rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Green growth, technology and innovation
The paper explores existing patterns of
            green innovation and presents an overview of green
            innovation policies for developing countries. The key
            findings from the empirical analysis are: (1) frontier green
            innovations are concentrated in high-income countries, few
            in developing countries but growing; (2) the most
            technologically-sophisticated developing countries are
            emerging as significant innovators but limited to a few
            technology fields; (3) there is very little South-South
            collaboration; (4) there is potential for expanding green
            production and trade; and (5) there has been little
            base-of-pyramid green innovation to meet the needs of poor
            consumers, and it is too early to draw conclusions about its
            scalability. To promote green innovation, technology and
            environmental policies work best in tandem, focusing on
            three complementary areas: (1) to promote frontier
            innovation, it is advisable to limit local technology-push
            support to countries with sufficient technological
            capabilities -- but there is also a need to provide global
            technology-push support for base-of-pyramid and neglected
            technologies including through a pool of long-term, stable
            funds supported by demand-pull mechanisms such as prizes;
            (2) to promote catch-up innovation, it is essential both to
            facilitate technology access and to stimulate technology
            absorption by firms -- with critical roles played by
            international trade and foreign direct investment, with firm
            demand spurred by public procurement, regulations and
            standards; and (3) to develop absorptive capacity, there is
            a need to strengthen skills and to improve the prevailing
            business environment for innovation -- to foster increased
            experimentation, global learning, and talent attraction and
            retention. There is still considerable progress to be made
            in ranking green innovation policies as most appropriate for
            different developing country contexts -- based on more
            impact evaluation studies of innovation policies targeted at
            green technologies.
How resilient and countercyclical
            were emerging economies to the global financial crisis
During the crises of the 1990s, emerging
            economies usually lacked the policy tools to deal with
            external shocks that were available to advanced economies.
            Worldwide turbulent episodes found most emerging economies
            unable to perform countercyclical policies and, in many
            cases, their own vulnerabilities and poor institutional
            frameworks amplified negative external shocks leading to
            sharper recessions. This paper shows that the 2008-2009
            global financial crisis represents a structural break in the
            way emerging economies conduct their policies, with more
            countercyclical policies pursued before and during the
            global crisis. Moreover, breaking with the past, emerging
            economies did not fall more than developed economies during
            the global financial crisis, thus becoming more similar to
            developed economies. The resilience of emerging economies
            during the 2008-2009 crisis might be partly attributed to a
            combination of sounder macroeconomic and financial policy
            frameworks with a shift towards safer domestic and
            international financial stances.
The political economy of healthcare
            litigation : model and empirical application to Uruguay
The political economy of health care is
            complex, as stakeholders have conflicting preferences over
            efficiency and equity. This paper formally models the
            preferences of consumer and producer groups involved in
            priority setting and judicialization in public health care.
            It uses a unique dataset of stakeholder perceptions, from
            Uruguay, to test whether these hypotheses are consistent
            with empirical evidence. The results suggest that the
            expectations of the political economy literature are
            supported: 1) regulators of public healthcare are less
            concerned with efficiency considerations than consumers; and
            2) less organized groups are more concerned about equity
            than more organized interest groups. With respect to the
            consequences of health litigation, the findings are only
            partially consistent with the health care governance
            literature. Consumers perceive litigation as more beneficial
            than health care providers and regulators do.
            Counter-intuitively, powerful interest groups seem less
            willing to use litigation to shape policy outcomes.
The impact of business environment
            reforms on new firm registration
This paper uses panel data on the number
            of new firm registrations in 91 countries to study how the
            ease of registering a business and the magnitude of
            registration reforms affect new firm registrations. The
            authors find that the costs, days and procedures required to
            start a business are important predictors of the number of
            new firm registrations. However, they find that small
            reforms, in general less than a 40 percent reduction in
            procedures or 50 to 60 percent reduction in costs and days,
            do not have a significant effect on new registrations. They
            also find important synergies in multiple reforms of two or
            more business environment indicators. Finally, they show
            that countries with relatively weaker business environments
            prior to reforms require relatively larger reforms in order
            to impact the number of newly registered firms.
Small vs. young firms across the
            world : contribution to employment, job creation, and growth
This paper investigates the contribution
            of small firms to employment, job creation, and growth in
            developing countries. While small firms (< 20 employees)
            have the smallest share of aggregate employment, the SME
            sector's (<100 employees) contribution is comparable
            to that of large firms. Small firms have the largest shares
            of job creation, and highest sales growth and employment
            growth, even after controlling for firm age. Large firms,
            however, have higher productivity growth. Conditional on
            size, young firms are the fastest growing and large mature
            firms have the largest employment shares but small young
            firms have higher job creation rates.
