rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Conflicts of interest in
            self-regulation : can demutualized exchanges successfully
            manage them
The author examines the implications of
            demutualization of financial exchanges for their roles as
            self-regulatory organizations. Many regulators and exchanges
            believe that conflicts of interest increase when exchanges
            convert to for-profit businesses. Demutualization also
            changes the nature of an exchange's regulatory role as
            broker-dealers' ownership interests are reduced. These
            factors are leading to reduced regulatory roles for
            exchanges in many jurisdictions. The resulting changes have
            significant implications for regulation of financial
            markets, especially as exchanges are the only
            self-regulating organizations (SROs) in most countries.
            Major changes in the role of exchanges require a rethinking
            of the allocation of regulatory functions and the role of
            self-regulation, as well as stronger mechanisms to mitigate
            conflicts of interest. Carson looks at the views of both
            exchanges and regulators on these issues in Asian, European,
            and North American jurisdictions where major exchanges have
            converted to for-profit businesses. He finds that views on
            the conflicts of interest faced by demutualized exchanges
            vary widely. In addition, the tools and processes used by
            exchanges and regulators to manage conflicts also differ
            significantly across jurisdictions. The author concludes
            that new and greater conflicts result from demutualization
            and canvasses the regulatory responses in the jurisdictions examined.
Designing natural gas distribution
            concessions in a megacity: tradeoffs beetween scale
            economies and information disclosure in Mexico City
In 1995 the Mexican government initiated
            structural reform of the natural gas sector-reform that
            permitted private investment in transportation, storage,
            distribution, trade and marketing while maintaining a State
            monopoly in production. It prepared a detailed regulatory
            framework to implement the sector liberalization, including
            an element to develop distribution systems through
            concessions in specific geographic areas. The concessions
            are bid and the winner is permitted physical exclusivity for
            12 years in gas distribution but not in gas marketing. In
            each concession award process a distribution geographical
            area is defined and minimum consumer coverage targets are
            established. Bidders present technical and financial
            proposals, including a market demand study. The winning
            proposal must be technically sound and offer the lowest
            average revenue for the first five-year period. Densely
            populated geographic areas pose a problem for exclusivity in
            distribution. If the concession is granted to a single firm,
            scale economies might be very attractive, but regulating a
            mega-monopoly would be difficult. If the distribution area
            is subdivided, economies of scale decrease while information
            for comparative regulation increases. These and such
            elements as technical characteristics of the geographic area
            and potential for competition in related services were
            considered when designing natural gas distribution
            franchises for the Mexico City Metropolitan Area.
Labor market reforms, growth, and
            unemployment in labor-exporting countries in the Middle East
            and North Africa
This paper studies the impact of labor
            market policies on growth and unemployment in
            labor-exporting countries in the Middle East and North
            Africa. The analysis is based on a framework that captures
            many of the main features of the labor market in these
            countries. We conduct a variety of policy experiments,
            including a reduction in payroll taxation, cuts in public
            sector wages and employment, an increase in employment
            subsidies, a reduction in trade unions' bargaining
            power, and a composite reform program. Our key message is
            that to foster broad-based growth and job creation in the
            region, labor market reforms must not be viewed in isolation
            but rather as a component of a comprehensive program of
            structural reforms.
Development finance via diaspora
            bonds track record and potential
A diaspora bond is a debt instrument
            issued by a country - or potentially, a sub-sovereign entity
            or a private corporation - to raise financing from its
            overseas diaspora. Israel and India have raised $35-40
            billion using these bonds. Drawing on their experiences,
            this paper discusses the rationale, methodology, and factors
            affecting the issuance of diaspora bonds for raising
            external development finance. The Government of Israel has
            offered a flexible menu of diaspora bonds since 1951 to keep
            the Jewish diaspora engaged. The Indian authorities, in
            contrast, have used this instrument for balance of payments
            support, to raise financing during times when they had
            difficulty in accessing international capital markets.
