rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Bangladesh’s impressive performance in poverty reduction, however, is not uniform across the country; although overall poverty has declined, the incidence of poverty is much higher in lagging regions (greater Rangpur). For example, HIES findings suggest that, while the rural poverty-headcount rate nationwide was 43.8 percent in 2005, the greater Rangpur (northwest) region had a rural poverty rate of 57.4 percent (Table 1). Incidence of extreme poverty was also much higher in the northwest (43 percent) than the nationwide rural average (28.6 percent).

Figure 1, which shows per capita monthly consumption at 18 points during the year (spaced at 20-day intervals), suggests that (i) household consumption per capita is much lower in the northwest than in other regions year round and (ii) seasonal fluctuation in expenditures is greater in the northwest than in the rest of the country (Khandker 2009). The northwest region also experiences a sharp shortfall in food consumption during certain months of the year, which produces cyclical food insecurity.

<!-- Start of picture text --> 1600.0<br>1400.0<br>1200.0<br>1000.0<br>Rangpur<br>800.0<br>Rest of Bangladesh<br>600.0<br>400.0<br>200.0<br>0.0<br>1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17<br>Per capita expenditure (Tk./month)<br><!-- End of picture text --> Source: HIES survey, 2005.

**Figure 1: Distribution of per capita expenditure**

7
in leverage to almost 50 percent by December 2002 is attributed largely to the impact of devaluation of the Brazilian Real over 2002 on the company’s US dollar denominated debt.

To get a full picture of the total leverage created by AES’ acquisition of the company, however, we need to look at debt levels in the project-financing structure—that is, the chain of companies through which AES owns its interests in Eletropaulo, as shown in Figure 3.

To help finance the purchase of Eletropaulo, the Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) loaned $1.1 billion. This money was loaned not to AES directly, but to the entities in the financing structure. The implications of lending the money in this way were that:

- What appears as equity in Eletropaulo’s balance sheet is in fact largely debt, borrowed by a company in the financing structure and then reinvested as equity in Eletropaulo.

- Because BNDES lent to the project finance companies, and not to AES itself, the loan can only be repaid if Eletropaulo generates enough dividends to allow the companies in the financing structure to service their debts. The loan is nonrecourse to AES; that is, if the project finance companies default on the loan, AES is under no obligation to repay BNDES.

- The net effect of this is that an asset valued at $3.6 billion must generate enough cash to service a debt of $2.8 billion (the sum of Eletropaulo’s debt and BNDES lending to the AES financing companies). As shown in Table 4, this creates effective leverage of almost 80 percent.

**Table 4: Eletropaulo and AES—total debt position (as at 31 December 2002)** US$ millions

||Assets|Debt|
|---|---|---|
|Eletropaulo Metropolitana|$3,600|$1,670|
|BNDES loans||$1,120|
|Total|$3,600|$2790|
|Leverage: 78 percent|||

Notes: Includes short- and long-term debt (principal and accrued interest) for Eletropaulo and its subsidiaries. Figures reported in Brazilian Real are converted at the exchange rate as of 31 December 2002, R$/US$ = 3.5333. Source: AES 2002 Annual Report, Eletropaulo Quarterly Report, 4<sup>th</sup> Quarter 2002.

BNDES’ security for its loans was the equity in Eletropaulo held by the companies in the AES financing structure. The complex financing structure adopted meant that there were now two ways in which a financial crisis at Eletropaulo could trigger a default on debt:

- The company itself could default on its debts.

- Eletropaulo could fail to generate sufficient dividends to allow the AES financing companies to service their debt to BNDES. If this happened, BNDES would have

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# **<mark>Box 2: The Deal of the Century—Temasek’s Acquisition of Thai Shin Corporation</mark>**

<mark>In January 2006, the family of former Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra decided to sell 47.7 percent of its equity share in Shin Corporation, the flagship of the family’s business empire, to Temasek, the Singapore’s Government investment arm, for US$ 1.8 billion. The nationality of the politically charged company immediately became the focus of public scrutiny since Singtel, the Singaporean state-owned telecommunications operator, already owned a 20 percent equity share in Shin Corp prior to the block sale. Shin Corp’s nationality will directly affect many of its subsidiaries—such as the cellular phone operator, AIS, television channel operator, ITV, satellite operator Shin Satellite, and low cost airline operator, Thai Air Asia as they are all engaged in service businesses where the Thai Foreign Business Act 1999 restricts direct foreign equity ownership to 49 percent. If Shin Corp were to be considered a foreign-owned company, then the foreign equity limit of all its subsidiaries would have been breached.</mark> <mark>To get around the Thai law that limits foreign direct equity holding of 49%, the deal detailed a very complex structure as shown in the following exhibition:</mark>

