rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Local financial development and growth
Using a unique sample of net domestic
            product data for districts in India, I investigate the
            connection between banking sector development, human
            capital, and economic growth at the sub-national level.
            Using disaggregate data avoids many of the omitted variable
            problems that plague cross-country studies of the
            finance-growth connection and facilitates an instrumentation
            strategy. The findings show that the growth of many
            districts in India is financially constrained due to lack of
            banking sector development, and that the relationship
            between finance and growth may be non-linear. For the
            districts in the sample, moving from the 75th percentile of
            credit/net domestic product to the 25th percentile implies
            an average loss of 4 percent in growth over the 1990s. This
            indicates that the gains from increased banking sector
            outreach may be large. The analysis shows that human capital
            deepening can reduce the effect of the financial constraint
            and help decouple growth from financial development. In a
            district at the 25th literacy percentile, the implied growth
            loss due to a constrained banking sector is twice as large
            as in a district at the 75th literacy percentile. Thus,
            higher levels of human capital may activate alternative
            growth and production channels that are less finance intensive.
Determinants of international
            emergency aid - humanitarian need only
The authors use an original data set
            covering more than 400 recent natural disasters to analyze
            the determinants of international emergency aid. Although
            humanitarian need is a major determinant of emergency relief
            payments, the results imply that political and strategic
            factors play a crucial role in the emergency aid allocation.
            On average, donor governments favor smaller, geographically
            closer, and oil exporting countries, and display significant
            biases in favor of politically less aligned countries as
            well as toward their former colonies. The authors also test
            and reject the independence of donors' aid decisions,
            finding strong evidence for bandwagon effects in
            humanitarian assistance.
The business of product innovation :
            international empirical evidence
It is so widely recognized that
            innovation is a key driver of economic growth that it is
            cliché to say so. This article studies product innovation by
            firms with data from 68 countries, covering more than 25,000
            firms in eight manufacturing sectors. The author assesses
            the predictions of inter-disciplinary research on innovation
            by firms. The econometric evidence suggests that
            globalization and local knowledge increase the likelihood
            that firms will introduce new products. By contrast,
            domestic regulatory impediments to competition are not
            robustly correlated with product innovation.
What drives firm productivity growth ?
This paper presents new evidence on the
            causal links between changes in the business environment and
            firm productivity growth. It contributes to the literature
            in three important aspects. First, it constructs a unique
            database merging information from two large firm-level
            databases. The samples of both databases are merged on four
            criteria-country, sub-national location, firm size, and
            year-producing a panel of 22,004 firms in eight economies of
            Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union: Bulgaria,
            Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia,, Poland, Romania, Serbia,
            and Ukraine. Second, the paper addresses shortcomings of
            earlier studies, namely reverse causation,
            multicollinearity, and unreliable productivity estimates.
            Firm productivity growth is estimated drawing on corporate
            financial data from manufacturing firms included in the
            AMADEUS database. Changes in the business environment are
            estimated from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys conducted
            in 2002 and 2005. Multicollinearity problems in the full
            model regression are mitigated by constructing a set of six
            aggregate indicators of the business environment (using
            principal component analysis). The paper finds that, over
            the period 2001 to 2004, an increase of one standard
            deviation in infrastructure quality, financial development,
            governance, labor market flexibility, labor quality, and
            market competition raises the total factor productivity of
            the average firm by 9.8, 7.8, 3.2, 3.4, 5.8, and 3 percent,
            respectively. Lastly, the paper decomposes firm productivity
            growth and ranks the relative impact of changes in these six
            aspects of the business environment by country, by firm
            size, and by industry.
Connecting lagging and leading
            regions : the role of labor mobility
How can policies improve the welfare of
            people in economically lagging regions of countries? Should
            policies help jobs follow people? Or should they enable
            people to follow jobs? In most countries, market forces have
            encouraged the geographic concentration of people and
            economic activities - policies that try to offset these
            forces to encourage balanced economic growth have largely
            been unsuccessful. However, policies that help people get
            closer to economic density have improved individual welfare.