            Diaspora bonds are often sold at a premium to the diaspora
            members, thus fetching a "patriotic" discount in
            borrowing costs. Besides patriotism or the desire to do good
            in the investor's country of origin, such a discount
            can also be explained by the fact that diaspora investors
            may be more willing and able to take on sovereign risks of
            default in hard currency as well as devaluation as they may
            have local currency liabilities and they may be able to
            influence the borrower's decision to service such debt.
            The paper discusses several conditions for successful
            diaspora bond issuance having a sizeable diaspora,
            especially first-generation migrants, is understandably an
            important factor affecting the issuance of diaspora bonds.
            Countries with strong and transparent legal systems for
            contract enforcement are likely to find it easier to issue
            such bonds. Absence of civil strife is a plus. While not a
            pre-requisite, presence of national banks and other
            institutions in destination countries facilitates the
            marketing of bonds to the diaspora.
Malaysian capital controls
Malaysian authorities implemented
            controls on international capital flows late in the Asian
            crisis, when most of the portfolio outflows had already
            occurred. The exchange rate had depreciated sharply and was
            fixed at an undervalued level, making further capital flight
            unlikely. The turnaround in the stock market, the return of
            positive GDP growth, the building of reserves, and the
            relaxation of interest rates all coincided with the
            imposition of controls. But the same changes took place in
            other crisis countries that did not follow the same control
            policies. However, the controls provided insurance against
            the consequences of possible further disturbances. They
            created a breathing space for making needed reforms, and the
            authorities made good use of this time, stabilizing the
            financial system and pushing ahead with regulatory and
            supervisory reform for the financial sector and capital
            markets - a prerequisite for fully liberalizing the capital
            account. Malaysia incurred a cost: an additional 300 basis
            point spread paid on floating rate debt for a period after
            the controls were instituted. But the exit strategy has so
            far not resulted in lasting flight of portfolio capital.
            Foreign direct investment remains below precrisis levels,
            but it is not possible at this stage to attribute this to
            the effect of controls. On balance, it appears that both the
            benefits from and the costs of the controls have been modest.
The uniqueness of short-term collateralization
The author finds evidence that lines of
            credit secured by accounts receivable are associated with
            business borrowers with a high risk of default. While an
            unsecured short-term loan is repaid from the borrower's
            future cash flow, a loan secured by accounts receivable (a
            unique form of "inside" collateral) is repaid from
            previously generated and observed sales (the borrower's
            trade credit terms to its customers). Consequently, lenders
            that secure accounts receivable are most concerned with the
            credit risk of the borrower's customers and the
            borrower's ability to continue to generate new sales. A
            stylized theoretical model demonstrates that the value of a
            secured line-of-credit loan in minimizing contracting costs
            is associated with the borrower's business risk and the
            quality of the borrower's customers. Empirical tests on
            a sample of publicly traded U.S. manufacturing firms find
            that firms with secured line of credit loans are observably
            riskier and have fewer expected growth opportunities. The
            author's findings suggest that observably riskier
            borrowers can borrow more on a secured than on an unsecured
            basis. The results highlight the important role of secured
            letters of credit in providing liquidity to risky,
            credit-constrained firms that might not have access to
            external financing through other channels.
When do special interests run
            rampant disentangling the role in banking crises of
            elections, incomplete information, and checks and balances
The author investigates the political
            determinants of government decisions that benefit special
            interest groups - especially government decisions to deal
            with banking crises. He finds that the better informed the
            voters, the more proximate elections, and the larger the
            number of political veto players ( conditional on the costs
            to voters of relevant policy decision), the smaller the
            government's fiscal transfer are to the financial
            sector and the less likely the government is to exercise
            forbearance in dealing with insolvent financial
            institutions. The results suggest that policies that might
            be appropriate for mitigating banking crises in the United
            States might be less effective in settings where voters are
            less informed, where elections are less competitive, and
            where there are fewer veto players, because in these
            settings checks and balances are missing. These policies
            include: a) Disseminating information about the costs of
            inefficient government decisions. b) Improving the structure
            of legislative regulatory oversight. c) Intervening early in
            insolvent banks. The author concludes that the more veto
            players there are, the less likely policies are to favor
            special interest groups (contrary to previous views).
