rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Price Controls : Good Intentions,
            Bad Outcomes
The use of price controls is widespread
            across emerging markets and developing economies, including
            for food and key imported and exported commodities. Although
            they are sometimes used as a tool for social policy, price
            controls can dampen investment and growth, worsen poverty
            outcomes, cause countries to incur heavy fiscal burdens, and
            complicate the effective conduct of monetary policy.
            Replacing price controls with expanded and better-targeted
            social safety nets, coupled with reforms to encourage
            competition and a sound regulatory environment, can be
            pro-poor and pro-growth. Such reforms need to be carefully
            communicated and sequenced to ensure political and social
            acceptance. Where they exist, price control regimes should
            be transparent and supported by well-capitalized
            stabilization funds or national hedging strategies to ensure
            fiscal sustainability.
The Learning Challenge in the 21st Century
Truth matters, and the norms associated
            with a democratic society, such as the common good,
            responsibility, ethics, and civic engagement, are under
            attack with the emergence of the post-truth society. There
            are concerns worldwide that public education is failing us
            on pushing back on disinformation. And, in most countries,
            education systems are not providing workers with the skills
            necessary to compete in today's job markets. The
            growing mismatch between demand and supply of skills holds
            back economic growth and undermines opportunity. At same
            time, the financial returns to schooling are high in most
            countries. Schooling remains a good economic and social
            investment, and there are record numbers of children in
            school today. The skills that matter in the coming
            technological revolution are likely the same as what is
            needed in a media environment of disinformation. More and
            better education and noncognitive skills will not only
            prepare students for the future world of work, they will
            also prepare them to navigate the increasingly complex
            post-truth society. They will also allow young people to
            gain trust. In other words, better education is
            democratizing, to the extent that it promotes truth, values,
            and civic engagement.
Who Benefits from Better Roads and
            Why Mixed Methods Analysis of the Gender-Disaggregated
            Impacts of a Rural Roads Project in Vietnam
The literature lends empirical support
            for the idea that improvements to transport infrastructure
            lead to economic development. How and why the benefits of
            better transport differ between genders is less clear. This
            paper attempts to answer this question by combining a
            nonexperimental impact evaluation of a large-scale rural
            roads project in Vietnam with qualitative data collection.
            The paper finds that roads improve economic opportunities
            for agricultural production and trade: all households
            increase agricultural trade. Yet only households headed by
            men capitalize on these opportunities, experiencing an
            increase in agricultural output and income. Production and
            income do not increase in households headed by women. The
            result seems to be driven by a lower level of household
            labor and access to capital in female-headed households,
            which constrains their ability to make up-front investments
            to increase production and income. Overall, the results
            indicate that female-headed households face constraints in
            taking advantage of newly created economic opportunities.
            Coordinating transport investments with complementary
            development programs addressing these constraints can
            improve the benefits of better transport for such households.
"She Helps Me All the
            Time" : Underestimating Women's Economic
            Engagement in Rural Honduras
This study aims to understand
            women's engagement in economic activities in rural
            Honduras and why these activities may not be accurately
            reflected in official statistics. The study finds that women
            underreport their engagement in economic activities,
            including production for own consumption, production of
            market goods, and remunerated services and commerce.
            Simulations suggest that the rural female labor force
            participation rate in Honduras is likely to be
            underestimated by 6 to 23 percentage points. Two main
            explanations are found. First, women identify themselves
            (and are identified) primarily as housewives, and the
            concepts of housework and employment are taken as mutually
            exclusive. Second, given this duality between housework and
            employment, women define "employment" based on a
            set of necessary characteristics that exclude many of their
            own activities. Specifically, work needs to (i) be conducted
            physically outside the home; (ii) be in exchange for money;
            and (iii) entail sufficient time commitment. Importantly,
            these conditions are not binding constraints for men to
            identify their own activities as economic activity. These
            results have implications for understanding the low labor
            force participation of women in rural communities in
            countries beyond Honduras, suggesting that low rates obscure
            a significant amount of economic activity in many countries.