            In this paper, the authors examine the migration decisions
            of working-age Brazilians and find that the pull of higher
            wages in leading regions has a strong influence on the
            decision to migrate. However, many people are also
            "pushed" to migrate, starved of access to basic
            public services such as clean water and sanitation in their
            hometowns. Although migration is welfare-improving for these
            individuals, the economy may end up worse off as these
            migrants are more likely to add to congestion costs in
            cities than to contribute to agglomeration benefits.
            Encouraging human capital formation can stimulate labor
            mobility for economic gain; and improving access to and
            quality of basic services in lagging regions will directly
            improve welfare as well as reduce the type of migration
            motivated by the search for life-supporting basic services.
The impact of EU accession on human
            capital formation : can migration fuel a brain gain
Can a brain drain be good for
            development? Many studies have established the theoretical
            possibility of such a brain gain. Yet it is only recently
            that the relaxation of data constraints has allowed for
            sound empirical assessments. In utilizing the dramatic
            policy change that accompanied European Union accession as a
            natural experiment, this paper is able to assuage fears of
            reverse causality between migration and human capital
            formation. The results highlight a significant impact of
            European Union accession on human capital formation
            indicating that the prospect of migration can indeed fuel
            skill formation even in the context of middle-income
            economies. And, if accompanied by policies to promote return
            migration, as well as a functioning credit market to enable
            private investment, international labor mobility could
            represent a powerful tool for growth.
Valuing mortality and morbidity in
            the context of disaster risks
Benefit-cost analyses of disaster risk
            reduction (DRR) projects are an important tool for
            evaluating the efficiency of such projects, and an important
            input into decision making.  These analyses, however, often
            fail to monetize the benefits of reduced death and injury.
            The authors review the literature on valuing reduced death
            and injury, and suggest methods for calculating
            order-of-magnitude estimates of these benefits.  Because few
            empirical estimates of the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL)
            are available for developing countries, methods for
            transferring estimates from high income to middle and low
            income countries are reviewed. The authors suggest using the
            range of values implied by an income elasticity of 1.0 and
            an elasticity of 1.5. With regard to injury valuation they
            discuss arguments for and against monetizing Quality
            Adjusted Life Years, and provide shortcuts to valuing
            injuries that may be used to assess their importance in DRR
            benefit-cost analyses.
Why do people die in earthquakes the
            costs, benefits and institutions of disaster risk reduction
            in developing countries
Every year, around 60,000 people die
            worldwide in natural disasters. The majority of the deaths
            are caused by building collapse in earthquakes, and the
            great majority occurs in the developing world. This is
            despite the fact that engineering solutions exist that can
            almost completely eliminate the risk of such deaths. Why is
            this? The engineering solutions are both expensive and
            technically demanding, so that the benefit-cost ratio of
            such solutions is often unfavorable compared with other
            interventions designed to save lives in developing
            countries. Nonetheless, a range of public disaster
            risk-reduction interventions (including construction
            activities) are highly cost effective. The fact that such
            interventions often remain unimplemented or ineffectively
            executed points to a role for issues of political economy.
            Building regulations in developing countries appear to have
            limited impact in many cases, perhaps because of limited
            capacity and the impact of corruption. Public construction
            is often of low quality - perhaps for similar reasons. This
            suggests approaches that emphasize simple and limited
            disaster risk regulation covering only the most at-risk
            structures and that (preferably) can be monitored by
            non-experts. It also suggests a range of transparency and
            oversight mechanisms for public construction projects.
No more cutting class reducing
            teacher absence and providing incentives for performance
Expanding and improving basic education
            in developing countries requires, at a minimum, teachers who
            are present in the classroom and motivated to teach, but
            this essential input is often missing.  This paper describes
            the findings of a series of recent World Bank and other
            studies on teacher absence and incentives for performance.
