rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Economic resilience: definition and measurement
The welfare impact of a disaster does
            not only depend on the physical characteristics of the event
            or its direct impacts in terms of lost lives and assets.
            Welfare impacts also depend on the ability of the economy to
            cope, recover, and reconstruct and therefore to minimize
            aggregate consumption losses. This ability can be referred
            to as the macroeconomic resilience to natural disasters.
            Macroeconomic resilience has two components: instantaneous
            resilience, which is the ability to limit the magnitude of
            immediate production losses for a given amount of asset
            losses, and dynamic resilience, which is the ability to
            reconstruct and recover. Welfare impacts also depend on
            micro-economic resilience, which depends on the distribution
            of losses; on households' vulnerability, such as their
            pre-disaster income and ability to smooth shocks over time
            with savings, borrowing, and insurance, and on the social
            protection system, or the mechanisms for sharing risks
            across the population. The (economic) welfare disaster risk
            in a country can be reduced by reducing the exposure or
            vulnerability of people and assets (reducing asset losses),
            increasing macroeconomic resilience (reducing aggregate
            consumption losses for a given level of asset losses), or
            increasing microeconomic resilience (reducing welfare losses
            for a given level of aggregate consumption losses). The
            paper proposes rules of thumb to estimate macroeconomic and
            microeconomic resilience based on the relevant parameters in
            the economy. It also provides a toolbox of policies to
            increase macro- or micro-economic resilience and a list of
            indicators that can be used to build a resilience indicator.
Employer voices, employer demands,
            and implications for public skills development policy
Educators believe that they are
            adequately preparing youth for the labor market while
            employers lament the lack of skills. A possible source of
            the mismatch in perceptions is that employers and educators
            have different understandings of the types of skills valued
            in the labor market. This paper uses economics and
            psychology literature to define four skills sets:
            socio-emotional, higher-order cognitive, basic cognitive,
            and technical skills. The paper reviews the literature that
            quantitatively measures employer skill demand, as reported
            in preference surveys. A sample of 28 studies reveals
            remarkable consistency across the world in the skills
            demanded by employers. Although employers value all skill
            sets, there is a greater demand for socio-emotional and
            higher-order cognitive skills than for basic cognitive or
            technical skills. These results are robust across economy
            size and level of development, sector, export-orientation,
            and occupations. Employers perceive that the greatest skills
            gaps are in socio-emotional and technical skills. These
            findings suggest the need to re-conceptualize education and
            training systems. Taking into consideration the
            developmental process to acquire the skills identified by
            employers, this implies the need to recognize that (a) the
            job-skills development process necessarily begins at birth
            and continues throughout the life cycle so skills policy
            should, as well; (b) schools play a relevant, but limited,
            role in skills development and the role of parents, mentors,
            and the work place must be defined and enhanced; and (c) the
            skills most demanded by employers -- higher-order cognitive
            and socio-emotional skills -- are largely taught (the
            former) or refined in secondary school, which argues for a
            general education until these skills are formed.
Gender and public goods provision in
            Tamil Nadu's village governments
Using data from 144 village-level
            governments in India's Tamil Nadu state, this paper
            investigates political reservations for women and whether
            the gender of village government leaders influences the
            provision of village public goods. A knowledge test of
            village government presidents and a survey about the
            interaction between village presidents and higher-level
            officials reveal that female village government presidents
            have much lower knowledge of the village government system
            than do their male counterparts and have significantly less
            contact with higher-level government officials. Although
            male and female presidents provide similar amounts of some
            public goods, there is strong evidence that village
            governments led by a woman built fewer schools and roadstwo
            public goods that require relatively more contact and
            coordination with higher-level officials.
Why don't remittances appear to
            affect growth
Although measured remittances by migrant
            workers have soared in recent years, macroeconomic studies
            have difficulty detecting their effect on economic growth.