# **<mark>Ownership Chain of AIS, a cellular phone subsidiary of Shin Corp</mark>**

<!-- Start of picture text --> Source: Nikomborirak and Tawannakul (2006).<br>As can be seen from the illustration, the Shin Corp deal was structured with several layers of foreign equity holding<br>up the company’s ownership chain to ensure Temasek’s effective corporate control while complying with the 49<br>percent foreign equity restriction. To begin with, to ensure that Shin Corp remained a Thai legal entity, Cedar<br>Holding was created to assume the 51 percent Thai equity share, while Temasek owned the remaining 44.14 percent<br>foreign equity share through Aspen Holding and Anderton Investment. In addition, to ensure that Cedar holding<br>was in turn a Thai legal entity, Temasak managed to find a genuine Thai partner, Siam Commercial Bank PCL that<br>agreed to hold 9.9 percent of Cedar holding’s equity. The remaining 41.1% mandatory Thai equity share went to a<br><!-- End of picture text --> 15
use the studies of Clemens et al. (2019) and Binswanger and Schunk (2012) to calibrate the psychic cost associated with migrating and the disutility from work, respectively. Finally, we take some ad-hoc values for the monetary cost of migrating based on the actual costs of visa and travel between Mexico and the US.

Under our baseline specification, our calibration suggests that a market for work permits would result in 33 million permits being exchanged at a price close to US$20,000. Migrant workers would earn an average of US$50,000 per year, thus increasing fiscal revenues for the US by 5%. Under this scenario, permit sellers would not only gain in terms of leisure but would experience an average net income gain of roughly US$10,000. This increase in income of native permit sellers will reduce the poverty rate by 3 percentage points from a 2018 initial condition of 12.3% (Semega et al., 2019). An interesting simulation consists of varying a tax that a government would put on work permits and reallocating the proceeds of the tax to these same permit sellers _in a lumpsum (unconditional)_ manner. Increasing the tax, while remaining below the monopolist’s markup, would shrink the set of direct beneficiaries of the market for work permits and at the same time increase tax revenues and hence the size of the cash transfer made on top of the permit price. We find that, given the price elasticity of the demand for work permits, tax policy can potentially eradicate poverty in the US: a 140 percent tax, the proceeds of which are redistributed to the set of permit sellers, would bring the poverty rate down to 2.9%. While these simulations should be viewed as illustrative rather than be taken at face value, they indicate the potential of a market-based solution to the problem of social safety nets for citizens displaced by migrant workers.

There are antecedents to the idea of a market-based immigration system proposed in this paper. For instance, Chiswick (1982), Becker and Nashat (1997), and Becker and Lazear (2013) propose to auction citizenship as opposed to granting it based on quotas and cumbersome rules. Similarly, Auriol and Mesnard (2016) propose the sale of visas as a way to crowd out informal migration channels. While these proposed schemes typically involved a government selling visas and citizenship papers, others have argued that citizens should 3
further limit our analysis to countries with a 2010 population of 1 million or more. Within each country, we limit our samples to the working age population, 15-65 years old. The countries that we use in our analysis, and the year each survey was conducted, are listed in table 1. We report results using data sets from 98 countries: 74 of which are low and middle income countries (by the World Bank definitions). The countries for which we have data represent 63% of the population of all low and middle income countries, and 46% of the population of high income countries. Unfortunately, the data base does not include a data set from the most populous country in the world, China, but the countries in our data represent 83% of the nonChinese population of low and middle income countries. All of the results presented in this paper are weighted by the sample frequency weights in each survey. Summary statistics for the regional and income group aggregations are weighted by the number of 15-65 year old workers in each country.<sup>3</sup>

# **IV. Characteristics of employers, own account workers, wage and salary employees, and nonpaid employees**

_Proportion of workers in each employment category_ Table 2 presents the distribution of workers between wage and salaried employment, non-paid employees, employers and own account workers, by region of the world and level of per capita GNI. We use the World Bank definition and divide countries into low income (less than 1006 U.S. 2010 PPP dollars), lower middle income countries (1,006-3,975 dollars), upper middle income countries (3,976-12,275 dollars) and high income countries (greater than 12,275 dollars).