            Surprise school visits reveal that teachers are absent at
            high rates in countries such as India, Indonesia, Uganda,
            Ecuador, and Zambia, reducing the quality of schooling for
            children, especially in rural, remote, and poor areas.  More
            broadly, poor teacher management and low levels of teacher
            accountability afflict many developing-country education
            systems.  The paper presents evidence on these shortcomings,
            but also on the types of incentives, management, and support
            structures that can improve motivation and performance and
            reduce avoidable absenteeism.  It concludes with policy
            options for developing countries to explore as they work to
            meet Education for All goals and improve quality.
Assessing the impact of political
            economy factors on rules of origin under NAFTA
Rules of origin are legitimate policy
            instruments to prevent trade deflection in a preferential
            trade agreement short of a customs union. Trade deflection
            takes place when a product imported into the preferential
            trade agreement through the member with the lowest external
            tariff is transhipped to a higher-tariff member, while
            yielding a benefit for the re-exporter. Yet, when captured
            by special interest groups, rules of origin can restrict
            trade beyond what is needed to prevent trade deflection. By
            how much do political economy factors account for the
            stringency of rules of origin?  This study quantifies the
            impact of both determinants - those considered
            "justifiable" because they prevent trade
            deflection and those deemed to arise from "political
            economy" forces - on the restrictiveness of rules of
            origin under the North American Free Trade Agreement,
            approximated by a restrictiveness index. The main finding is
            that political economy forces, especially from the United
            States, raised significantly the restrictiveness of the
            rules of origin. Indeed, in industries where
            political-economy forces were strong prior to the North
            American Free Trade Agreement, as when the U.S. Most Favored
            Nation tariff was high or the revealed comparative advantage
            of Mexico (the United States) was strong (weak), more
            stringent rules of origin were introduced. Thus, stricter
            rules of origin are associated with higher production costs
            reducing the potential benefits of enhanced market access
            that is initially pursued by this type of agreement.
Global income distribution and
            poverty in the absence of agricultural distortions
This paper assesses the potential
            impacts of the removal of agriculture trade distortions
            using a newly developed dataset and methodological approach
            for evaluating the global poverty and inequality effects of
            policy reforms. It finds that liberalization of agriculture
            and food could increase global extreme poverty (US$1 a day)
            by 0.2 percent and lower moderate poverty (US$2 a day) by
            0.3 percent. Beneath these small aggregate changes, most
            countries witness a substantial reduction in poverty while
            South Asia-where half of the world's poor
            reside-experiences an increase in extreme poverty incidence
            due to high rates of protection afforded to
            unskilled-intensive agricultural sectors. The distributional
            changes are likely to be mild, but exhibit a strong regional
            pattern. Inequality is likely to fall in regions such as
            Latin America, which are characterized by high initial
            inequality, and rise in regions like South Asia,
            characterized by low initial inequality.
The demographic and socio-economic
            distribution of excess mortality during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda
There is an extensive literature on
            violent conflicts such as the 1994 Rwandan genocide, but few
            papers examine the profiles of victims and perpetrators, or
            more broadly the micro-level dynamics of widespread
            violence. This paper studies the demographic consequences of
            the Rwandan genocide and how the excess mortality due to the
            conflict was distributed in the population. Data collected
            by the 2000 Demographic and Health Survey indicate that
            although there were more deaths across the entire
            population, adult males were the most likely to die. Using
            the characteristics of the survey respondent as a proxy for
            the socio-economic status of the family dead, the results
            also show that individuals with an urban or more educated
            background were more likely to die. Over and above the human
            tragedies, a long-term cost of the genocide is the
            country's loss of productive skills.
Transforming natural resource wealth
            into sustained growth and poverty reduction : a conceptual
            framework for Sub-Saharan African oil exporting countries
Oil and mineral revenues raise national
            savings and hence facilitate investment, capital
            accumulation, and sustained growth; thus, there are benefits
            of owning large natural resources. There can be a
            significant spillover effect from the oil sector to the
            non-oil sector particularly if governments are committed to
            bridge the infrastructure gap and promote the non-oil
            economy and foremost the non-oil tradable sector.
