rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Sea-level rise and storm surges : a
            comparative analysis of impacts in developing countries
WPS4901 Policy ReseaRch WoRking PaPeR 4901 Sea-Level Rise and Storm Surges A Comparative Analysis of Impacts in Developing Countries _Susmita Dasgupta Benoit Laplante Siobhan Murray David Wheeler_ The World Bank Development Research Group Environment and Energy Team April 2009
Banking on politics
This paper presents new data from 150
            countries showing that former cabinet members, central bank
            governors, and financial regulators are many orders of
            magnitude more likely than other citizens to become board
            members of banks. Countries where the politician-banker
            phenomenon is more prevalent have higher corruption and more
            powerful yet less accountable governments, but not better
            functioning financial systems. Regulation becomes more
            pro-banker where this happens more often. Furthermore, a
            higher fraction of the rents that are created accrue to
            bankers, former politicians are not more likely to be
            directors when their side is in power, and banks are more
            profitable without being more leveraged. Rather than
            supporting a public interest view, the evidence is
            consistent with a capture-type private interest story where,
            in exchange for a non-executive position at a bank in the
            future, politicians provide for beneficial regulation.
Development strategy, viability, and
            economic distortions in developing countries
This paper presents a three-sector
            static model to explore the rationale for a series of
            institutional distortions in developing countries. The
            authors argue that, after World War II, motivated by a
            belief in the development of state-of-the-art industries as
            a means for nation building, the majority of developing
            country governments attempted to accelerate the growth of
            advanced capital-intensive industries. However, since
            developing countries are relatively rich in labor or natural
            resource endowments but not in capital endowment, advanced
            capital-intensive industries were not adapted to the
            endowment structures of these developing countries at the
            time. Enterprises in those industries were non-viable in
            open, competitive markets and could not survive without
            government subsidization or protection. The model shows
            that, in order to mobilize resources into the
            capital-intensive, advanced sectors, it is necessary for
            governments to use distortionary policies such as taxes and
            subsidies, distortions of factor prices, directive
            allocation of resources, and nationalization of enterprises.
            Such distortions enable developing countries to set up
            advanced, capital-intensive industries in the early stage of
            their development. However, they also tend to suppress
            incentives, misallocate resources, and make the economy inefficient.
How can donors help build global
            public goods in health
Aid to developing countries has largely
            neglected the population-wide health services that are core
            to communicable disease control in the developed world.
            These mostly non-clinical services generate "pure
            public goods" by reducing everyone's exposure to
            disease through measures such as implementing health and
            sanitary regulations. They complement the clinical
            preventive and treatment services which are the donors'
            main focus. Their neglect is manifested, for example, in a
            lack of coherent public health regulations in countries
            where donors have long been active, facilitating the spread
            of diseases such as avian flu. These services can be
            inexpensive, and dramatically reduce health inequalities.
            Sri Lanka spends less than 0.2% of GDP on its well-designed
            population-wide services, which contribute to the
            country's high levels of health equity and life
            expectancy despite low GDP per head and civil war. Evidence
            abounds on the negative externalities of weak
            population-wide health services. Global public health
            security cannot be assured without building strong national
            population-wide health systems to reduce the potential for
            communicable diseases to spread within and beyond their
            borders. Donors need greater clarity about what constitutes
            a strong public health system, and how to build them. The
            paper discusses gaps in donors' approaches and first
            steps toward closing them.
How do agricultural policy
            restrictions to global trade and welfare differ across commodities
For decades the world's
            agricultural markets have been highly distorted by national
            government policies, but very differently for different
            commodities. Hence a weighted average across countries of
            nominal rates of assistance or consumer tax equivalents for
            a product can be misleading as an indicator of the trade or
            welfare effects of policies affecting that product's
            global market. This is especially the case when some
            countries tax and others subsidize its production or
            consumption. This article develops a new set of
            more-satisfactory indicators for that purpose, drawing on
            the recent literature on trade restrictiveness indexes. It
            then exploits a global agricultural distortions database
            recently compiled by the World Bank to generate the first
            set of estimates of those two indicators for each of 28 key
            agricultural commodities from 1960 to 2004,  based on a
            sample of 75 countries that together account for more than
            three-quarters of the world's production of those
            agricultural commodities. These reveal the considerable
            extent of reforms in agricultural policies of developing as
            well as high-income countries over the past two decades.