            This paper reviews existing explanations for this puzzle and
            proposes three new ones. First, it offers evidence that a
            large majority of the recent rise in measured remittances
            may be illusory -- arising from changes in measurement, not
            changes in real financial flows. Second, it shows that even
            if these increases were correctly measured, cross-country
            regressions would have too little power to detect their
            effects on growth. Third, it points out that the greatest
            driver of rising remittances is rising migration, which has
            an opportunity cost to economic product at the origin. Net
            of that cost, there is little reason to expect large growth
            effects of remittances in the origin economy. Migration and
            remittances clearly have first-order effects on poverty at
            the origin, on the welfare of migrants and their families,
            and on global gross domestic product; but detecting their
            effects on growth of the origin economy is likely to remain elusive.
Accelerating poverty reduction in a
            less poor world : the roles of growth and inequality
This paper re-examines the roles of
            changes in income and inequality in poverty reduction. The
            study provides estimates of the relative effects of
            inequality reduction versus growth promotion in reducing
            poverty for countries with different levels of initial
            poverty. The analysis uses country panel-data for 1980-2010.
            The results indicate that, as countries become less poor,
            inequality-reducing policies are likely to become relatively
            more effective for poverty reduction than growth-promoting
            policies. The results indicate that the growth elasticity of
            poverty reduction either increases or remains constant with
            the level of initial poverty.  Nevertheless, the results
            also strongly indicate that, as poverty declines, the
            inequality elasticity of poverty reduction increases faster.
            Therefore, if the marginal cost of reducing inequality
            relative to the marginal cost of increasing growth does not
            increase with lower poverty levels, to accelerate poverty
            reduction, greater emphasis should be given to equity rather
            than growth as countries attain higher levels of development.
Transition to clean capital,
            irreversible investment and stranded assets
This paper uses a Ramsey model with two
            types of capital to analyze the optimal transition to clean
            capital when polluting investment is irreversible. The cost
            of climate mitigation decomposes as a technical cost of
            using clean instead of polluting capital and a transition
            cost from the irreversibility of pre-existing polluting
            capital. With a carbon price, the transition cost can be
            limited by underutilizing polluting capital, at the expense
            of a loss in the value of polluting assets (stranded assets)
            and a drop in income. In contrast, policy instruments that
            focus on redirecting investments -- such as feebates or
            environmental standards -- prevent underutilization of
            existing capital, avoid stranded assets, and reduce
            short-term losses; but they reduce emissions more slowly and
            increase the intertemporal cost of the transition. The paper
            investigates inter- and intra-generational distributional
            impacts and the political acceptability of climate change
            mitigation policy instruments.
The price is not always right : on
            the impacts of (commodity) prices on households (and countries)
This paper provides an overview of the
            impact of once-and-for-all changes in commodity prices and
            other prices on household welfare. It begins with a
            collection of stylized facts related to commodities based on
            household survey data from Latin America and Africa. The
            data uncover strong commodity dependence in both continents:
            households typically allocate a large fraction of their
            budget to commodities and they often depend on commodities
            to earn their income. This income and expenditure dependency
            suggests sizable impacts and adjustments following
            commodity-price shocks. The paper explores these effects
            with a review of the literature. It studies consumption and
            income responses, labor-market responses, and spillovers
            across sectors. It ends up providing evidence on the
            relative magnitudes of various mechanisms through which
            commodity prices affect household (and national) welfare in
            developing economies.
CATA meets IMPOV: a unified approach
            to measuring financial protection in health
Up to now catastrophic and impoverishing
            payments have been seen as two alternative approaches to
            measuring financial protection in health. Building on the
            previous literature, the authors propose a unified
            methodology in which impoverishing and catastrophic payments
            are mutually exclusive outcomes. They achieve this by
            expressing out-of-pocket payments as a ratio of
            'discretionary' consumption, defined as the amount
            by which total consumption (gross of out-of-pocket payments)
            exceeds the poverty line. This allows the authors to
            identify both households who are impoverished by
            out-of-pocket payments (their ratio exceeds one) and
            households who are pushed even further into poverty by
            out-of-pocket payments (their ratio is negative); the
            authors call such payments 'immiserizing'.