International migration, transfers
            of norms and home country fertility
This paper examines the relationship
            between international migration and source country
            fertility. The impact of international migration on source
            country fertility may have a number of causes, including a
            transfer of destination countries' fertility norms and
            an incentive to acquire more education. It provides provide
            a rigorous test of the diffusion on of fertility norms using
            original and detailed data on migration. The results provide
            evidence of a significant transfer of fertility norms from
            migrants to their country of origin: a one percent decrease
            in the fertility norm to which migrants are exposed reduces
            home country fertility by about 0.3 percent for origin countries.
Household welfare and natural
            resource management around national parks in Zambia
Game management areas in Zambia aim to
            combine nature conservation with economic empowerment of
            rural households. By looking at households inside and
            outside game management areas, this study advances the
            knowledge of the impact of community based natural resource
            management on household welfare. The paper focuses on the
            economic welfare of households living inside game management
            areas. It tries to answer the question: Do the households in
            game management areas enjoy higher levels of welfare
            relative to the conditions they would have been in had the
            area not been designated as a game management area? Within
            the game management area, the paper tries to determine the
            factors that influence household participation in natural
            resource management, and whether the participating
            households get any extra benefits. Also of interest is
            whether such benefits of living in a game management area,
            and, once in such an area, those of participating accrue
            more to the poorer segments of the communities. The study
            finds that the gains from living in a game management area
            and from active participation in natural resource management
            are large but unevenly distributed. Only game management
            areas near Kasanka, Lavushi, Isangano, and South Luangwa
            national parks in the sample show significant benefits to
            general and participating households. And in those areas,
            the poor do not seem to gain even when they participate
            actively. More even distribution of gains from game
            management areas across households near different park
            systems and across the poor and the non-poor should be a
            continuing goal of national policy makers.
Optimal pre-merger notification
            mechanisms - incentives and efficiency of mandatory and
            voluntary schemes
The authors compare the two merger
            control systems currently employed worldwide: a mandatory
            system based on merger size threshold and a voluntary system
            with ex-post monitoring and fines. The voluntary system
            possesses two informational advantages: (i) the enforcement
            agency employs more information -verifiable and non
            verifiable parameters- to decide the set of mergers to
            investigate, and (ii) the first move of merging firms
            reveals useful information to the agency about the
            competitive risk of a merger. If fines for undue omission to
            notify are upward limited, then a mixed mechanism is
            optimal, where small transactions are under a voluntary
            regime while the big mergers are obliged to report. Remedies
            for fixing anticompetitive mergers act as an instrument that
            induces firms to notify the operation, improving further the
            advantage of the voluntary mechanism.
The impact of the business
            environment on the business creation process
New data from the 2008 World Bank Group
            Entrepreneurship Survey indicates a very strong and
            statistically significant relationship between
            entrepreneurship and a better business environment. Data for
            100 countries on the number of total and newly registered
            corporations over an eight-year period (2000-2007) were
            collected directly from registrars of companies around the
            world. Data were also collected on the functioning and
            structure of business registries. Empirical evidence
            suggests that greater ease in starting a business and better
            governance are associated with increased entrepreneurial
            activity. After controlling for economic development (gross
            domestic product per capita), higher entrepreneurial
            activity is significantly associated with cheaper, more
            efficient business registration procedures and better
            governance. Although the degree of progress in the
            modernization of business registries varies greatly,
            countries usually have a common goal to evolve from a
            paper-based business registry to a one-stop, automated,
            web-enabled registry capable of delivering products and
            services online via transactions involving authenticated
            users and documents. Tests show that business registry
            modernization (often a component of broader private sector
            reforms) has a positive impact not only on the ease of
            creating a business, but also on new business registration.
            Overall, the data show that a quick, efficient, and
            cost-effective business registration process is critical for
            fostering formal sector entrepreneurship.
Social and governance dimensions of
            climate change : implications for policy
This paper addresses two vital concerns
            in the debate on adaptation to climate change. First, how
            can countries prepare to manage the impact of climate-change
            induced natural disasters? Second, how can countries ensure
            that they have the governmental institutions required to
            manage the phenomenal challenge of adaptation to climate
            change? A range of economic and institutional measures are
            tested for their potential effects on natural disaster
            resilience and the quality of environmental governance. The
            findings suggest an important role is played by social and
            political institutions in determining the ability of
            countries to adapt to climate change and respond to natural
            disasters, in particular in the degree to which countries
            have succeeded in gender empowerment and the development of
            a robust civil society and nonprofit sector. As the climate
            change challenge moves from that of "proving the
            facts" to that of "implementing change," the
            authors suggest that international policymakers, donors, and
            activists must increasingly focus on building domestic
            policy environments that are conducive to the delivery of
            more effective environmental legislation, for example
            through implementation of gender quotas and provision of
            support to civil society groups.
