rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Did Latvia's public works
            program mitigate the impact of the 2008-2010 crisis
To mitigate the impact of the 2008-2010
            global financial crisis on vulnerable households, the
            Government of Latvia established Workplaces with Stipends,
            an emergency public works program that targeted registered
            unemployed people who were not receiving unemployment
            benefits. This paper evaluates the targeting performance and
            welfare impacts of the program. It exploits the
            over-subscription of Workplaces with Stipends to define a
            control group. The paper finds that the program was
            successful at targeting poor and vulnerable people, and that
            leakage to non-poor households was small. Using propensity
            score matching, the paper finds that the program's
            stipend mitigated the impact of job loss and, in the short
            term, raised participating household incomes by 37 percent
            relative to similar households not benefiting from the
            program. The paper also finds that the foregone income for
            this program was less than foregone incomes estimated in
            other countries. This suggests a dearth of income-generating
            opportunities in Latvia; thus the program provided temporary
            employment opportunities and helped the unemployed mitigate
            the impact of the crisis. However, relative to the depth of
            the crisis in Latvia, the Workplaces with Stipends program
            scale was small, which meant long waiting periods for
            program applicants.
Business training and female
            enterprise start-up, growth, and dynamics : experimental
            evidence from Sri Lanka
The authors conduct a randomized
            experiment among women in urban Sri Lanka to measure the
            impact of the most commonly used business training course in
            developing countries, the Start-and-Improve Your Business
            program. They work with two representative groups of women:
            a random sample of women operating subsistence enterprises
            and a random sample of women who are out of the labor force
            but interested in starting a business. They track the
            impacts of two treatments -- training only and training plus
            a cash grant -- over two years with four follow-up surveys
            and find that the short and medium-term impacts differ. For
            women already in business, training alone leads to some
            changes in business practices but has no impact on business
            profits, sales or capital stock. In contrast, the
            combination of training and a grant leads to large and
            significant improvements in business profitability in the
            first eight months, but this impact dissipates in the second
            year. For women interested in starting enterprises, business
            training speeds up entry but leads to no increase in net
            business ownership by the final survey round. Both
            profitability and business practices of the new entrants are
            increased by training, suggesting training may be more
            effective for new owners than for existing businesses. The
            study also finds that the two treatments have selection
            effects, leading to entrants being less analytically skilled
            and poorer.
Incentivizing calculated risk-taking
            :evidence from an experiment with commercial bank loan officers
This paper uses a series of experiments
            with commercial bank loan officers to test the effect of
            performance incentives on risk-assessment and lending
            decisions. The paper first shows that, while high-powered
            incentives lead to greater screening effort and more
            profitable lending, their power is muted by both deferred
            compensation and the limited liability typically enjoyed by
            loan officers. Second, the paper presents direct evidence
            that incentive contracts distort judgment and beliefs, even
            among trained professionals with many years of experience.
            Loans evaluated under more permissive incentive schemes are
            rated significantly less risky than the same loans evaluated
            under pay-for-performance.
Reforming subsidies : a tool-kit for
            policy simulations
The paper provides basic guidelines and
            tools for simulating subsidy reforms with Stata using a
            single cross-section survey. Simulations are discussed under
            a partial equilibrium and medium-term framework using a
            marginal approach. The paper distinguishes between single
            priced products, such as fuel or bread, and multiple priced
            products, such as household utilities. Part I provides basic
            instructions for carrying out subsidy analyses. Part II
            outlines economic theory and formulae for the two types of
            products considered. Part III illustrates the use of the
            Stata codes, which are downloadable from the Internet.
