rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Agricultural production, dietary
            diversity, and climate variability
Nonseparable household models outline
            the links between agricultural production and household
            consumption, yet empirical extensions to investigate the
            effect of production on dietary diversity and diet
            composition are limited. Although a significant literature
            has investigated the calorie-income elasticity abstracting
            from production, this paper provides an empirical
            application of the nonseparable household model linking the
            effect of exogenous variation in planting season production
            decisions via climate variability on household dietary
            diversity. Using exogenous variation in degree days,
            rainfall, and agricultural capital stocks as instruments,
            the effect of production on household dietary diversity at
            harvest is estimated. The empirical specifications estimate
            production effects on dietary diversity using both
            agricultural revenue and crop production diversity.
            Significant effects of agricultural revenue and crop
            production diversity on dietary diversity are estimated. The
            dietary diversity-production elasticities imply that a 10
            percent increase in agricultural revenue or crop diversity
            results in a 1.8 percent or 2.4 percent increase in dietary
            diversity, respectively. These results illustrate that
            agricultural income growth or increased crop diversity may
            not be sufficient to ensure improved dietary diversity.
            Increases in agricultural revenue do change diet
            composition. Estimates of the effect of agricultural income
            on share of calories by food groups indicate relatively
            large changes in diet composition. On average, a 10 percent
            increase in agricultural revenue makes households 7.2
            percent more likely to consume vegetables and 3.5 percent
            more likely to consume fish, and increases the share of
            tubers consumed by 5.2 percent.
Inequality of opportunity among
            Egyptian children
This paper analyzes the level and trends
            in inequality of opportunity among Egyptian children during
            the 2000s. The analysis uses severall tools, including
            comparison of the distributions of early risks and outcomes
            across circumstance groups; estimation of the human
            opportunity index; measurement of the relative contributions
            of circumstances to inequality of opportunity; and
            decomposition of changes in inequality of opportunity and
            factors driving them over time. Egypt has made significant
            progress in the availability of and access to basic services
            for children and mothers, in some cases with an overall
            pro-poor effect. In particular, appreciable improvements
            have been made in healthcare utilization before and during
            pregnancy and immunizations. As a result, there has been a
            decline in inequality of opportunity over the past decade,
            largely attributable to increased coverage by basic services
            rather than through redistributive effects. However, there
            are areas of persistent and emerging concerns, including
            postnatal care utilization, nutrition, and schooling.
            Nutrition indicators have deteriorated during the 2000s,
            affecting a quarter of children regardless of their
            circumstances. Wide disparities in school enrollment
            persist, notably at the higher levels. Large regional
            disparities in access to basic infrastructure exist, with
            Upper Egypt and the Frontier Governorates lagging the rest
            of the country.  Family background, especially parents'
            education and wealth, and geographic factors are key factors
            affecting child development outcomes in Egypt. While
            interventions targeted at the less advantaged circumstance
            groups may offer significant potential for enhancing overall
            equity in postnatal care utilization and schooling, a more
            inclusive approach would be needed to improve child
            nutrition outcomes.
Cost-effectiveness measurement in
            development : accounting for local costs and noisy impacts
As evidence from rigorous impact
            evaluations grows in development, there have been more calls
            to complement impact evaluation analysis with cost analysis,
            so that policy makers can make investment decisions based on
            costs as well as impacts. This paper discusses important
            considerations for implementing cost-effectiveness analysis
            in the policy making process. The analysis is applied in the
            context of education interventions, although the findings
            generalize to other areas. First, the paper demonstrates a
            systematic method for characterizing the sensitivity of
            impact estimates. Second, the concept of context-specificity
            is applied to cost measurement: program costs vary greatly
            across contexts -- both within and across countries -- and
            with program complexity. The paper shows how adapting a
            single cost ingredient across settings dramatically shifts
            cost-effectiveness measures. Third, the paper provides
            evidence that interventions with fewer beneficiaries tend to
            have higher per-beneficiary costs, resulting in potential
            cost overestimates when extrapolating to large-scale
            applications. At the same time, recall bias may result in
            cost underestimates. The paper also discusses other
            challenges in measuring and extrapolating cost-effectiveness
            measures. For cost-effectiveness analysis to be useful,
            policy makers will require detailed, comparable, and timely
            cost reporting, as well as significant effort to ensure
            costs are relevant to the local environment.
