rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
(regressions reported in Table 4). Indeed for the madrasas (which maintain strict dress code covering the whole body and disciplinary rules restricting social interactions at school), there is no statistically significant effect of arsenic poisoning at home. However, the effect is negative and statistically significant for school sample where children are not subjected to restrictions on dress code and have greater opportunity to ostracise someone on the basis of his/her physical/personal attributes. Similar results are obtained if we further control for classroom fixed-effects (regressions not reported).

# **5 Conclusion**

Arsenic today threatens millions of people in Bangladesh, West Bengal, Thailand and elsewhere in the USA, China and South America. Although the health consequences of such natural disaster are well-documented, very little is known on the negative impact on children’s developmental outcomes. We have drawn upon primary data on secondary school children of arsenic affected and unaffected households in Bangladesh, a country that has experienced the most severe form of arsenic poising to date.

We find a robust negative relationship between arsenicosis and test score. Given that health is an important input in educational production and children in arsenicosis-affected households have poorer health, this finding is unsurprising. Given the finding that cognitive development of children is negatively affected by arsenic, reducing exposure for this vulnerable group forms an important policy objective. We show that drinking water from a contaminated source at home is a significant route of exposure, net of school level exposure. Although arsenic poisoning of tube wells at school also serves as an additional route of exposure, for rampant school switching at the end of the primary cycle and lack of detailed data on pollution status of tube wells in primary school, we were unable to assess the actual impact of school level exposure – we have information on pollution status of current (secondary) school and only control for past school level exposure in an indirect manner (i.e. controls for various past schooling inputs that may be correlated with pollution status of primary school tube well). Knowledge of the relative effect of arsenicosis at home and school is important as policy makers may seek to target all places where children potentially 14
# **<u>Appendix A: Supplemental Tables</u>**

|**Appendix Table A1: Basic Demog**|**raphic C**|**haracteristic**|**s of Sample**||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|**Variable**|**Obs**|**%**|**Mean**|**Std.**|
|||||**Dev.**|
|Women|494|51.7%|||
|Men|462|48.3%|||
|Households with matched monogamous|422|73.7%|||
|couples|||||
|**Number of households by province**<sup>**16**</sup>**:**|||||
|Davao Oriental|119|28.2%|||
|Davao del Sur|92|21.8%|||
|Sarangani|25|5.9%|||
|North Cotabato|15|3.6%|||
|Sultan Kudarat|44|10.4%|||
|Misamis Oriental|41|9.7%|||
|Bukidnon|28|6.6%|||
|Surigao del Sur|2|0.5%|||
|Albay<sup>17</sup>|28|6.6%|||
|Camarines Sur<sup>16</sup>|28|6.6%|||
|Husband age<sup>18</sup>|||54.43|12.32|
|Wife age|||49.84|12.89|
|Age difference (husband’s age – wife’s age)|||4.34|6.41|
|Couples in formal marriages||91.7%|||
|Couples in common-law marriages||8.3%|||
|Agrarian reform beneficiary’s<sup>19</sup>education level|||7.03|3.42|
|(years)|||||
|Per capita monthly household income (PHP)|||4762.02|6319.78|
|Household below national food poverty|347|80.7%|||
|income threshold|||||
|Women with non-farm income|222|52.6%|||
|Men with non-farm income|244|57.8%|||
|Female agrarian reform beneficiary|107|25.36%|||
|Parcels tilled by household|||1.52|0.77|
|Parcels formally owned by household<sup>20</sup>|||1.17|0.43|
|Household size|||4.64|2.26|

# **Appendix Table A2: Key Decision-making Questions and Answer Options**

|**Question:**<br>**Answer options:**|
|---|
|**Household Activities:**|

16 All statistics are limited to matched couples in our data set.

17 Province is in the island of Luzon.

18 Data on age and income were gathered in the initial baseline survey carried out in 2016 and 2017.

19 Agrarian reform beneficiaries are the spouse who was the primary recipient of the agricultural parcel awarded through CARP.

20 We consider parcels “formally owned” when the household possesses an official title document for the land. This includes all parcels received through CARP.