Table 2 shows that self-employment is very common in developing countries. In low and middle income countries fewer than half of all workers are wage and salary employees, compared to over 85% in high income countries. As the GNI per capita of the country increases the percent of workers who are wage and salaried employees or employers increases, while the percent of workers who are own account or non-paid employees falls. In low income countries over 70% of workers are own account or non-paid employees, while in high income countries these workers make up only about 10% of workers.

In low and middle income countries more than 40% of workers are in agriculture (table 3). Because the meaning of self-employment, own account, employer and non-paid employee may

> 3 For most countries this is also done by using the sample frequency weights available in each survey.  In those surveys that did not include frequency weights, we constructed our own weights using the total number of 15-65 year old workers in each country as reported by the ILO on their LABORSTAT web site.  These countries are: Egypt, Mauritius, Syria, Turkey and Turkmenistan.

7
46

# G. Agenda for Future Research

The discussion of industrialized nations' experience<sup>wth adult training programs</sup> presented In this essay not only provides the background<sup>for the six lessons just listed, it also makes</sup> cleartha **t** here are a number of Issues conceming the retraining<sup>of displaced workers that warrant frther</sup> exploration. This final section briefly outlines<sup>four of these Issues.</sup> A first Issue revolves around the question of how to make sure<sup>that displaced workers</sup> who would benefit most from training services<sup>actually receive retraining. Sweden's comprehensive</sup> training system solves this problem by providing<sup>services to all unemployed</sup> workers, as well as to those employed workers at risk of unemployment. But since<sup>the programs of most other nations are specific</sup> to displaced worker and Involve the purchase of<sup>training services from external training providers,</sup> program officials face the dual problems of Identifying<sup>workers most In need in services and then making</sup> sure that the needs of targeted workers are effectively met. The discussion In Section D suggested<sup>that</sup> the Identification problem can be dealt with, as a firt approximation, by focusing on workers with low levels of educational attainment. The latter problem<sup>Is made more difficult by the common practice of</sup> reaching contracts with training providers that are<sup>performance</sup> based, gMng providers an Incentive to screen out those workers most urgently In need of assistance.<sup>Additional research Is needed on how</sup> contractual arrangements can be specffied that<sup>encourage performance by training providers as</sup> measured by such outcomes as job placement while still assuring that the least job ready receive<sup>needed</sup> services.

A related issue Is how best to mee **t** he needs of displaced<sup>workers who require enhanced</sup> basic math and communications skills before they can be considered employable<sup>or even ready to go</sup> on to job skills training. As noted in Section<sup>D, displaced worker retraining programs have seldom</sup> Included a basic education component. Fortunately, considerabl **e** xperience in the provision of<sup>basic</sup> educational services Is available for U.S. programs<sup>designed to Improve the labor market prospects of</sup> welfare recipients; and evidence from the four<sup>Minority Female Single Parent demonstration</sup> projects was briefly discussed in Section D. But further attention<sup>to the substantial</sup> body of research on U.S. welfare-
Policy Research Working Paper 5917

# **Abstract**

This paper looks into institutional and other macro determinants of prevalence of informal dependent employment, as well as informal self-employment, in European countries, using European Social Survey data on work without legal contract in on 30 countries, covering years 2004–2009. Consistently with theoretical predictions, quality of business environment has a significant negative impact on prevalence of both types of informal employment. The share of non-contracted employees is negatively affected by perceived quality of public services and positively related to economic growth. Informal self-employment is positively related to growth in Europe at large, as well as in Eastern and Southern Europe. The level of GDP per capita also has a positive impact on the prevalence of informal employment in Europe at large and within Eastern and Southern Europe, whilst an opposite effect is found in Western and Northern Europe. Other things equal, the share of non-contracted employees in the labor force across European countries increases with the minimum-toaverage wage ratio, with union density, with the share of first and second generation immigrants, and with income inequality, but falls with stricter employment protection legislation (EPL) and higher tax wedge on labor. Thus it appears that in Europe at large, labor cost effects of EPL and taxes are weaker than their impact via perceptions of job security and law enforcement, along with tax morale and the income effect. Yet the EPL effect on informality is positive (i.e., cost-related) when either Eastern and Southern Europe or Western and Northern Europe are considered separately. Furthermore, within Western and Northern Europe, the minimum wage effect is negative, whilst within Eastern and Southern Europe, the union effect is negative; in both cases, we offer a supply side explanation.