Measuring the impact of a change in
            the price of Cashew received by exporters on farmgate prices
            and poverty in Guinea-Bissau
This paper assesses the impact of a
            change in the price of cashew received by exporters in
            general -- and by FUNPI, a fund to promote the
            industrialization of agricultural products, in particular --
            on farmgate prices and poverty in Guinea-Bissau. The
            analysis builds a theoretical model of supply chains in
            export agriculture that includes exporters, traders, and
            farmers competing in a bilateral oligopoly fashion. The
            model is adapted to data from the country's cashew
            sector and a household survey. Given the market structure, a
            shock on export prices or the introduction of an export tax,
            such as the FUNPI contribution, has a strong effect on
            farmgate prices, as farmers absorb about 80 percent of the
            tax (while exporters take up 13 percent and traders absorb
            the remaining 7 percent). The effect is uneven across
            households, as poor rural households are more exposed to
            price volatility and most cashew farmers are poor. It is
            estimated that their income falls by 12 percent as a result
            of the FUNPI contribution. Complementary policies can
            overcome the effect of the FUNPI surcharge on farmgate
            prices by aiming for reductions in transport,
            infrastructure, and transaction costs for traders and
            exporters. Fostering cashew processing would create added
            value through a displacement of volume from exporters to
            processors. The analysis finds it implausible that, under
            reasonable assumtions, a subsidy would overturn the welfare
            costs of the FUNPI contribution.
A comprehensive review of empirical
            and modeled HIV incidence trends (1990-2012)
An accurate measurement of HIV incidence
            is a key for policy makers and HIV program managers
            directing national HIV response. However, there is no
            perfect method to measure or estimate the rate at which new
            HIV infections occur in a population. This review compiles
            and triangulates longitudinal HIV incidence and prevalence
            data from published studies and trials, national reports and
            surveys, and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS
            estimates from the Spectrum model, focusing on 20 countries
            in Sub-Saharan Africa with generalized HIV epidemics. Three
            main points can be taken from this analysis of HIV incidence
            trends. First, modeled HIV incidence and nationally reported
            HIV prevalence levels in young females suggest that national
            HIV incidence has declined since 2000 in all except three
            countries analyzed (stable estimated HIV trends in Burkina
            Faso, Burundi, and Uganda), but trial and survey data
            suggest that in some demographics, HIV incidence remains
            critically high. Second, all modeled national HIV incidence
            curves and most empirically observed trends commenced a
            downward trajectory prior to the introduction of
            anti-retroviral therapy programs around 2004, suggesting the
            contribution of other factors, such as HIV prevention
            programs and natural epidemic dynamics, to this decline.
            Third, modeled HIV incidence estimates, including the
            incidence peaks in the past, exhibit much variation between
            Spectrum model versions and when new data are added,
            emphasizing the uncertainty of model outputs and the need to
            use incidence estimates with caution.
Updating poverty estimates at
            frequent intervals in the absence of consumption data :
            methods and illustration with reference to a middle-income country
Obtaining consistent estimates on
            poverty over time as well as monitoring poverty trends on a
            timely basis is a priority concern for policy makers.
            However, these objectives are not readily achieved in
            practice when household consumption data are neither
            frequently collected, nor constructed using consistent and
            transparent criteria. This paper develops a formal framework
            for survey-to-survey poverty imputation in an attempt to
            overcome these obstacles, and to elevate the discussion of
            these methods beyond the largely ad-hoc efforts in the
            existing literature. The framework introduced here imposes
            few restrictive assumptions, works with simple variance
            formulas,  provides guidance on the selection of control
            variables for model building, and can be generally applied
            to imputation either from one survey to another survey with
            the same design, or to another survey with a different
            design. Empirical results analyzing the Household
            Expenditure and Income Survey and the Unemployment and
            Employment Survey in Jordan are quite encouraging, with
            imputation-based poverty estimates closely tracking the
            direct estimates of poverty.
