rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Growth (but not only) is good for
            the poor : some cross-country evidence to promote growth and
            shared prosperity in Haiti
Many low-income countries, such as
            Haiti, have high ambitions and socioeconomic needs to
            achieve substantial income growth, especially for the
            poorest income quintiles. This situation raises the question
            of policy prioritization, which is often difficult to
            address, since reliable country-specific micro data are
            scarce in most low-income countries. Although many studies
            have investigated the determinants of growth of gross
            domestic product, less is known about the factors
            influencing household incomes at the lowest segments of the
            income distribution. Focusing on the specific case of Haiti,
            a country with one of the lowest income levels, this paper
            proposes an approach to handle this challenge: it estimates
            income drivers for the poorest two income quintiles from
            cross-country regressions. The results suggest that
            maintaining macroeconomic stability as well as investing in
            human and physical capital would not only be associated with
            faster overall economic growth, but also with even faster
            income growth for the poorest segments of the population.
            Thus, there need not be a trade-off between inequality and
            growth. Economies could foster faster growth while also
            increasing inclusiveness, ensuring that everyone can live up
            to their potential.
A firm of one's own :
            experimental evidence on credit constraints and occupational choice
This study presents results from a
            randomized evaluation of two labor market interventions
            targeted to young women aged 18 to 19 years in three of
            Nairobi's poorest neighborhoods. One treatment offered
            participants a bundled intervention designed to
            simultaneously relieve credit and human capital constraints;
            a second treatment provided women with an unrestricted cash
            grant, but no training or other support. Both interventions
            had economically large and statistically significant impacts
            on income over the medium term (7 to 10 months after the end
            of the interventions), but these impacts dissipated in the
            second year after treatment. The results are consistent with
            a model in which savings constraints prevent women from
            smoothing consumption after receiving large transfers --
            even in the absence of credit constraints, and when
            participants have no intention of remaining in
            entrepreneurship. The study also shows that participants
            hold remarkably accurate beliefs about the impacts of the
            treatments on occupational choice
Horizontal depth : a new database on
            the content of preferential trade agreements
Preferential trade agreements are an
            important feature of the global trade system. Several
            questions, ranging from the rationale for preferential
            arrangements to their impact on members, non-members and the
            broader multilateral trade system, are at the forefront of
            academic and policy debates in trade policy. This paper
            contributes to the literature in two ways. First, it
            presents a new database that offers a detailed assessment of
            the content of preferential arrangements, examining the
            coverage and legal enforceability of provisions. The
            database covers 279 agreements signed by 189 countries
            between 1958 and 2015, which reflects the entire set of
            preferential trade agreements in force and notified to the
            World Trade Organization as of 2015. Second, the paper
            presents some novel stylized facts on preferential
            arrangements based on the analysis of the data. The key
            insight is that preferential trade agreements became deeper
            over time. A growing number of these treaties cover an
            extended set of policy areas, frequently with legally
            enforceable provisions, in areas under the current World
            Trade Organization mandate and in four leading areas outside
            the current World Trade Organization mandate: competition
            policy, investment, movements of capital, and intellectual
            property rights protection. Accounting for the changing
            coverage of preferential trade agreements, that is, their
            “horizontal depth,” is essential to gain a more complete and
            accurate understanding of where the global trading system is
            going and how its governance can be improved.
Agriculture in Africa -- telling
            myths from facts : a synthesis
Stylized facts drive research agendas
            and policy debates. Yet robust stylized facts are hard to
            come by, and when available, often outdated. In a special
            issue of Food Policy, 12 papers revisit conventional wisdom
            on African agriculture and its farmers' livelihoods
            using nationally representative surveys from the Living
            Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on
            Agriculture Initiative in six African countries. At times,
            the findings simply confirm the common understanding of the
            topic. But the studies also throw up several surprises,
            redirecting some policy debates while fine-tuning others.
            Overall, the project calls for more attention to checking
            and updating the common wisdom. This requires nationally
            representative data, and sufficient incentives among
            researchers and policy makers alike. Without well-grounded
            stylized facts, they can easily be profoundly misguided.