Strengthening Public Health Systems
            : Policy Ideas from a Governance Perspective
Public health systems that are capable
            of disease surveillance and action to prevent and manage
            outbreaks require trustworthy community-embedded public
            health workers who are empowered to undertake their tasks as
            professionals. Economic theory on incentives and norms of
            agents tasked with performing activities that society cares
            about yield direct implications for how to recruit and
            manage frontline health workers to promote trustworthiness
            and professionalism. This paper provides novel evidence from
            a survey of public health workers in Bihar, India's
            poorest state, that supports the insights of economic theory
            and taken together yields ideas that can immediately be put
            to work in policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis. These
            ideas address problems of governance and trust that have
            bedeviled health policymakers. Managing the current and
            preventing future pandemics requires going beyond technical
            health policies to the political institutions that shape
            incentives and norms of health workers tasked with
            implementing those policies.
Exporters Dynamics and the Role of
            Imports in Argentina
This paper examines the performance of
            globally engaged firms in Argentina in the past decade.
            Using highly disaggregated firm-level customs transaction
            data for imports and exports, the paper documents the
            progressive retreat of Argentine firms from global markets.
            Between 2007 and 2017, the number of exporters decreased by
            30 percent. Benchmarking the characteristics of these
            exporters with similar countries reveals that Argentine
            exporters are disproportionally fewer and individually
            larger, with export value extremely concentrated in a few
            firms. Firm churning rates are disproportionately low and
            survival rates of entrants are high. These findings reflect
            exceptionally high entry costs of export, which are the
            result of anti-export bias and import substitution policies
            that sought unsuccessfully to develop the local industry.
            The paper shows that exporters that import directly
            intermediate and capital goods have better export outcomes
            than other exporters.
Explaining Differences in the
            Returns to R&D in Argentina : The Role of Contextual
            Factors and Complementarities
Argentina's private investment in
            research and development is well below that of its peers.
            One important reason may be low and very heterogeneous
            returns to research and development activities on
            productivity. This paper uses novel microdata to estimate
            the returns to research and development and understand the
            contextual factors that shape their heterogeneity. The paper
            groups these context-based factors into knowledge
            complementary factors (that is, factors that affect the
            returns via learning capabilities from external sources of
            knowledge) and market complementary factors (factors that
            act via business capabilities to appropriate the returns to
            research and development investments). The paper
            hypothesizes that the effects of contextual factors depend
            on firms~^!!^ management capabilities and attitudes
            (innovative capacity), which determine firms~^!!^ ability to
            benefit from the context. The findings suggest that the
            returns are indeed heterogeneous across regions and sectors,
            and these results depend on some context-based factors,
            which can boost or depress the returns to R&D. The
            results have important policy implications, considering the
            effectiveness of innovation policies, need for adapting to
            specific regions and sectors, and maximization of the impact
            of these factors on the returns to research and development.
Building Resilient Health Systems :
            Experimental Evidence from Sierra Leone and the 2014 Ebola Outbreak
This paper experimentally examines
            efforts aimed at improving health worker performance in the
            context of the 2014-15 West African Ebola crisis. Roughly
            two years before the outbreak in Sierra Leone, the study
            randomly assigned two accountability interventions to
            government-run health clinics—one focused on community
            monitoring and the other gave status awards to clinic staff.
            The findings show that, prior to the Ebola crisis, both
            interventions led to improvements in utilization of clinics,
            patient satisfaction with the health system, and child
            health outcomes. During the crisis, the interventions led to
            higher reported Ebola cases, as well as lower mortality from
            Ebola, particularly in areas with community monitoring
            clinics. The paper explores the potential mechanisms, and
            the findings provide evidence consistent with the following
            mechanism: by building trust and confidence in health
            workers, and improving the perceived quality of care
            provided by clinics prior to the outbreak, the interventions
            encouraged patients to report and receive treatment. The
            results suggest that accountability interventions not only
            have the power to improve health systems during normal
            times, but also can make health systems resilient to crises
            that may emerge over the longer run.