Reducing trade costs in east Africa
            : deep regional integration and multilateral action
There is substantial evidence that with
            the progressive global decline in tariffs over several
            decades, trade costs are a more significant barrier to trade
            than tariffs, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper
            decomposes trade costs into three categories: costs that can
            be lowered by trade facilitation, nontariff barriers, and
            the costs of business services. The paper develops a
            10-region, 18-sector, global trade model that includes
            Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda of the East African
            Customs Union. The analysis finds that deep integration in
            the East African Customs Union that lowers these trade costs
            results in significant gains for the four countries,
            especially from improved trade facilitation. Extending the
            lowering of nontariff barriers and services liberalization
            multilaterally would increase the gains between two and
            seven times, depending on the country. that the analysis
            also finds that reducing nondiscriminatory services barriers
            in Kenya and Tanzania would increase welfare even more than
            multilateral reduction of discriminatory services barriers.
            The paper is innovative both conceptually and empirically.
            It contains foreign direct investment in services and is the
            first paper to numerically assess liberalization of barriers
            against domestic and multinational service providers in a
            multi-sector, multi-region, applied general equilibrium
            model. The paper uses new databases of the ad valorem
            equivalents of barriers in services and the time in trade
            costs. Both databases are shown to be important to the results.
Local intermediate inputs and the
            shared supplier spillovers of foreign direct investment
Trade liberalizations have been shown to
            improve domestic firms' performance through the new
            varieties of imported intermediate inputs. This paper uses a
            unique, representative sample of Bangladeshi garment firms
            to highlight that local intermediate inputs may also enhance
            domestic firms' performance, through the shared
            supplier spillovers of foreign direct investment (FDI)
            firms. An exogenous EU trade policy shock is shown to cause
            some FDI firms in Bangladesh to expand, which led to better
            performance of the domestic firms that shared their
            suppliers. Overall, the shared supplier spillovers of FDI
            explain 1/4 of the product scope expansion and 1/3 of the
            productivity gains within domestic firms.
A dynamic spatial model of
            rural-urban transformation with public goods
This paper develops a dynamic model that
            explains the pattern of population and production allocation
            in an economy with an urban location and a rural one.
            Agglomeration economies make urban dwellers benefit from a
            larger population living in the city and urban firms become
            more productive when they operate in locations with a larger
            labor force. However, congestion costs associated with a too
            large population size limit the process of urban-rural
            transformation. Firms in the urban location also benefit
            from a public good that enhances their productivity. The
            model predicts that in the competitive equilibrium the urban
            location is inefficiently small because households fail to
            internalize the agglomeration economies and the positive
            effect of public goods in urban production.
Exploiting externalities to estimate
            the long-term effects of early childhood deworming
This paper investigates whether a
            large-scale deworming intervention aimed at primary school
            pupils in western Kenya had long-term effects on young
            children in the region. The paper exploits positive
            externalities from the program to estimate the impact on
            younger children who did not receive treatment directly. Ten
            years after the intervention, large cognitive effects are
            found -- comparable to between 0.5 and 0.8 years of
            schooling -- for children who were less than one year old
            when their communities received mass deworming treatment.
            Because mass deworming was administered through schools,
            effects are estimated among children who were likely to have
            older siblings in schools receiving the treatment directly;
            in this subpopulation, effects are nearly twice as large.
Foreign bank subsidiaries'
            default risk during the global crisis : what factors help
            insulate affiliates from their parents
This paper examines the association
            between the default risk of foreign bank subsidiaries and
            their parents during the global financial crisis, with the
            purpose of understanding what factors can help insulate
            affiliates from their parents. The paper finds evidence of a
            significant positive correlation between parent banks'
            and foreign subsidiaries' default risk. This
            correlation is lower for subsidiaries that have higher
            capital, retail deposit funding, and profitability ratios
            and that are more independently managed from their parents.
