            policy makers need to know sooner how well the policy is
            being implemented. The paper extends the well-known Rasch
            methodology from the literature on student achievement,
            including the Programme for International Student
            Assessment, to the measurement of the implementation of
            school based management by computing a Rasch measure of the
            implementation of school based management. To test whether
            the resulting benchmarked measure is plausible and has
            practical policy value, the measure is tested for
            correlations with standardized measures of personality and
            political skills of school principals, developed in the
            psychology and political science literatures. The paper will
            be useful for readers interested in studying school based
            management as well as those interested more generally in the
            methodology of benchmarking implementation of public policy
            where the ultimate results are subject to long
            implementation periods. The methodology presented in this
            paper can be applied to enhance the rigor of the ongoing
            Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER)
            exercise to benchmark educational policies in various
            domains. That exercise is set to become one of the flagship
            policy analytical tools being developed by the World Bank
            and partner agencies.
Income inequality and violent crime
            : evidence from Mexico's drug war
The relationship between income
            inequality and crime has attracted the interest of many
            researchers, but little convincing evidence exists on the
            causal effect of inequality on crime in developing
            countries. This paper estimates this effect in a unique
            context: Mexico's Drug War. The analysis takes
            advantage of a unique data set containing inequality and
            crime statistics for more than 2,000 Mexican municipalities
            covering a period of 20 years. Using an instrumental
            variable for inequality that tackles problems of reverse
            causality and omitted variable bias, this paper finds that
            an increment of one point in the Gini coefficient translates
            into an increase of more than 10 drug-related homicides per
            100,000 inhabitants between 2006 and 2010. There are no
            significant effects before 2005. The fact that the effect
            was found during Mexico's Drug War and not before is
            likely because the cost of crime decreased with the
            proliferation of gangs (facilitating access to knowledge and
            logistics, lowering the marginal cost of criminal behavior),
            which, combined with rising inequality, increased the
            expected net benefit from criminal acts after 2005.
Open skies over the Middle East
The dynamism of air traffic markets in
            the Middle East obscures the persistence of restrictions on
            international competition. But how important are such
            restrictions for passenger traffic? This paper uses detailed
            data on worldwide passenger aviation to estimate the effect
            of air transport policy on international air traffic. The
            policy variable is a quantitative measure of the commitments
            under international agreements. The paper analyzes, for the
            first time, not only bilateral agreements, but also
            plurilateral agreements such as the one between Arab states.
            The analysis finds that more liberal policy is associated
            with greater passenger traffic between countries. Higher
            traffic levels appear to be driven primarily by larger
            numbers of city pairs being served, rather than by more
            passengers traveling along given routes. To demonstrate the
            quantitative implication of the estimates, two
            liberalization scenarios in the Middle East are evaluated.
            Deepening the plurilateral agreement among Arab states would
            lead to a 30 percent increase in intraregional passenger
            traffic. Widening the agreement to include Turkey would
            generate significantly larger gains because current policy
            vis-à-vis Turkey is much more restrictive.