            Households experiencing 'catastrophic' payments
            are a subset of those who incur out-of-pocket payments but
            who are neither impoverished nor immiserized by them. Two
            alternative definitions of catastrophic payments are
            offered: those that absorb more than a pre-specified
            fraction of discretionary consumption; and those that leave
            a household's nonmedical consumption (total consumption
            net of out-of-pocket spending) below a pre-specified
            multiple of the poverty line. The authors also offer a
            simple financial protection index that reflects the
            percentages of households incurring immiserizing,
            impoverishing, catastrophic, non-catastrophic, and zero
            out-of-pocket payments. They illustrate their unified
            approach with data from the World Health Survey, using
            international poverty lines and a catastrophic payment
            threshold of 40 percent.
A global assessment of human capital
            mobility: the role of non-OECD destinations
Discussions of high-skilled mobility
            typically evoke migration patterns from poorer to wealthier
            countries, which ignore movements to and between developing
            countries. This paper presents, for the first time, a global
            overview of human capital mobility through bilateral
            migration stocks by gender and education in 1990 and 2000,
            and calculation of nuanced brain drain indicators. Building
            on newly collated data, the paper uses a novel estimation
            procedure based on a pseudo-gravity model, then identifies
            key determinants of international migration, and
            subsequently uses estimated parameters to impute missing
            data. Non-OECD destinations account for one-third of
            skilled-migration, while OECD destinations are declining in
            relative importance.
Income and energy consumption in
            Mexican households
The analysis of household energy
            consumption patterns is critical for evaluating public
            mechanisms, such as subsidies and social tariffs that aim to
            provide lower income earners with better access to energy
            sources. This paper focuses on Mexican households to analyze
            the relations between their levels of income, consumption of
            different forms of energy, and the role played by different
            household characteristics. Using microdata from the Mexican
            Income Expenditure Surveys, the paper first relate income
            and energy expenditure to determine the shape of this
            relation. It then applies OLS and Tobit models to determine
            how income levels affect energy consumption in relation to
            other covariates. The results show a positive relation for
            income deciles and energy consumption and some household
            characteristics -- pointing to differentiated mechanisms for
            improving energy use.
International asset allocations and
            capital flows : the benchmark effect
This paper studies channels through
            which well-known benchmark indexes impact asset allocations
            and capital flows across countries. The study uses unique
            monthly micro-level data of benchmark compositions and
            mutual fund investments during 1996-2012. Benchmarks have
            important effects on equity and bond mutual fund portfolios
            across funds with different degrees of activism. Benchmarks
            explain, on average, around 70 percent of country
            allocations and have significant impact even on active
            funds. Benchmark effects are important after controlling for
            industry, macroeconomic, and country-specific, time-varying
            effects. Reverse causality does not drive the results.
            Exogenous, pre-announced changes in benchmarks result in
            movements in asset allocations mostly when these changes are
            implemented (not when announced). By impacting country
            allocations, benchmarks affect capital flows across
            countries through direct and indirect channels, including
            contagion. They explain apparently counterintuitive
            movements in capital flows, generating outflows from
            countries when upgraded and with large market capitalization
            and better relative performance.
Beyond the income effect : impacts
            of conditional cash transfer programs on private investments
            in human capital
In the past decade, conditional cash
            transfer (CCT) programs have become an important component
            of social policy in developing countries. While the impacts
            of these programs have been well researched with respect to
            their effectiveness to achieve intended outcomes, less is
            known about their impact on private expenditure decisions.
            This aspect has great policy relevance since changes in
            private household expenditures can either support or
            counteract the aim of the programs. This essay investigates
            the impact of a CCT program on private household expenditure
            decisions in nutrition, health and education which are seen
            as principal contributors to child human capital. First,
            household expenditure behavior under a CCT program is
            discussed based on Heckman's model on the technology of
            skill formation as a conceptual framework. The paper shows
            how intra-household preferences and perceptions on the
            substitutability or complementarity of investments can
            impact household resource allocation decisions.