Firms' Discriminatory Behavior,
            and Women's Employment in the Democratic Republic of Congo
This paper contributes to better
            understanding firms' discriminatory behavior in the
            presence of gender-based legal discrimination and its
            linkages with labor market outcomes for women in a
            developing country setting. Using data collected through the
            World Bank Enterprise Surveys in the Democratic Republic of
            Congo, the paper documents the existence of nonnegligible
            employer discrimination and limitations in women's
            autonomy in the presence of a discriminatory environment.
            Interestingly, these are more pervasive outside the capital
            city, Kinshasa, which suggests that cultural norms or
            differences in regulation enforcement may be at play. The
            paper also finds that firms' discriminatory behavior
            harms women's labor market outcomes, in their
            representation among the upper echelons of management and
            participation in the overall workforce. The negative
            relationship between restrictions from discriminatory
            behaviors and female employment is particularly strong in
            the manufacturing sector.
Liberalizing versus Facilitating
            Mode 4 Trade in Services
The growing importance of services trade
            for countries across the world is well-documented in the
            services and trade literatures. At the same time, regulatory
            and administrative barriers to the movement of service
            suppliers to deliver services internationally have resulted
            in very low shares of "Mode 4" trade in total
            services trade. Against this background, this paper
            conceptualizes an agenda for trade facilitation in services
            as it would apply to the movement of natural persons. It
            also provides descriptive statistical evidence from the
            Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
            Development's Services Trade Restrictiveness Index
            database. The paper differentiates between regulatory
            measures that may improve transparency or facilitate access
            for service providers and those measures that impede Mode 4
            trade as well as the administrative, financial, and economic
            costs of compliance with such measures.
Facilitating Trade in Services
In 2016, the Government of India
            proposed negotiations on an agreement to facilitate trade in
            services to complement the 2013 World Trade Organization
            Trade Facilitation Agreement in goods. The proposal did not
            find much support, but plurilateral talks launched in 2017
            on various policy areas encompass areas that are very
            relevant from a services trade facilitation perspective.
            This paper argues that participating in the current
            plurilateral talks can do much to achieve services trade
            facilitation objectives by identifying good regulatory
            practices. Although elements relevant to services trade
            facilitation are on the table in the World Trade
            Organization, there are important gaps. Identifying
            priorities for complementary international cooperation to
            facilitate trade in services on a plurilateral basis
            requires initiatives that bring together governments,
            services industry associations, and sectoral regulators.
Investment Facilitation and Mode 3
            Trade in Services : Are Current Discussions Addressing the
            Key Issues
Based on a novel approach to measuring
            the cost of trade in services for Modes 1 (cross-border
            supply), 2 (consumption abroad), and 4 (temporary movement
            of service suppliers), developed by the World Trade
            Organization Secretariat, this pper reviews available
            evidence on factors affecting trade costs for services
            supplied via a commercial presence in a host country market,
            so-called Mode 3 trade. It does so with a view to answering
            the question of whether the current “facilitation” agendas
            on services and investment proceeding at the World Trade
            Organization focus on the most important factors affecting
            Mode 3–related trade costs, by far the most important of all
            modes of supplying services internationally. The paper
            explores the policy opportunity costs arising from the
            decision to focus the investment facilitation agenda on
            matters of regulatory transparency and the streamlining of
            administrative procedures. It recalls how reducing
            regulatory heterogeneity, tackling discriminatory
            impediments to cross-border investment, and developing
            investor-state conflict management mechanisms to retain and
            expand investment and prevent dispute escalation -- all
            issues left unaddressed by ongoing negotiations -- hold
            important potential for reducing Mode 3 trade costs and
            facilitating expanded investment.
The Welfare Effects of Mobile
            Broadband Internet : Evidence from Nigeria
This paper estimates the impacts of
            mobile broadband coverage on household consumption and
            poverty in Nigeria, the largest economy and mobile broadband
            market in Africa. The analysis exploits a unique dataset
            that integrates three waves of a nationally representative
            longitudinal household survey on living standards with
            information from Nigerian mobile operators on the deployment
            of mobile broadband (3G and 4G) coverage between 2010 and
            2016. The estimates show that mobile broadband coverage had
            large and positive impacts on household consumption levels
            which increased over time, although at a decreasing rate.