This paper is a product of the Human Development Economics Unit, Europe and Central Asia Region. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The author may be contacted at mihazan@lanet.lv.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
Policy Research Working Paper 10260

# **Abstract**

Child workers constitute a significant share of the Myanmar labor force, which has translated into an unprotected child labor market. Given the prevalence of issues surrounding school enrollment and dropout rates, this paper investigates the relationship between child work and education. Using data from the 2015 Labor Force survey, it studies what factors explain child work and how this can in turn affect schooling outcomes. The study differentiates between children’s household chores and wage work. To understand if these two types of activities affect schooling differently, the paper explores if and how work intensity (number of hours worked) plays a role. The findings show that child work has a negative correlation with school enrollment and attendance, to differing degrees depending on the type of work and work intensity, regardless of gender. Overall, wage work is negatively correlated with enrollment and attendance disproportionately more than household chores. Work intensity seems to play a smaller role, but it still matters when looking at girls’ participation in household chores. Working long hours does not seem to have a link with the likelihood of being enrolled and attending school, although it could affect learning outcomes as it reduces the amount of time dedicated to homework and study. However, the data source being some years old, the analysis may not fully reflect the most recent economic and social developments and conditions in Myanmar.

This paper is a product of the Poverty and Equity Global Practice. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/prwp. The authors may be contacted at emilie.perge@unsdsn.org, cdallaglio91@gmail.com, and ctsimponkengne@worldbank.org.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
of the tariff lines in a product category (we have a total of 98) are eligible. In this case, we continue to assign a value of 1 if any of the tariff lines in a category are eligible for that program. This is not a major concern for FTA, CBI, Andean and AGOA since a wide majority of the tariff lines in a given category are either eligible together or not at all. However, this generalization poses a problem for GSP since the eligibility is more limited and idiosyncratic. We address this issue with the second group of preference variables as discussed below. In the end, we have 90 product categories eligible for GSP and all 98 eligible for FTA in both 1997 and 2001. For the other programs, the Trade Act of 2000 made certain changes. For example, while 87 and 88 categories were eligible for CBI and Andean, respectively, in 1997, all 98 categories were eligible in 2001. AGOA was not in effect in 1997 and covers all categories in 2001. Sample statistics are reported in Table 1b.

The second set of preference indicators aims to measure how valuable the preferences actually are. There is almost a consensus among policymakers that preferential programs are saddled with many restrictions in the form of rules of origin requirements that impede their utilization (see Brenton [2003] ). It is frequently reported that in many categories only around 30% of all eligible exports enter the US and EU under preferences (World Bank [2003]). As a result, the presence of a preference in a category does not mean much when the beneficiary country cannot take advantage of it. To address this problem, we construct a variable denoted as Preference Utilizationijtk and calculated as follows: where κ denotes the set of countries eligible for preference program k and CVijtk is the customs value of exports from country i in category j under program k in year t. Thus, Pi∈κ<sup>CVijtkisthetotalimportsofcategoryjinyeartthatenteredtheU.S.underthe</sup> program k and<sup>P</sup> i∈κ<sup>CVijtisthetotalimportsoftheU.S.incategoryjinyeartfromall</sup> countries that are eligible under program k. Then, PreferenceUtilizationjtk of program k 9
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# _4.3. Denmark vs. Latin America and Israel_

The second question that arises when comparing the behavior of real variables during stabilization in Europe and Latin America is if the expansion that followed Denmark's exchange rate based stabilization was of the same sort as those observed in chronic inflation countries, i.e. generated by the belief that the program was temporary only, and that a major reversal of policy would take place sooner or later. We gave already some sort of negative answer when we compared Denmark to France and Ireland. We there showed how the Index of GES and the behavior of the stock market seemed to indicate that Danish consumers and firms were confident about stabilization.

In this section, we intend to show that there are some other indicators that reveal that the Danish expansion was quite different in nature from those observed in Latin America. We acknowledge, however, the inherent difficulty of such pursuit. Several statistics that one can think of as good indicators of speculative behavior might only reflect optimism about future output trends.

**Table 3. Real Share Prices in Chile and Denmark (Quarterly data)**

|Country|Factor by which Real Share<br>Prices should be multiplied<br>|
|---|---|
|Chile: 76.1 to 80.3|1<br>13.30<br>|
|Denmark: 80.1 to 86.1|T<br>_5.18_|

_Sources:_ IMFIFS for Chile and Mexico; OECD Main Economic Indicators for Denmark.

The behavior of the stock market is one such indicator. Ramos (1986) notes that the stock market boomed during each of the Southern Cone Stabilizations. Perhaps, the magnitude of the boom may help us distinguish between speculative and optimistic behavior. We analyzed the cases of Chile during the Tablita, and Denmark. There are two quite astonishing differences among these two countries. The first is the dramatic reversal in real share prices experienced by Chile. The second, is the size of the boom