            Host country regulations also influence the extent to which
            shocks to the parents affect the subsidiaries' default
            risk. In particular, the correlation between the default
            risk of the subsidiary and the parent is lower for
            subsidiaries operating in countries that impose higher
            capital, reserve, provisioning, and disclosure requirements
            and tougher restrictions on bank activities.
Water quality, brawn, and education:
            the rural drinking water program in China
Although previous research has
            demonstrated the health benefits of water treatment
            programs, relatively little is known about the effect of
            water treatment on education. This paper examines the
            educational benefits to rural youth in China of a major
            drinking water treatment program started in the 1980s,
            perhaps the largest of such programs in the world. By
            employing a cross-sectional data set (constructed from a
            longitudinal data set covering two decades) with more than
            4,700 individuals between 18 and 25 years old, the analysis
            finds that this health program has improved the
            individuals' education substantially, increasing the
            grades of education completed by 1.08 years. The qualitative
            results hold when the analysis controls for local
            educational policies and resources, village dummies, and
            distance of villages to schools, and by instrumenting the
            water treatment dummy with villages' topographic
            features, among others. Moreover, three findings render
            support to the brawn theory of gender division of labor:
            girls benefit much more from water treatment than boys in
            schooling attainment; youth with an older brother benefit
            more than youth with an older sister; and boys gain more
            body mass than girls do from having access to treated water.
            The program can account for the gender gap in educational
            attainment in rural China in the sample period. Young people
            that had access to treated plant water in early childhood
            (0-2 years of age) experienced significantly higher gains in
            education than those who were exposed to treated water after
            early childhood. The estimates suggest that this program is
            highly cost-effective.
Agricultural productivity, hired
            labor, wages and poverty : evidence from Bangladesh
This paper provides evidence on the
            effects of agricultural productivity on wage rates, labor
            supply to market oriented activities, and labor allocation
            between own farming and wage labor in agriculture. To guide
            the empirical work, this paper develops a general
            equilibrium model that underscores the role of reallocation
            of family labor engaged in the production of non-marketed
            services at home (`home production'). The model
            predicts positive effects of a favorable agricultural
            productivity shock on wages and income, but the effect on
            hired labor is ambiguous; it depends on the strength of
            reallocation of labor from home to market production by
            labor surplus and deficit households. Taking rainfall
            variations as a measure of shock to agricultural
            productivity, and using subdistrict level panel data from
            Bangladesh, this paper finds significant positive effects of
            a favorable rainfall shock on agricultural wages, labor
            supply to market work, and per capita household expenditure.
            The share of hired labor in contrast declines substantially
            in response to a favorable productivity shock, which is
            consistent with a case where labor-deficit households
            respond more than the labor-surplus ones in reallocating
            labor from home production.
Measuring agricultural knowledge and adoption
Understanding the trade-offs in
            improving the precision of agricultural measures through
            survey design is crucial. Yet, standard indicators used to
            determine program effectiveness may be flawed and at a
            differential rate for men and women. The authors use a
            household survey from Mozambique to estimate the measurement
            error from male and female self-reports of their adoption
            and knowledge of three practices: intercropping, mulching,
            and strip tillage. Despite clear differences in human and
            physical capital, there are no obvious differences in the
            knowledge, adoption, and error in self-reporting between men
            and women. Having received training unanimously lowers
            knowledge misreports and increases adoption misreports.
            Other determinants of reporting error differ by gender.
            Misreporting is positively associated with a greater number
            of plots for men. Recall decay on measures of knowledge
            appears prominent among men but not women. Findings from
            regression and cost-effectiveness analyses always favor the
            collection of objective measures of knowledge. Given the
            lowest rate of accuracy for adoption was around 80 percent,
            costlier objective adoption measures are recommended for a
            subsample in regions with heterogeneous farm sizes.