            Moreover, the closer the elections, the less likely policies
            are to favor special interest groups.
Gender dimensions of pension reform
            in the Former Soviet Union
The authors analyze the gender
            implications of pension reform in Kazakhstan, the Kygyz
            Republic, Latvia, and Moldova. The new systems deliberately
            penalize early retirement and reward longer careers, so that
            with no change in behavior or policy, women's pensions
            will be lower than men's on average. Still, the
            implicit financial returns for women remain higher on
            average than returns for men, because of women's longer
            life expectancy and because of redistributory minimum
            pensions. Overall, however, the net change in wealth
            resulting from the reforms will be larger on average for men
            than for women, because they will work longer and get a
            larger pension. Women's longer life expectancy means
            that women can expect to spend the last years of their lives
            alone. If their pensions are too low because of their work
            histories, poverty among elderly women may increase.
Measuring poverty dynamics and
            inequality in transition economies - disentangling real
            events from noisy data
The author uses instrumental variable
            methods, and the decomposition of income into transitory and
            persistent components to distinguish underlying income
            inequality and changes in poverty from the effects
            attributable to measurement error or transitory shocks. He
            applies this methodology to household-level panel data for
            Russia and Poland in the mid-1990s. The author finds that:
            1) Accounting for noise in the data reduces inequality (as
            measured by the Gini coefficient) by 10-45 percent. 2)
            Individuals in both countries face much economic insecurity.
            The median absolute annual change in income or spending is
            about fifty percent in Russia, and about 20 percent in
            Poland. But roughly half of these fluctuations reflect
            measurement error or transitory shocks, so underlying levels
            of income, and spending are much more stable than the data
            suggest. 3) The apparent high levels of economic mobility
            are driven largely by transitory events and noisy data.
            After transitory shocks are accounted for, about eighty
            percent of the poor in both Russia and Poland remain in
            poverty for at least one year. So there is a real risk of an
            entrenched underclass emerging in these transition economies.
Infrastructure coverage and the poor
            : the global perspective
The authors use the World Bank's
            Living Standards Measurement Study (LSMS) surveys from 15
            countries (covering more than 55,500 households) to examine
            the relationship between infrastructure coverage and
            household income. The results show that throughout the world
            all income groups have much higher levels of coverage for
            electricity than for other formal infrastructure services
            (in-house piped water service, sewerage service, and private
            telephone service). In many countries most households in
            urban areas now have electricity service. As monthly
            household incomes increase from $100 to $250, coverage of
            all these infrastructure services rises, but at different
            rates. The findings confirm that the very poor rarely have
            these infrastructure services - with exceptions. The very
            poor often do have electricity if they live in urban areas.
            The very poor in Eastern Europe and Central Asia have much
            higher levels of coverage than those elsewhere in the world;
            they often have electricity, water, sewer, and telephone
            services. The results also suggest that if the poor gain
            access to services in their communities, many will decide to connect.
Inventories in developing countries
            : levels and determinants - a red flag for competitiveness
            and growth
Raw materials inventories in the
            manufacturing sector in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were two
            to five times as high in developing countries as in the
            United States, despite the fact that in most developing
            countries real interest rates are at least twice as high.