Moving up the ladder the impact of
            migration experience on occupational mobility in Albania
The contribution of return migrants to
            economic development in source countries can be significant.
            Overseas savings of returnees may lead to improvements in
            household welfare and provide liquidity for investments in
            the face of credit market failures. Labor market experience
            and skills acquired abroad may also lead migrants to find
            occupations higher in the skill and remuneration spectrum
            upon return. This study uses the 2005 Albanian Living
            Standards Measurement Study Survey and estimates the impact
            of international migration experience on the occupational
            mobility of return migrants vis a vis working-age Albanian
            residents that never migrated. Controlling for the
            non-random nature of international migration and return, the
            results show that past migration experience increases the
            likelihood of upward occupational mobility. Exploring the
            heterogeneity of impact by host country indicates that the
            positive effect of past migration experience on upward
            occupational mobility is driven by past migration experience
            in Italy and countries further a field, while past migration
            experience in Greece does not exert any significant impact
            on mobility outcomes. The results, which are consistent
            across different sample specifications and outcome variables
            measuring occupational mobility, hint at the link between
            migration and human/financial capital formation among
            migrants and foster optimism concerning the positive effect
            of return migration on economic development. This insight is
            particularly important since remittances from permanent
            migrants, which have fueled the impressive growth
            performance of the country in the recent era, may taper off
            in the medium to long term with the decline in out-migration
            and growing global economic woes.
Risks, ex-ante actions and public
            assistance : impacts of natural disasters on child schooling
            in Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Malawi
This paper examines the impacts of
            natural disasters on schooling investments with special
            focus on the roles of ex-ante actions and ex-post responses
            using panel data from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Malawi. The
            importance of ex-ante actions depends on disaster risks and
            the likelihood of public assistance, which potentially
            creates substitution between the two actions. The findings
            show that higher future probabilities of disasters increase
            the likelihood of holding more human capital and/or
            livestock relative to land, and this asset-portfolio effect
            is significant in disaster prone areas. The empirical
            results support the roles of both ex-ante and ex-post
            responses (public assistance) in coping with disasters, but
            also show interesting variations across countries. In
            Ethiopia, public assistance plays a more important role than
            ex-ante actions to mitigate the impact of shocks on child
            schooling. In contrast, households in Malawi rely more on
            private ex-ante actions than public assistance. The
            Bangladesh example shows active roles of both ex-ante and
            ex-post actions. These observations are consistent with the
            finding on the relationship between ex-ante actions and
            disaster risks. The results also show that among ex-ante
            actions, human capital accumulated in the household prior to
            disasters helps mitigate the negative effects of disasters
            in both the short and long runs.
Natural disasters, self-insurance
            and human capital investment : evidence from Bangladesh,
            Ethiopia and Malawi
This paper examines the impacts of
            disasters on dynamic human capital production using panel
            data from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, and Malawi. The empirical
            results show that the accumulation of biological human
            capital prior to disasters helps children maintain
            investments in the post-disaster period. Biological human
            capital formed in early childhood (long-term nutritional
            status) plays a role of insurance with resilience to
            disasters by protecting schooling investment and outcomes,
            although disasters have negative impacts on investment. In
            Bangladesh, children with more biological human capital are
            less affected by the adverse effects of floods, and the rate
            of investment increases with the initial human capital stock
            in the post-disaster recovery process. In Ethiopia and
            Malawi, where droughts are rather frequent, exposure to
            highly frequent droughts in some cases reduces schooling
            investment but the negative impacts are larger among
            children embodying less biological human capital. Asset
            holdings prior to the disasters, especially the
            household's stock of intellectual human capital, also
            helps maintain schooling investments at least to the same
            degree as the stock of human capital accumulated in children
            prior to the disasters.