            Consequently, the capacity for coordinated policy
            formulation and execution is fundamental as well as sound
            windfall management mechanisms and institutions. This
            conceptual framework uses the case of Indonesia and the
            example of Norway to argue that the resource paradox is
            avoidable. Abundance should not be a curse, but rather a
            blessing for Sub-Saharan Africa's oil and mineral
            exporting countries. The country context and political
            economy matter a great deal but should not be the main
            driving forces behind windfall management, to avoid
            excessive rent-seeking activities, inefficiency, and
            wasteful spending. The EITI++ implementation can contribute
            to make a difference, mostly through capacity building,
            implementation assistance, and coordination support.
Auctions with endogenous
            participation and quality thresholds : evidence from ODA
            infrastructure procurement
Infrastructure projects are often
            technically complicated and highly customized. Therefore,
            procurement competition tends to be limited. Competition is
            the single most important factor toward auction efficiency
            and anti-corruption. However, the degree of competition
            realized is closely related to bidders' entry decision
            and the auctioneer's decision on how to assess
            technical attributes in the bid evaluation process. This
            paper estimates the interactive effects among quality,
            entry, and competition. With data on procurement auctions
            for electricity projects in developing countries, it is
            found that large electricity works are by nature costly and
            can attract only a few participants. The limited competition
            would raise government procurement costs. In addition, high
            technical requirements are likely to be imposed for these
            large-scale projects, which will in turn add extra costs for
            the better quality of works and further limit bidder
            participation. The evidence suggests that quality is of
            particular importance in large infrastructure projects and
            auctioneers cannot easily substitute price for quality.
(UN)Bundling infrastructure
            procurement : evidence from water supply and sewage projects
Competition in public procurement
            auctions in the water supply and sanitation sector is
            largely limited. This is partly because of high technical
            complexity and partly because of auction design flaws. The
            division of lot contracts is an important policy choice for
            auctioneers to achieve efficiency. In general, there is a
            tradeoff between competition in auctions and size of
            contracts. Larger works could benefit from economies of
            scale and scope, but large contracts might undermine
            competition. Using data on public procurement auctions for
            water and sewage projects in developing countries, this
            paper shows that bidder entry is crucially endogenous,
            especially because it is determined by the auctioneer's
            bundling and unbundling strategy. If water treatment plant
            and distribution network works are bundled in a single lot
            package, competition would be significantly reduced, and
            this adverse entry effect would in turn raise the public
            procurement costs of infrastructure. There is no evidence of
            positive scope economies in the bidder cost structure. It is
            important to account for the underlying cost structure for
            designing efficient auction mechanisms.
Bidders' entry and
            auctioneer's rejection : applying a double selection
            model to road procurement auctions
Limited competition has been a serious
            concern in infrastructure procurement. Importantly, however,
            there are normally a number of potential bidders initially
            showing interest in proposed projects. This paper focuses on
            tackling the question why these initially interested bidders
            fade out. An empirical problem is that no bids of fading-out
            firms are observable. They could decide not to enter the
            process at the beginning of the tendering or may be
            technically disqualified at any point in the selection
            process. This paper applies the double selection model to
            procurement data from road development projects in
            developing countries and examines why competition ends up
            restricted. It shows that bidders are self-selective and
            auctioneers also tend to limit participation depending on
            the size of contracts. Therefore, limited competition would
            likely lead to high infrastructure procurement costs.
Market integration and structural
            transformation in a poor rural economy
By developing a simple theoretical model
            of the impact of market integration on sectoral output and
            employment in a poor rural setting, this paper demonstrates
            that trade can induce asymmetric growth. Under certain,
            plausible, assumptions, the non-farm sector will grow much
            faster than the agricultural sector when markets become
            integrated. Promoting market integration may thus be an
            effective way of encouraging diversification beyond
            agriculture and catalysing structural change in poor rural economies.