The direct and indirect costs of tax
            treaty policy : evidence from Ukraine
This study combines macro and micro data
            to quantify the revenue effects of double tax treaties.
            First, drawing on administrative information, the study
            estimates the tax sensitivity of income flows (dividend,
            interest, and royalty payments) at an aggregate level. The
            analysis finds important direct revenue costs linked to
            treaty restrictions on taxing rights, especially for flows
            into a few major investment hubs. However, high elasticities
            of income flows also suggest that increases in withholding
            rates at the individual treaty partner level would not
            necessarily result in more revenue collection. Second, the
            study uses firm-level information to estimate the
            sensitivity of reported profitability to changes in the
            relevant treaty network. The analysis of the reported
            earnings of multinational enterprise affiliates in Ukraine
            suggests that the ownership structure and operations with
            affiliates in certain jurisdictions explain reported
            profitability, and should thus receive increased attention
            in risk assessment and transfer pricing audit activities.
Special study on benchmarking the
            quality of project economic analysis for the South Asia Region
This paper benchmarks the quality of
            project economic analysis in South Asia against other World
            Bank regions, using data on project exits between 1975 and
            2015. The results show that the South Asia region performs
            on par with the other regions, in that the share of project
            documents that report estimated economic rates of return
            have declined from 70 to 36 percent for South Asia and the
            other regions. This finding suggests there is less attention
            to project economic analysis (especially for sectors where
            this has been a traditional practice, such as energy,
            transport, water, and agriculture). The finding also
            indicates that the incidence of reporting rates of return in
            project documents and the dispersion or difference between
            rates of return estimated at project appraisal and
            completion are significantly correlated with project
            performance (after correcting for country- and project-level
            variables). For the project-level variables, the task team
            effect is a key variable that explains project outcomes. The
            paper discusses the implications of the analyses for
            strengthening project performance and risk mitigation.
Rising incomes and inequality of
            access to infrastructure among Latin American households
This paper documents access to services
            and ownership of infrastructure-related durables in the
            water, energy, telecom, and transport areas, based on
            harmonized household survey data covering 1.6 million
            households in 14 Latin American countries during 1992 to
            2012. The paper provides a systematic disaggregation of
            access and ownership rates at different levels of income and
            over time, and econometrically derives the country
            infrastructure premium, a measure of how much a household
            benefits from simply being located in a given country. The
            results show extensive inequality of access, within
            countries across the income distribution, but also across
            countries for households at similar levels of income. For
            water and electricity, for example, up to two-thirds of the
            variability in individual percentile access to
            infrastructure services and consumption of related assets
            can be explained by country residence only. In addition, few
            country fundamentals appear to be significant in explaining
            this variability, pointing to policy differences as an
            important determinant. The paper derives the income
            elasticity of infrastructure access for the full set of
            indicators, and uses these to estimate the time that would
            be needed to close the remaining gap for households at
            different levels of the income distribution under a
            "business as usual" hypothesis. Under that
            scenario, universal access appears to be decades away for
            many countries in the region. The last part discusses the
            policy challenges, arguing that in a context in which public
            budgets face strong constraints and significant increases in
            private investment are unlikely to be forthcoming, a large
            part of the solution lies in refocused investment
            strategies, better demand management, and improved public
            spending efficiency.
Regional dimensions of recent
            weakness in investment : drivers, investment needs and
            policy responses
Investment growth in many emerging
            market and developing economies (EMDEs) has slowed sharply
            since 2010. Investment growth performance has varied
            significantly across different regions, however. This paper
            examines the temporal evolution of investment growth in six
            EMDE regions, documents remaining investment needs,
            especially for infrastructure, and presents a set of
            region-specific policy responses to address these needs. It
            reports three main findings. First, investment growth has
            been particularly weak in EMDE regions with a large number
            of commodity exporters. In regions with a substantial number
            of commodity-importing economies, investment growth has been
            somewhat resilient but has also declined steadily since
            2010. Second, sizable investment needs remain in most EMDE
            regions to make room for expanding economic activity and
            rapid urbanization. A sizeable portion of these investment
            needs is in infrastructure and human capital. Finally, while
            specific policy priorities vary across regions, several
            policy options to address remaining investment needs apply
            universally. These include more, or more efficient, public
            investment and measures to improve overall growth prospects
            and the business climate. Improved project selection and
            monitoring, as well as better governance, may enhance the
            efficiency and benefits from public investment.