            Given the high cost of capital in most developing countries,
            these high inventory levels have an enormous impact on the
            cost of doing business and on productivity and
            competitiveness. Poor infrastructure and ineffective
            regulation as well as deficiencies in market development -
            rather than the interest rates and uncertainty - are the
            main determinants of these differences. Cross-country
            estimates show that a one-standard-deviation improvement in
            infrastructure reduces raw materials inventories by 27-47
            percent. Poorly functioning markets, as measured by the
            ratio of transfers and subsidies to GDP, are also an
            important factor, with a one-standard-deviation improvement
            leading to a 19-30 percent reduction in raw materials
            inventories. The authors show that these reductions in raw
            materials inventories are not offset by a reduction in
            finished goods inventories upstream. The policy implications
            are clear and strong. Improvements in infrastructure (roads,
            ports, and telecommunications) can help to significantly
            reduce inventory levels (and thus the cost of doing
            business), especially when accompanied by effective
            regulation and the development and deregulation of
            associated markets.
Implicit pension debt, transition
            cost, options, and impact of China's pension reform : a
            computable general equilibrium analysis
The main problems with China's
            pension system--the pension burdens of state enterprises and
            the agency of the population--have deepened in recent years.
            Using a new computable general equilibrium model that
            differentiates between three types of enterprise ownership
            and 22 groups in the labor force, the authors estimate the
            effects of pension reform in China, comparing various
            options for financing the transition cost. They examine the
            impact that various reform options would have on the
            system's sustainability, on overall economic growth,
            and on income distribution. The results are promising. The
            current pay-as-you-go system, with a notional individual
            account, remains unchanged in the first scenario examined.
            Simulations show this system to be unsustainable. Expanding
            coverage under this system would improve financial viability
            in the short run but weaken it in the long run. Other
            scenarios assume that the transition cost will be financed
            by various taxes and that a new, fully funded individual
            account will be established in 2001. The authors compare the
            impact of a corporate tax, a value-added tax, a personal
            income tax, and a consumption tax. They estimate the annual
            transition cost to be about 0.6 percent of Gross Domestic
            Product (GDP) between 2000 and 2010, declining to 0.3
            percent by 2050. Using a personal income tax to finance the
            transition cost would best promote economic growth and
            reduce income inequality. Levying a social security tax and
            injecting fiscal resources to finance the transition costs
            would help make the reformed public pillar sustainable. To
            finance a benefit of 20 percent of the average wage, a
            contribution rate of only 10 percent-12.5 percent would be
            enough to balance the basic pension pillar. Gradually
            increasing the retirement age would further reduce the
            contribution rate.
Catastrophe risk management : using
            alternative risk financing and insurance pooling mechanisms
Residual stochastic risks from
            catastrophic natural events can be addressed through
            insurance pooling and risk transfer mechanisms that provide
            the basis for financial protection and instill strong
            incentives for reducing vulnerability. To reduce the
            economic stress after disasters, the author shows, World
            Bank instruments could be used to support initiaitves to
            help correct market imperfections in catastrophe insurance.
            He takes a step-by-step approach to showing how both risk
            pooling structures and alternative catastrophe coverage
            mechanisms (long-maturity risk financing facilities,
            weather-indexed contracts, and capital market instruments)
            can achieve better risk protection and financing
            terms--enough to allow the expansion of insurance coverage
            of public assets and private property. The author examines
            the insurable assets (private and public) in eight countries
            in the easternmost part of the Caribbean and, by quantifying
            the portion of the premium and risk used to fund catastrophe
            losses, shows that through pooling and the use of
            credit-type instruments for catastrophe coverage,
            governments and uninsured property owners or enterprises
            (with insurable assets) could expect to improve their terms
            of coverage. Neither local insurers nor reinsurers would
            suffer in profitability. The risk management options the
            author examines could lead to real benefits for all
            participants (buyers and sellers) in insurance markets. But
            four factors are essential for ensuring the integrity of any
            participatory insurance scheme for providing risk management
            in disaster-prone areas such as the Caribbean: 1) stronger
            regulatory requirements and supervision in the insurance
            sector; 2) Broad-based, pooled catastrophe funding
            structures with efficient risk transfer tools; 3) Public
            insurance policies linked to programs for loss reduction in
            uninsured sectors; and 4) Stronger risk assessment and
            enforcement of such structural measures as zoning and
            compliance with building codes.