31
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<mark>rich but also in low and middle income countries, and technology has not led to the widespread improvements in governance that many had predicted, for example, as seen by the aftermath of the protest movements in the Middle East and North Africa known as the “Arab Spring.” Technology is obviously not the cause of these trends, but it is important to ask why they are happening despite its supposedly transformational role.</mark> <mark>This is the core question asked in the 2016 edition of the World Bank’s World Development Report</mark> _<mark>Digital Dividends</mark>_ <mark>. The report reviews the empirical evidence of the impact of digital technologies on economic growth, opportunity for individuals, and public service delivery. Using a simple framework discussed in the next section, it presents many examples of benefits accrued to firms, workers and governments. But it also identifies a number of risks: Firms in poorer countries adopt digital technologies much more slowly than expected. Automation, increasingly of mid-level white collar jobs, is contributing to a shift of income from labor to capital and a hollowing out of the labor market, even in many developing countries. And despite large investments, e-government initiatives too often fail to improve how public services are delivered. Drawing on the economic literature in several subfields, the report concludes that digital technology will contribute to development less than expected when important “analog complements” are absent. Firms and farms will not invest in productivity enhancing technology when they are sheltered from competition. Workers will not gain, if limited skills do not allow them to leverage technology rather than be replaced by it. And governments will not have the incentives to deploy technology to empower citizens and deliver better services when institutions are not accountable. In other words,</mark> _<mark>digital dividends</mark>_ <mark>—faster growth, more jobs and better services—will fall short if digital investments are not accompanied by long overdue reforms in a country’s business regulations, skills development systems, and public sector governance.</mark> <mark>Drawing on the lessons from the World Development Report 2016 (WDR), this paper provides a brief review of the impact of new digital technologies on development in the rural sector of developing countries. The following section introduces a simple framework of technology’s impacts. ICTs support development objectives principally by allowing more people and firms to participate in markets (inclusion), by making existing factors more productive (efficiency), and by supporting large economies of scale enabling new business models (innovation). The following sections apply this framework to the rural space, stressing the role of information,</mark> 3
In Colombia, as in the vast majority of countries in the region, indirect taxes plus subsidies tend to be equalizers. In other words, the Gini coefficient associated with consumable income, the income that considers subsidies and indirect taxes, is relatively lower than that observed for disposable income. However, these two coefficients are not statistically different (Figure IV-6). In the case of Colombia, the effect of indirect taxes plus subsidies is similar to the average for Latin American countries. Finally, after Argentina, Uruguay, and Brazil, Colombia is the country whose transfers in education and health services reduce inequality to a greater extent (Figure IV-6). In the case of Argentina, this last impact results in a 0.111 point drop in the Gini coefficient, while for Colombia, it is 0.06.

<!-- Start of picture text --> FIGURE IV-6 : GINI COEFFICIENTS FOR LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES<br>(PENSIONS CONSIDERED DIRECT TRANSFERS)<br>0.6<br>0.55 0.551<br>0.517 0.515<br>0.5<br>0.45 0.455<br>0.4<br>0.35<br>0.3<br>0.25<br>Market Income plus Disposable Income Consumable Income Final Income<br>pensions<br>Argentina Uruguay Ecuador Perú Brazil<br>Venezuela Chile Colombia LAC<br>Source: The Impact of Taxes and Social Spending on Income Distribution and Poverty in Latin America. An Application of the<br>Commitment to Equity Methodology (CEQ), 2017. World Bank Group estimates for Colombia using the ENPH 2017<br><!-- End of picture text -->

# iii. The impact on poverty

In addition to the impact on inequality, which measures the relative position of households in the income distribution, it is important to measure the impacts on poverty, the results of which depend on the value of household income with respect to the poverty line defined. The results suggest that the combination of taxes paid by households, with transfers and subsidies,<sup>46</sup> would induce a poverty reduction in Colombia. However, none of the changes is statistically significant. That said, the percentage of people whose market income plus pensions were below the official poverty line, which is equivalent to US$ 5.4 dollars per day per person (2011 PPP), is 39.1 percent (Table IV-1), and once the transfers and subsidies received by the household are considered, and the taxes paid by the household are subtracted, the percentage of people below the poverty line decreases to 38.8 percent. However, as mentioned above, this change is not statistically significant.