For India's rural poor, growing
            towns matter more than growing cities
It is theoretically ambiguous whether
            growth of cities matters more to the rural poor than growth
            of towns. This paper empirically examines whether growth of
            India's secondary towns or big cities mattered more to
            recent rural poverty reduction, noting that data
            deficiencies have made this a difficult question to answer
            previously. Satellite observations of night lights are used
            to measure urban growth on the extensive and intensive
            margins in the context of a spatial Durbin fixed-effects
            model of poverty measures for rural India, calibrated to a
            panel of 59 regions observed four times over 1993-2012. The
            expansion of lit area had greater effect on the rural
            poverty measures than did intensive margin growth in the
            brightness of light from urban areas. For India's
            current stage of development, growth of secondary towns may
            do more to reduce rural poverty than big city growth,
            although the theoretical model suggests that cities may
            eventually take over from towns as the drivers of rural
            poverty reduction.
Deliberative democracy in India
This paper traces the evolution of
            deliberative institutions in India to understand the role of
            deliberation in democratic life, as well as the ways in
            which deliberative bodies influence, and are influenced by,
            entrenched social inequality. The paper first unpacks the
            historical roots of Indian deliberation in the pre-colonial
            and colonial periods, emphasizing the ways in which
            religious traditions fostered a culture of debate and
            dialogue. The paper then explores the interplay between
            Western liberal philosophers, most notably Henry Maine, and
            Indian political thinkers, including Gandhi and Ambedkar, on
            participatory democracy in India. The discussion then
            highlights the continued dialogue between Indian and Western
            ideas in the push for greater participatory development.
            Finally, the paper probes the current incarnation of
            state-sponsored deliberation in India -- namely, village
            assemblies known as gram sabhas under the constitutionally
            mandated system of Indian village democracy or Panchayati
            Raj -- and reviews the growing empirical scholarship about
            these village assemblies.
Financial information in Colombia
An audit study was conducted in Colombia
            following the protocols in Giné and Mazer (2017).
            Trainedauditors visited multiple financial institutions
            (both regulated and unregulated), seeking credit and
            savingsproducts. Consistent with Gabaix and Laibson (2006)
            and similar to Giné and Mazer (2017), the staff onlyprovided
            information about the cost when asked, disclosing less than
            a third of the total cost voluntarily. Inaddition, clients
            were rarely offered the cheapest product, most likely
            because staff was incentivized tooffer more expensive and
            thus more profitable products to the institution.
Effects of public policy on child
            labor : current knowledge, gaps, and implications for
            program design
Many policy instruments can be used to
            address or affect child labor, even if they are implemented
            to achieve other objectives. From a theoretical point of
            view, however, the impact of these policies on child labor
            is undetermined. This paper discusses the evidence generated
            by rigorous evaluations on the impact on child labor of
            labor market programs, conditional and unconditional
            transfers, and microcredit, among other social programs and
            interventions. The study finds that although transfer
            programs generally tend to reduce child labor, other
            policies risk increasing child labor, especially if they
            affect households' productive opportunities. The
            findings also point to knowledge gaps that should be
            addressed in future evaluations. While progress has been
            made over the past decade, there is still much to learn
            about the effects of public policy on the labor
            participation of many children in developing countries.
Measuring skills in developing countries
Measures of cognitive, noncognitive, and
            technical skills are increasingly used in development
            economics to analyze the determinants of skill formation,
            the role of skills in economic decisions, or simply because
            they are potential confounders. Yet in most cases, these
            measures have only been validated in high-income countries.