Women's access to labor market
            opportunities, control of household resources, and domestic violence
While there are many positive societal
            implications of increased female labor force opportunities,
            some theoretical models and empirical evidence suggest that
            working can increase a woman's risk of suffering
            domestic violence. Using a dataset collected in peri-urban
            Dhaka, this analysis documents a positive correlation
            between work and domestic violence. This correlation is only
            present among women with less education or who were younger
            at first marriage. These results are consistent with a
            theoretical model in which a woman with low bargaining power
            can face increased risk of domestic violence upon entering
            the labor force as a husband seeks to counteract her
            increased bargaining power. By contrast, husbands of women
            who have higher baseline bargaining power cannot resort to
            domestic violence since their wives have the ability to
            leave violent marriages. These findings are inconsistent
            with the models of assortative matching in the marriage
            market, expressive violence, work in response to economic
            shocks, or underreporting of domestic violence. The results
            on age at marriage are also inconsistent with the
            implications of a reverse causality model in which women
            enter the labor force to escape violent situations at home,
            although the results on education are consistent with that story.
Working with the grain for reforming
            the public service : a live example from Sierra Leone
Development practitioners still lack a
            critical mass of empirical evidence which can help identify
            the set of interventions that are more likely to work, and
            inform the design and implementation of feasible reforms.
            This paper contributes to fill this gap by looking at the
            case of the 'Sierra Leone Pay and Performance
            Project', a World Bank-supported initiative to reform
            the civil service. It analyzes the functional problems
            characterizing the civil service and discusses what factors
            account for the observed dysfunctions. The central argument
            is that the current dysfunctions might be difficult to
            reverse as they define a sub-optimal equilibrium which
            serves political purposes (dysfunctions by design). However,
            politics is not all that matters. This equilibrium is
            further reinforced by systemic dysfunctions that may not be
            the consequence of any strategic design or the outcome of
            elite preferences (dysfunctions by default). This is where
            there is scope for change, even in the short run. The
            authors conclude that the chances of successful civil
            service reforms are likely to be maximized if reform
            initiatives support modest and incremental changes that
            work with the grain of existing incentives and are
            consistent with government preferences.  The Sierra Leone
            Pay and Performance Project aims to do so by adopting a
            limited and targeted focus on pay reform, performance
            management and recruitment and staffing. In addition, the
            use of the results-based lending instrument is expected to
            help mitigate the current dysfunctions by aligning the
            incentives of the various players and, in this way, create
            the conditions for greater coordination across government
            agencies. Although the suggested approach is not without
            risks, recent dynamics suggest that the chances of success
            are greater today than in the past.
Accounting for gender production
            from a growth accounting framework in Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper draws on an expanded growth
            accounting framework to estimate the relative contribution
            of women to growth in Sub-Saharan Africa. Empirical results
            show a consistently positive contribution of women to growth
            in gross domestic product in the region, both during
            economic downturns and growth spurts. This is despite the
            absence of any valuation of home-produced goods and informal
            sector production, which accounts for the bulk of womens
            production, in national product and income accounts.
            Women's positive contribution is largely attributed to
            their increased rates of labor force participation in wage
            employment and the reduction in the gender gap in education
            in recent years.
How inertia and limited potentials
            affect the timing of sectoral abatements in optimal climate policy
This paper investigates the optimal
            timing of greenhouse gas abatement efforts in a
            multi-sectoral model with economic inertia, each sector
            having a limited abatement potential. It defines economic
            inertia as the conjunction of technical inertia -- a social
            planner chooses investment on persistent abating activities,
            as opposed to choosing abatement at each time period
            independently -- and increasing marginal investment costs in
            abating activities. It shows that in the presence of
            economic inertia, optimal abatement efforts (in dollars per
            ton) are bell-shaped and trigger a transition toward a
            low-carbon economy. The authors prove that optimal marginal
            abatement costs should differ across sectors: they depend on
            the global carbon price, but also on sector-specific shadow
            costs of the sectoral abatement potential. The paper
            discusses the impact of the convexity of abatement
            investment costs: more rigid sectors are represented with
            more convex cost functions and should invest more in early
            abatement. The conclusion is that overlapping mitigation
            policies should not be discarded based on the argument that
            they set different marginal costs (`"different carbon
            prices"') in different sectors.