Weathering the storm : investing in
            port infrastructure to lower trade costs in East Asia
The world economic crisis of 2008
            presents clear challenges to prospects for economic growth
            in developing countries. This is particularly true for
            emerging economies in East Asia that have relied to a great
            extent over the past decade on export-led growth. What steps
            to facilitate trade promise a relatively strong return on
            investment for East Asia to help sustain trade and growth?
            The authors examine how port infrastructure affects trade
            and the role of transport costs in driving exports and
            imports for the region. They find that port congestion has
            significantly increased the transport costs to East Asia
            from both of the United States and Japan. The analysis
            suggests that cutting port congestion by 10 percent could
            cut transport costs in East Asia by up to 3 percent. This
            translates into a 0.3 to 0.5 percent across-the-board tariff
            cut. In addition, the estimates suggest that the trade cost
            reduction of investment in port infrastructure in East Asia
            that translates into higher consumer welfare would far
            outweigh the cost for physical expansion of the ports in the region.
The crisis-resilience of services trade
Much attention has focused on the impact
            of the current crisis on goods trade; hardly any on its
            impact on services trade. Using new trade data from the
            United States, and more aggregate data from other OECD
            countries, the authors show that services trade is
            weathering the current crisis much better than goods trade.
            As of February 2009, the value of US goods imports had
            declined year-on-year by 33 percent and the value of goods
            exports by 21 percent; services imports and exports each had
            declined by less than 7 percent. Within services,
            interesting patterns are emerging. Trade in goods-related
            transport services and crisis-related financial services has
            shrunk, as has expenditure on tourism abroad. But trade in a
            range of business, professional, and technical services is
            still increasing, with US exports growing even faster (at 10
            percent) than US imports (at 7 percent). Developing
            countries like India, which are relatively specialized in
            business process outsourcing and information technology
            services, have suffered much smaller declines in total
            exports to the United States than countries like Brazil and
            China and regions like Africa, which are specialized in
            exports of goods, transport services, or tourism services.
            On the basis of new evidence from Indian services exporters,
            the authors suggest that services trade is buoyant relative
            to goods trade for two reasons: demand for a range of traded
            services is less cyclical, and services trade and production
            are less dependent on external finance. Even though few
            explicitly protectionist measures have so far been taken in
            services, the changing political climate and the widening
            boundaries of the state in crisis countries may introduce a
            national bias in firms' procurement and location choices.
Exit and save : migration and saving
            under violence
This paper examines how households trade
            off migration and savings when subject to exogenous
            violence. The authors propose that households under violence
            decide jointly on migration and saving, because a higher
            asset-stock is more difficult to carry to a new place. When
            confronted with exogenous violence, households are expected
            to consider migration, and reduce their assets, both in
            order to reduce their exposure to violence, and to make
            migration easier. In some cases, after a migration decision
            has been taken, savings can increase as a function of
            violence to ensure a minimum bundle to carry. Empirical
            evidence from rich Colombian micro-data supports the
            conceptual framework for violence that carries a
            displacement threat, such as guerrilla attacks.
Can risk averse competitive input
            providers serve farmers efficiently in developing countries
Under price ceilings and quality floors
            for agricultural inputs in cash crop sectors in developing
            countries where credit markets are weak, imperfect
            information on the ability of farmers to pay for their
            inputs at the end of the cropping season may lead the
            decentralized production of those inputs by risk averse
            private input providers to be inefficient. A coordinating
            agency and/or subsidies for new farmers could help to
            produce and distribute more agricultural inputs, thereby
            increasing the profits for input providers while also
            enabling more farmers to produce the crops that are key to
            their livelihood.