When the international poverty lines of US$ 5.5 and US$ 3.2 per day per person (2011 PPP) are used, the poverty incidence decreases 0.3 and 2.6 percentage points respectively, although none of these changes is statistically significant. The direct transfers received by households explain most of this reduction. While the net effect of indirect taxes and subsidies increases poverty, this negative effect is outpaced by the

> 46 It is important to note that this exercise did not include fuel subsidies (gasoline and diesel) due to lack of administrative information.

31
This discussion should take into account three main issues concerning the implementation of a poverty mapping for improving the design of household surveys: i) the capacities of National Statistical Offices to perform poverty mappings; ii) the problem of performing a poverty mapping when the census has been conducted too long ago; and iii) the variability affecting the mean per capita consumption per PSU in the poverty mapping exercise.

Concerning issue i), the poverty mapping exercise was initially quite an intensive procedure, which needed high econometric capacity and, therefore, only highly skilled World Bank consultants were able to implement it. In order to apply the ELL approach, the World Bank research team has developed a user-friendly software that can easily be implemented inside National Statistical Offices. PovMap version 2.1, the latest version as of 2015,<sup>3</sup> provides computational solutions to all stages of poverty mapping activities. However, the new methods mentioned earlier are developed only in a Stata module produced by a team of researchers at the World Bank.<sup>4</sup> This software is valid for use when there is a recent census available and a recent Household Budget Survey (or World Bank format of Living Standard Measurement Survey, LSMS) also available.

Concerning issue ii), often the question may be: “What should be done when the poverty map is too old?” In some countries or cases, the poverty map may be too old or not updated enough in order to properly implement the methodology proposed in this paper. This may occur primarily because a census is usually conducted every 10 years. There are two possible solutions depending on the type of recent household survey that is available. In the case of a recent HBS or LSMS, the proposed methodology could take into account the so-called “updated” or “further-updated” poverty maps that are prepared with recent methodologies developed under World Bank projects. In particular, Dabalen and Ferrè (2008) have shown how to implement the Lemieux (2002) approach to link the new HBS with the old HBS, and then update the poverty mapping through the use of the old Census. Moreover, Betti _et al._ (2013) have demonstrated that this updating is still

> 3 https://www.worldbank.org/en/research/brief/software-for-poverty-mapping. 4 The Stata package is available here https://github.com/pcorralrodas/SAE-Stata-Package.

20
On balance, developing countries gained a lot more out of the Uruguay Round than could possibly have been anticipated in advance.<sup>2</sup> During the period when the Uruguay Round was being negotiated, and subsequently as the WTO came into being and undertakings from the Round have been implemented, developing countries were simultaneously engaged in liberalizing their own trade regimes, generally unilaterally. As they have done so, the importance of the international economy to them has increased greatly. Not only has the share of trade in GDP risen markedly in many developing countries, but overall development strategies are based on reliance on the international market. As uniform incentives for exporting are set at reasonable levels, export growth depends crucially on access to markets. A rapidly-growing and open international economy is in the interests of all countries, but especially of those whose development prospects are now tied to the success of an outer-oriented development strategy.<sup>3</sup> At the same time, threats are arising to the multilateral trading system, especially in the form of proliferating preferential trading arrangements, but also with increased resort to antidumping measures and other forms of implicit protection not now covered under WTO rules. Indeed, there is considerable risk that the trend toward an increasingly multilateral liberalized international trading system of the past half century may be reversed. Many observers, including the present writer, are calling for a start of a new round of multilateral trade negotiations, both to 2 See Dani Rodrik, "Developing Countries after the Uruguay Round", paper prepared for the Group of 24, Mimeo. August 1994, Will Martin and L. Alan Winters, editors, The Uruguay Round and the Developing Countries, Cambridge University Press, 1996, and T. N. Srinivasan, Developing Countries and the Multilateral Trading System, Westview Press, 1998. for comprehensive surveys and assessments of the achievements of the developing countries in the Uruguay Round.