Cognitive and behavioral challenges
            in responding to climate change
Climate scientists have identified
            global warming as the most important environmental issue of
            our time, but it has taken over 20 years for the problem to
            penetrate the public discourse in even the most superficial
            manner. While some nations have done better than others, no
            nation has adequately reduced emissions and no nation has a
            base of public citizens that are sufficiently socially and
            politically engaged in response to climate change. This
            paper summarizes international and national differences in
            levels of knowledge and concern regarding climate change,
            and the existing explanations for the worldwide failure of
            public response to climate change, drawing from psychology,
            social psychology and sociology. On the whole, the widely
            presumed links between public access to information on
            climate change and levels of concern and action are not
            supported. The paper's key findings emphasize the
            presence of negative emotions in conjunction with global
            warming (fear, guilt, and helplessness), and the process of
            emotion management and cultural norms in the construction of
            a social reality in which climate change is held at arms
            length. Barriers in responding to climate change are placed
            into three broad categories: 1) psychological/conceptual, 2)
            social and cultural, and 3) structural (political economy).
            The author provides policy considerations and summarizes the
            policy implications of both psychological and conceptual
            barriers, and social and cultural barriers. An annotated
            bibliography is included.
Climate change governance
Climate change governance poses
            difficult challenges for contemporary
            political/administrative systems. These systems evolved to
            handle other sorts of problems and must now be adapted to
            handle emerging issues of climate change mitigation and
            adaptation. This paper examines long-term climate
            governance, particularly in relation to overcoming
            "institutional inertia" that hampers the
            development of an effective and timely response. It argues
            that when the influence of groups that fear adverse
            consequences of mitigation policies is combined with
            scientific uncertainty, the complexity of reaching global
            agreements, and long time frames, the natural tendency is
            for governments to delay action, to seek to avoid
            antagonizing influential groups, and to adopt less ambitious
            climate programs. Conflicts of power and interest are
            inevitable in relation to climate change policy. To address
            climate change means altering the way things are being done
            today - especially in terms of production and consumption
            practices in key sectors such as energy, agriculture, and
            transportation. But some of the most powerful groups in
            society have done well from existing arrangements, and they
            are cautious about disturbing the status quo. Climate change
            governance requires governments to take an active role in
            bringing about shifts in interest perceptions so that stable
            societal majorities in favor of deploying an active
            mitigation and adaptation policy regime can be maintained.
            Measures to help effect such change include: building
            coalitions for change, buying off opponents, establishing
            new centers of economic power, creating new institutional
            actors, adjusting legal rights and responsibilities, and
            changing ideas and accepted norms and expectations.
Modeling migration dynamics in
            Albania : a hazard function approach
Since 1990 migration flows from Albania
            have been massive, relative to the size of the country and
            its population, but they have also fluctuated over time.
            This paper presents and discusses various descriptive
            trends, mainly in graphical form. The data come from the
            Albanian Living Standards Measurement Survey, 2005 round,
            and cover the period 1990-2004. The resulting observed
            trends reflect changing push and pull factors in Albania and
            the two main host countries, Greece and Italy. The paper
            also presents a hazard approach to modeling Albanian
            emigration and return migration. This analysis highlights,
            among other things, the relevance of networks in Albanian
            migration dynamics, both to promote emigration and to delay return.
Does regulatory supervision curtail
            microfinance profitability and outreach
Regulation allows microfinance
            institutions to evolve more fully into banks, particularly
            for institutions aiming to take deposits.  But there are
            potential trade-offs.  Complying with regulation and
            supervision can be costly. The authors examine the
            implications for the institutions profitability and their
            outreach to small-scale borrowers and women. The tests draw
            on a new database that combines high-quality financial data
            on 245 of the worlds largest microfinance institutions with
            newly-constructed data on their prudential supervision.
            Ordinary least squares regressions show that supervision is
            negatively associated with profitability. Controlling for
            the non-random assignment of supervision via treatment
            effects and instrumental variables regressions, the analysis
            finds that supervision is associated with substantially
            larger average loan sizes and less lending to women than in
            ordinary least squares regressions, although it is not
            significantly associated with profitability. The pattern is
            consistent with the notion that profit-oriented microfinance
            institutions absorb the cost of supervision by curtailing
            outreach to market segments that tend to be more costly per
            dollar lent. By contrast, microfinance institutions that
            rely on non-commercial sources of funding (for example,
            donations), and thus are less profit-oriented, do not adjust
            loan sizes or lend less to women when supervised, but their
            profitability is significantly reduced.
Social networks among indigenous
            peoples in Mexico
This paper examines the extent to which
            social networks among indigenous peoples have a significant
            effect on a variety of human capital investment and economic
            activities, such as school attendance and work among teenage
            boys and girls, and migration, welfare participation,
            employment status, occupation and sector of employment among
            adult males and females. The analysis uses data from the 10
            percent population sample of the 2000 Population and Housing
            Census of Mexico and an empirical strategy that allows
            taking into account the role of municipality and language
            group fixed effects. The authors confirm empirically that
            social network effects play an important role in the
            economic decisions of indigenous people, especially in rural
            areas. The analysis also provides evidence that better
            access to basic services, such as water and electricity,
            increases the size and strength of network effects in rural areas.