Poverty and income seasonality in Bangladesh
Seasonal poverty in Bangladesh, locally
            known as monga, refers to seasonal deprivation of food
            during the pre-harvest season of Aman rice. An analysis of
            household income and expenditure survey data shows that
            average household income and consumption are much lower
            during monga season than in other seasons, and that seasonal
            income greatly influences seasonal consumption. However,
            lack of income and consumption smoothing is more acute in
            greater Rangpur, the North West region, than in other
            regions, causing widespread seasonal deprivation. The
            analysis shows that agricultural income diversification
            accompanied by better access to micro-credit, irrigation,
            education, electrification, social safety net programs, and
            dynamic labor markets has helped reduce seasonality in
            income and poverty in regions other than Rangpur in the
            recent past.  Hence, government policies should promote
            income diversification through infrastructure investments
            and provide income transfers to the targeted poor to contain
            income seasonality and poverty in this impoverished part of Bangladesh.
Making sense of Africa's
            infrastructure endowment : a benchmarking approach
The paper's objective is to explain
            factors underlying Africa's weak infrastructure
            endowment and to identify suitable infrastructure goals for
            the region based on benchmarking against international
            peers. The authors use a dataset covering the stocks of key
            infrastructure-including information and communication
            technology (ICT), power, roads, and water-across 155
            developing countries over the period 1960 to 2005. The paper
            also examines subregional differences within Africa. They
            make use of regression techniques to control for a
            comprehensive set of economic, demographic, geographic, and
            historic conditioning factors, as well as adjusting for
            potential endogeneities. Results show that Africa lags
            behind all other regions of the developing world in its
            infrastructure endowment, except in ICT. By far the largest
            gaps arise in the power sector, with generating capacity and
            household access to electricity at half the levels observed
            in South Asia. While it is often assumed that Africa's
            infrastructure deficit is largely a reflection of its
            relatively low income levels, the authors find that African
            countries have much more limited infrastructure than income
            peers in other parts of the developing world. Countries that
            face the most challenging environment, with low population
            density, weak governance, and history of conflict, have the
            poorest infrastructure endowments. At the outset of the data
            series, Africa was doing significantly better than other
            developing regions for road density, generation capacity,
            and fixed-line telephones, but Africa's relative
            position has deteriorated over time. The most dramatic loss
            of ground has come in electrical generating capacity, which
            has stagnated since 1980.
Infrastructure and growth in Africa
The goal of the paper is to provide a
            comprehensive assessment of the impact of infrastructure
            development on growth in African countries. Based on
            econometric estimates for a sample of 136 countries from
            1960-2005, the authors evaluate the impact on per capita
            growth of faster accumulation of infrastructure stocks and
            of enhancement in the quality of infrastructure services for
            39 African countries in three key infrastructure sectors:
            telecommunications, electricity, and roads.Using an
            econometric technique suitable for dynamic panel data models
            and likely endogenous regressors, the authors find that
            infrastructure stocks and service quality boost economic
            growth. The growth payoff of reaching the infrastructure
            development of the African leader (Mauritius) is 1.1 percent
            of GDP per year in North Africa and 2.3 percent in
            Sub-Saharan Africa, with most of the contribution coming
            from more, rather than better, infrastructure. Across
            Africa, infrastructure contributed 99 basis points to per
            capita economic growth, versus 68 points for other
            structural policies. Most of the contribution came from
            increases in stocks (89 basis points), versus quality
            improvements (10 basis points). The findings show that
            growth is positively affected by the volume of
            infrastructure stocks and the quality of infrastructure
            services; simulations show that our empirical findings are
            significant statistically and economically. Identifying
            areas of opportunity to generate productivity growth, the
            authors find that African countries are likely to gain more
            from larger stocks of infrastructure than from enhancements
            in the quality of existing infrastructure. The payoffs are
            largest for telephone density, electricity-generating
            capacity, road-network length, and road quality.