Unlocking Bangladesh-India trade :
            emerging potential and the way forward
The primary objective of this study is
            to analyze the impact on Bangladesh of increased market
            access in India, both within a static production structure
            and also identifying dynamic gains. The study shows that
            Bangladesh and India would both gain by opening up their
            markets to each other. Indian investments in Bangladesh will
            be very important for the latter to ramp up its exports,
            including products that would broaden trade complementarity
            and enhance intra-industry trade, and improve its trade
            standards and trade-handling capacity. A bilateral Free
            Trade Agreement would lift Bangladesh's exports to
            India by 182 percent, and nearly 300 percent if transaction
            costs were also reduced through improved connectivity. These
            numbers, based on existing trade patterns, represent a lower
            bound of the potential increase in Bangladesh's exports
            arising from a Free Trade Agreement. A Free Trade Agreement
            would also raise India's exports to Bangladesh.
            India's provision of duty-free access for all
            Bangladeshi products (already done) could increase the
            latter's exports to India by 134 percent. In helping
            Bangladesh's economy to grow, India would stimulate
            economic activity in its own eastern and north-eastern
            states. Challenges exist, however, including non-tariff
            measures/barriers in both countries, excessive bureaucracy,
            weak trade facilitation, and customs inefficiencies. Trade
            in education and health care services offers valuable
            prospects, but also suffers from market access issues. To
            enable larger gains, Bangladesh-India cooperation should go
            beyond goods trade and include investment, finance, services
            trade, trade facilitation, and technology transfer, and be
            placed within the context of regional cooperation.
Can donors and non-state actors
            undermine citizens' legitimating beliefs
This paper addresses the conditions
            under which donor and non-state actor service provision is
            likely to undermine or strengthen citizens'
            legitimating beliefs. On the one hand, citizens may be less
            likely to support their government with quasi-voluntary
            compliance when they credit non-state actors or donors for
            service provision. On the other hand, the provision of goods
            and services by donors and non-state actors might strengthen
            citizens' confidence in their government and their
            willingness to defer to governmental laws and regulations if
            citizens believe that the government is essential to
            leveraging and managing these resources. The author assesses
            these competing hypotheses using multi-level analyses of
            Afrobarometer survey data. The sample, drawn from a
            continuum of developing societies in Africa, allows for
            analysis of associations between donor and non-state actor
            service provision and the sense of obligation to comply with
            the tax authorities, the police and courts. The findings
            yield support for the hypothesis that the provision of
            services by donors and non-state actors is strengthening,
            rather than undermining, the relationship between citizens
            and the state.
Jobless growth Okun's law in
            East Asia
Was economic growth in East Asia
            jobless? This paper addresses this question using data from
            eight East Asian countries during the period between 1997
            and 2011 to estimate the Okun's Law Coefficient, which
            captures the relationship between growth and employment. The
            analysis suggests that growth was not jobless. However,
            there is considerable variation across countries. Generally,
            the effect of growth on employment tends to magnify under
            more flexible hiring and firing rules. Yet even where labor
            markets are more tightly regulated, economic growth affects
            employment, not necessarily in the aggregate but in its
            composition. There is evidence that agricultural employment
            moves counter-cyclically, as opposed to non-agricultural
            employment. The effect is particularly pronounced in periods
            of economic crisis, suggesting that agriculture may serve as
            a shock-absorber for workers laid off in the industrial
            sector. Isolating non-agricultural employment reveals a
            stronger relationship between growth and job creation.
Understanding the business
            environment in South Asia : evidence from firm-level surveys
This paper examines the relationship
            between firm performance and growth and the business
            environment in the countries of the South Asia Region --
            Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal,
            Pakistan, and Sri Lanka -- using firm-level data from the
            World Bank's Enterprise Surveys. The analysis uses an
            approach in which the responses of firms to questions about
            the quality of the business environment can be interpreted
            as shadow prices: estimations by managers of the cost
            imposed on the firm by inadequacies of an aspect of the
            business environment -- public inputs such as regulation,
            physical infrastructure, availability of skilled labor,
            macroeconomic conditions, rule of law, etc. -- for the
            growth of their firm.  The analysis finds, in line with this
            approach, that higher-productivity and better-performing
            firms in the region, and in particular firms that recently
            expanded their employment and created jobs, report
            significantly higher constraints in terms of the supply of
            public inputs.  The authors discuss the differences across
            countries in the importance of various industries, how they
            relate to various firm characteristics, how informal and
            rural sector firms are constrained by public inputs, and how
            firms in the South Asia Region countries compare with firms
            in the rest of the world.