3 The rapid growth of the international economy was always important to developing countries, even under import substitution. Indeed, it can be argued that the rapid growth of the international economy enabled developing countries to pursue import-substitution strategies for far longer, and with far smaller costs in terms of foregone 2
Policy Research Working Paper 9219

# **Abstract**

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.

This paper is a product of the Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation 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 xcirera@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
**PHN 1992 Sector Review**

19 _Table 6: Classification of FY92 PHN Projects by Poverty Objectives_ **_and_** _Content_

||Category I|Cateory 2|Category 3|
|---|---|---|---|
|REGION|Multisectoral<br>Interventions for Poverty<br>Alleviation|Provision of Basic Social<br>Services to Poor and Vlnerable<br>Groups as Primary Objective|PHN Sector Interventions<br>Whose Benefits to Poor Are<br>Important, But Not Primary<br>Objective|
|AFRICA|Rwanda|Equatorial Guinea<br>Mauritania<br>Niger<br>| Sao Tome|Kenya|
||EASTASIA|II||China|
|ECA<br>l<br>_<br>_<br>_<br>__<br>_<br>_|1<br>ll<br>_<br>_<br>_<br>_<br>_<br>_<br>_<br>_|<br>l__<br>_<br>_<br>_<br>_<br>_<br>__<br>_<br>_<br>_<br>_<br>_<br>_<br>i~~~~~~~~~~~~~~i|||Poland<br>|i_<br>R om ania|
|LAC|Guyana<br>Hondurasl||Chile|
|MENA|l||Egypt|
|SOUTH ASIA||India Safe Motherhood and<br>Child<br>Survival<br>India Family Welfare (Urban<br>Slums)|India AIDS Prevention<br>Control|

3.16 The three remaining projects in this category target diseases which afflict the poor. The Egypt and China projects are supporting major programs for the control of schistosomiasis, targeting mainly rural and lower income and less educated segments of the population. The China project will also support a major reform in that country's approach to tuberculosis. The new control strategy emphasizes treatment of _all_ detected cases to reduce infection rates rapidly, rather than searching for new cases and treating only these who can afford to pay, which had been the practice. This will lead to increased effectiveness, accountability and _equity_ in the control of that disease, and will help alleviate the immediate, often financially devastating impact of the disease on the patients and their families.

3.17 The India AIDS project will benefit poor segments of the population and migrant labor. As a part of project preparation the impact of HIV/AIDS at the household level in India was assessed and found to have devastating effects on the social and economic welfare of the victims and their families, such as loss of economic security, potential loss of land and other assets, reduced remittances to family and friends, reduced capacity to finance education, orphans (young and old), not to mention the high costs of medical care and funerals. This project's success in reducing the incidence of HIVlAIDS will thus contribute to poverty alleviation in an important way.
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for the level of electricity outages in the respective years. To demonstrate that this proxy correlates with actual lightning intensity in the African context, I use data on lightning flash rate from NASA’s OTD/LIS satellite and correlate it with the proxy ( _CAPE × P_ ) as shown in Figure A1, and Figure A2 in the online appendix. The scatter plot in Figure A1 reveals a high r-square: _CAPE × P_ explains about 77% of the variations in lightning intensity in Africa, thus confirming the earlier findings of Romps et al. (2014). Figure A2 in the online appendix also shows a high spatial correlation between the actual lightning flash rate and the proxy.

In addition, data on mean annual temperature and precipitation from the ERA5 Global Reanalysis Database<sup>22</sup> are used in the analysis. Summary statistics are presented in Table A1 in the appendix.

# **4 Empirical Strategy and Results**

## **4.1 Identification Strategy**

Empirical estimation of the causal impact of electricity outages on outcomes such as employment and firm productivity is often beset with methodological challenges. Notable among them is the issue of endogeneity resulting from the potential correlation between outage intensity and (observable and unobservable) factors that (in)directly influence these outcomes. In other words, any assumption that variations in outage intensity are orthogonal to economic outcomes such as employment and firm productivity is unlikely to be valid. For instance, firm location, industry composition, and the prevailing economic and political conditions in a country can influence both outage intensity and the performance of firms. Also, regions with high unemployment and hence low income are more likely to suffer outages possibly due to the non-payment of electricity services leading

> 22https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/cdsapp#!/home

16