            Mobile broadband coverage also reduces the proportion of
            households below the poverty line, driven by higher food and
            non-food consumption in rural households. These effects are
            mainly due to an increase in labor force participation and
            employment, particularly among women.
Welfare Dynamics in India over a
            Quarter Century : Poverty, Vulnerability, and Mobility
            during 1987-2012
This paper analyzes the Indian National
            Sample Survey data spanning 1987/88-2011/12 to uncover
            patterns of transition into and out of different classes of
            the consumption distribution. At the aggregate level, income
            growth has accelerated, accompanied by accelerating poverty
            decline. Underlying these trends is a process of mobility,
            with 40-60 percent of the population transitioning between
            consumption classes and increasing mobility over time. Yet,
            the majority of those who escape poverty remain vulnerable.
            Most of those who are poor were also poor in the preceding
            period and, thus, are likely to be chronically poor. The
            characteristics of upwardly mobile households contrast with
            those of the poor; these households are also far less likely
            to experience downward mobility. The paper also finds that
            states exhibit heterogenous mobility patterns.
Cabinet Size and Governance in
            Sub-Saharan Africa
There is frequent public and media
            concern over the cost of bloated cabinets in many
            Sub-Saharan African countries. Scholarship on elite
            clientelism links cabinet positions with corruption and
            practices that undermine sound policy making. This paper
            presents new data on the number of ministers in African
            governments and shows a negative association with several
            measures of governance. The associations are robust in a
            regression framework that exploits within-country variation
            over time and accounts for various potential confounders.
            These patterns suggest that policy makers, donors,
            investors, and citizens should pay close attention to the
            number of ministers appointed to the cabinet. Although the
            paper cautions against simplistic policy prescriptions, a
            sizable increase in the number of ministers is likely bad
            news for governance.
Trade Facilitation in Services : A
            Conceptual and Empirical Analysis
Beyond their key contribution to value
            chains in all sectors, services represent a centrally
            important source of economic and export diversification.
            This paper discusses how to promote trade in services as a
            channel for growth, employment, and diversification by
            assessing services trade costs and identifying policies that
            contribute to their reduction: a concept termed trade
            facilitation in services. It summarizes the latest research
            on the costs facing trade in services beyond discriminatory
            market access and national treatment and finds that these
            are high. It proposes measures that could fall under the
            scope of a potential trade facilitation in services agenda,
            namely: (i) streamlining processes and procedures used in
            administering regulatory policies aside from the policy
            itself, (ii) improving access to information on regulatory
            policies (that is, transparency), and (iii) boosting the
            efficiency of governance structures for regulators that set
            policies affecting trade in services.
Trade Facilitation in Services :
            Concepts and Empirical Importance
This paper examines the concept of trade
            facilitation in services from the perspective of the recent
            literature on the determinants of services trade. The aim is
            to conceptualize trade facilitation in this area as a
            dimension of international integration beyond the baseline
            restrictiveness of policy, as captured by indicators of
            discriminatory market access. The analysis focuses on the
            role of governance structures, institutions, and
            transparency in shaping the environment for trading in
            services internationally. In addition to examining these
            factors, the paper provides some novel empirical estimates.
            Using a gravity model, the analysis finds that the ad
            valorem equivalents of common measures of institutional
            quality, governance, and transparency are larger relative to
            measures of sheer policy restrictiveness, frequently a
            significant multiple. The paper also shows that the ad
            valorem equivalents of data restrictions are of similar
            magnitude to policy restrictions in services. The conclusion
            is that framing discussions of trade facilitation in
            services around the concept of reducing trade costs --
            specifically those stemming from areas where improvement is
            needed in governance, institutions, and transparency --
            could potentially bring significant benefits in increased
            integration of the global services economy.