Impact of WTO accession and the
            customs union on the bound and applied tariff rates of the
            Russian federation
After 18 years of negotiations, Russia
            has joined the World Trade Organization. This paper assesses
            how the tariff structure of the Russian Federation will
            change as a result of the phased implementation of its World
            Trade Organization commitments between 2012 and 2020 and how
            it has changed as a result of its agreement to participate
            in a Customs Union with Kazakhstan and Belarus.  The
            analysis uses trade data at the ten digit level, which
            allows the first accurate assessment of the impact of these
            policy changes. It finds that World Trade Organization
            commitments will progressively and significantly lower the
            applied tariffs of the Russian Federation. After all
            commitments are implemented, tariffs will fall from 11.5
            percent to 7.9 percent on an un-weighted average basis, or
            from 13.0 percent to 5.8 percent on a weighted average
            basis. The average "bound" tariff rate of Russia
            under its World Trade Organization commitments will be 8.6
            percent, that is, 0.7 percentage points higher than the
            applied tariffs. Russia's commitments represent
            significant tariff liberalization, but compared with other
            countries that have acceded to the World Trade Organization,
            the commitments of the Russian Federation are not unusual,
            especially when compared with the Transition countries.
Emerging economies and the emergence
            of south-south protectionism
Do exports resume when
            import-restricting temporary trade barriers such as
            antidumping are finally removed? To establish the importance
            of this question for emerging economies, this paper uses
            newly available data from the World Bank's Temporary
            Trade Barriers Database to update a number of inter-temporal
            indicators of import protection along three dimensions:
            additional time coverage through 2011, additional
            policy-imposing country coverage, and a more comprehensive
            depiction of impacted trading partner coverage. It then
            turns to the emerging economy exporters affected by
            temporary trade barriers and highlights the economic
            significance of frequently bilateral import restrictions
            imposed by other emerging economies, i.e., South-South
            protectionism. Finally, it then investigates empirically
            whether country-level exports resume when the previously
            imposed -- but temporary -- import protection is finally
            removed. China's exporters respond quickly and
            aggressively to the market access opening embodied in the
            removal of such import restrictions. This differs markedly
            from the slow and tepid export response of other emerging
            economies, especially when the import protection had been
            imposed by another emerging economy trading partner. This
            evidence suggests a previously unidentified long-run cost
            associated with such South-South protectionism that merits
            further research and inquiry.
Learning from China's rise to
            escape the middle-income trap : a new structural economics
            approach to Latin America
This paper discusses the causes of the
            middle-income trap in Latin America and the Caribbean,
            identifies the challenges and opportunities for Latin
            America that come from China's rise, and draws lessons
            from New Structural Economics and the Growth Identification
            and Facilitation Framework to help Latin America escape the
            middle-income trap. Countries in Latin America and the
            Caribbean are caught in a middle-income trap due to their
            inability to structurally upgrade from low value-added to
            high value-added products. Governments in Latin America and
            the Caribbean should intervene in industries in which they
            have a comparative advantage, calibrating supporting
            policies in close collaboration with the private sector
            through public-private sector alliances. Through continuous
            structural upgrading in sectors intensive in factors such as
            natural resources, scientific knowledge, and unskilled
            labor, the region could achieve dynamic growth. This would
            require investments in education, research and development,
            and physical infrastructure. Therefore, industrial upgrading
            and diversification would be essential to avoid further
            de-industrialization arising from the competitive pressures
            of the rise of China, broaden the base for economic growth,
            and create the basis for further sustained reduction in
            unemployment, poverty and income inequality. Failure to do
            so would lead to a loss of competitiveness and risks of
            further de-industrialization.