            Subsequently, the theoretical implications are tested in the
            context of the Brazilian CCT program Bolsa Família, using
            the Brazilian household expenditure survey. Evidence is
            found that households increase their private expenditure in
            food and education disproportionally to the amount of cash
            transfer, that is, more than would be expected when
            considering the Engel curves of the expenditures under question.
Son preference, fertility and family
            structure : evidence from reproductive behavior among
            Nigerian women
Strong boy-bias and its consequences for
            young and unborn girls have been widely documented for Asia.
            This paper considers a country in Sub-Saharan Africa and
            finds that parental gender preferences do affect fertility
            behavior and shape traditional social institutions with
            negative effects on adult women's health and
            well-being. Using individual-level data for Nigeria, the
            paper shows that, compared to women with first-born sons,
            women with first-born daughters have (and desire) more
            children and are less likely to use contraceptives. Women
            with daughters among earlier-born children are also more
            likely to have shorter birth intervals, a behavior medically
            known to increase the risk of child and maternal mortality.
            Moreover, they are more likely to end up in a polygynous
            union, to be divorced, and to be head of the household. The
            preference for sons is also supported by child fostering
            patterns in which daughters are substitutes for foster
            girls, while the same does not hold for sons and foster
            boys. These results can partly explain excess female
            mortality among adult women in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Housing matters
Housing matters to the livability of
            cities and to the productivity of their economies. The
            failure of cities to accommodate the housing needs of
            growing urban populations can be seen in the proliferation
            of poorly serviced, high-density informal settlements. Such
            settlements are not new in the history of rapidly growing
            cities, their persistence results as much from policies as
            from economics and demographic transition. Slums have
            attracted most of the attention on urban housing in
            developing countries, and the Millennium Development Goals
            have given prominence to their reduction. However, urban
            housing issues transcend conditions in slums and are linked
            closely to economic activity. City economies influence
            housing demand, and in turn the flexibility of housing
            supply affects economic activity and city growth. This paper
            provides an overview of the policy and institutional
            building blocks that determine housing sector performance,
            drawing on studies from both developed and developing
            countries. It focuses on property rights, including tenure
            choice, housing finance, and subsidies. It also reviews the
            factors that affect supply: the availability of serviced
            land, as well as land and housing regulations. While these
            elements have been standard tools of housing policy, they
            are still the subject of considerable debate over their
            sequencing, policy content, and priority. There has been a
            great deal of emphasis over the last two decades on
            demand-side measures to improve property rights systems,
            develop housing finance, and even to introduce new subsidy
            systems. All these developments are important, but as this
            paper argues, less progress has been made in understanding
            and addressing the factors that constrain supply, which
            often thwart improvements on the demand side.
Analyzing urban systems : have
            megacities become too large
The trend toward ever greater
            urbanization continues unabated across the globe. According
            to the United Nations, by 2025 closes to 5 billion people
            will live in urban areas. Many cities, especially in the
            developing world, are set to explode in size. Over the next
            decade and a half, Lagos is expected to increase its
            population 50 percent, to nearly 16 million. Naturally,
            there is an active debate on whether restricting the growth
            of megacities is desirable and whether doing so can make
            residents of those cities and their countries better off.
            When analyzing whether megacities have become too large,
            policy makers often analyze a single city in depth. But no
            city is an island: improving urban infrastructure in one
            city might attract migrants, and a negative shock in one
            location can be mitigated because people can move to
            another. Considering the general equilibrium effects of any
            such urban policy is thus key. That is, when deciding
            whether to make medium-size cities more attractive, policy
            makers need to understand how cities of all sizes will be
            affected. The second section briefly summarizes the
            theoretical framework and discusses which data are needed.
            The third section implements the methodology for the
            benchmark case of the United States. The fourth section does
            the same for China and Mexico and compares the findings. And
            the last section concludes. A technical online appendix
            guides the reader through a practical, step-by-step,
            discussion of how to do the analysis.