            This paper tests the reliability and validity of some of the
            most commonly used skills measures in a rural developing
            context. A survey with a series of skills measurements was
            administered to more than 900 farmers in western Kenya, and
            the same questions were asked again after three weeks to
            test the reliability of the measures. To test predictive
            power, the study also collected information on agricultural
            practices and production during the four following seasons.
            The results show the cognitive skills measures are reliable
            and internally consistent, while technical skills are
            difficult to capture and very noisy. The evidence further
            suggests that measurement error in noncognitive skills is
            non-classical, as correlations between questions are driven
            in part by the answering patterns of the respondents and the
            phrasing of the questions. Addressing both random and
            systematic measurement error using common psychometric
            practices and repeated measures leads to improvements and
            clearer predictions, but does not address all concerns. The
            paper provides a cautionary tale for na&#xef;ve
            interpretations of skill measures. It also points to the
            importance of addressing measurement challenges to establish
            the relationship of different skills with economic outcomes.
            Based on these findings, the paper derives guidelines for
            skill measurement and interpretation in similar contexts.
Are poor individuals mainly found in
            poor households evidence using nutrition data for Africa
Antipoverty policies in developing
            countries often assume that targeting poor households will
            be reasonably effective in reaching poor individuals. This
            paper questions this assumption, using nutritional status as
            a proxy for individual poverty. The comprehensive assessment
            for Sub-Saharan Africa reveals that undernourished women and
            children are spread widely across the distribution of
            household wealth and consumption. Roughly three-quarters of
            underweight women and undernourished children are not found
            in the poorest 20 percent of households, and around half are
            not found in the poorest 40 percent. The mean joint
            probability of being an underweight woman and living in the
            poorest wealth quintile is only 0.03. Countries with higher
            overall rates of undernutrition tend to have a higher share
            of undernourished individuals in nonpoor households. The
            results are consistent with evidence of substantial
            intrahousehold inequality.
Do foreign investors underperform An
            empirical decomposition into style and flows
This paper studies the trading behavior
            and performance of foreign investors with different
            management styles. The analysis uses a comprehensive
            Colombian data with complete transaction records and unique
            investor identification, and finds that the aggregate
            under-performance of foreign investors is attributable to
            foreign passive funds, that is, those that replicate a
            benchmark index. These funds pay higher prices to increase
            the speed of their trades to accommodate daily flows
            proportionally to their index before market closing. Passive
            funds face higher transaction costs on days when they trade
            multiple stocks in the same direction, buy (sell) the same
            stock multiple times, and make large trades near the daily
            closing time. Meanwhile, foreign active funds trade at more
            favorable prices and display higher risk-adjusted returns
            than any other investor group, including domestic funds with
            similar active management. The findings highlight the
            potential costs of index investing in developing countries
            or in securities with low trading activity (small stocks).
The motherhood penalty and female
            employment in urban India
Since the 1990s, India has seen robust
            economic growth, rising wages, steady fertility decline,
            increased urbanization, and expanded educational attainment
            for males and females. But unlike other countries that have
            undergone similar transitions, urban women's employment
            has refused to budge, never crossing the 25 percent mark.
            This paper fills a critical gap in policy research on
            women's employment in India. The discussion is situated
            in the normative construction of motherhood and the gendered
            nature of caregiving in India. The analysis uses pooled data
            from six rounds of the National Sample Surveys to examine
            the effects of having a young child on mothers'
            employment in urban India over 1983-2011. The analysis also
            looks at household structure, and analyzes the effects of
            other household members on women's labor supply. The
            results show that although the onus of childbearing may have
            reduced, that of caregiving has increased. Having a young
            child in the home depresses mothers' employment, an
            inverse relationship that has intensified over time.
            Further, living in a household with older children and women
            over the age of 50 is positively associated with
            women's employment. These results show that the care of
            young children is an increasingly important issue in
            women's employment decisions, in a context where formal
            childcare is practically nonexistent. These results have
            significant implications for policy to raise women’s labor
            force participation in India.