rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Poverty alleviation in Mexico
This paper is concerned with the problem
            of poverty in Mexico. Its four objectives are to : i)
            present evidence; ii) analyze economic determinants; iii)
            discuss policy options; and iv) assess existing poverty
            programs. The author begins by giving a very brief
            discussion of recent economic events, as these set the stage
            for poverty programs in the 1990's. The paper goes on
            to discuss the concept of poverty measurement. The author
            presents evidence of the extent of poverty in Mexico. He
            aims at answering the question : who, where and how poor are
            the poor? Also, why are the poor poor? The paper reviews
            issues of rural development, urban bias and macroeconomic
            policy. As regards policy, what should the Government's
            objectives be, and what are appropriate instruments to use?
            In answering these questions, the author reviews
            "stylized facts" about the behavior of the poor,
            as well as information and incentive issues that bear on the
            design of poverty alleviation programs. Policies are
            suggested for alleviating extreme and moderate levels of
            poverty. The paper concludes by assessing, in the light of
            previous findings, current Government programs to alleviate
            poverty and offers some suggestions for improvement. A
            summary of results and unanswered questions is also presented.
Distributional effects of adjustment
            policies : simulations for two archetypes economies
The 1980s was a period of external
            shocks for developing countries, and domestic macroeconomic
            imbalance and structural inefficiencies compounded the
            effects. But the performance of developing countries was not
            uniform. The authors devised a model for simulating the
            effects of terms of trade and interest rate shocks on two
            archetype economies, one representing an average Latin
            American economy, and the other an average African economy.
            The study examined the effects of the shocks and of
            different adjustment policies. Identical shocks and
            adjustment packages yield different outcomes for growth,
            poverty, and income distribution in the two economies. The
            simulations suggest three important conclusions : i) with
            the standard adjustment package, inequality increased
            significantly for the Latin American archetype but decreased
            significantly for the African archetype; ii) adjustment can
            lead to a sharp redistribution of income from groups with
            low marginal propensities to save towards groups with a high
            marginal propensity to save; and iii) trade and tax reforms
            that improve allocative efficiency by equalizing incentives
            across sectors can reduce inequality significantly, provided
            that governments are able to implement these revenue-neutral measures.
On hunger and public action
This article is a commentary on a new
            book "Hunger and Public Action," by authors Jean
            Dreze and Amartya Sen. The article compares the book's
            conceptual approach and policy recommendations to those of
            other recent writings on poverty and hunger. Researchers
            trying to understand the causes of a particular famine or to
            anticipate future famines have usually concentrated on
            information about aggregate food availability. A better
            approach is to focus on the determinants of individual
            entitlements - the command of people over food and other
            necessities. Ravallion critically assesses the book's
            conceptual framework, data, and the methods of analysis. He
            concludes that, despite some shortcomings in the book, the
            authors make a convincing case for a positive role for
            public action in famine relief and longer term relief of
            poverty and hunger.
Health financing in the poor
            countries : cost recovery or cost reduction
Many donor agencies have tended to view
            the problem of financing health care services in developing
            countries as a problem of cost recovery. Policy reforms
            based on this view have therefore focused on measures, such
            as user charges and insurance, intended to generate
            additional revenues to meet recurrent resource needs.
            However, the potential to actually reduce costs by
            eliminating waste in health systems has not been given
            adequate attention. The health care system in Mali
            represents a case study in the difficulties of providing
            effective care in poor countries. Households bear most of
            the burden of health financing, accounting for about 75
            percent of total sectoral expenditures in 1986. Revenues
            from user charges represent only a small fraction of
            operating expenditures in government health facilities.
            Changing the present system so that cost recovery becomes a
            significant proportion of actual expenditures would be
            extremely difficult. However, realistic possibilities do
            exist for reducing the costs of pharmaceuticals. With
            improved drug management practices, Mali would not need
            additional external aid to make drugs available in its
            health units and dispensaries. This suggests that the
            therapy for improving public health services should be based
            primarily on cost reduction, not simply cost recovery. Such
            a focus on cost reduction is consistent with the goals of
            the Bamako Initiative.
Reflections on credit policy in
            developing countries : its effect on private investment
Previous approaches to credit policy in
            the stabilization and adjustment of developing countries
            have emphasized either the role of the availability of
            credit or the role of its price - that is, the interest
            rate.  The authors argue that effective credit policy in
            developing countries must take into account both interest
            rate and credit channels.  The authors develop their
            argument in the context of the link between credit policy
            and private investment, using a model of firms'
            investment behavior in an economy with exogenous,
            time-varying borrowing constraints.  The model incorporates
            a credit ceiling linked to the firms' net worth and the
            state of the credit market.  The state of the credit market
            depends on factors such as credit and interest rate policy,
            regulatory and supervisory practices, and market sentiments
            that banks consider in making lending decisions.  These
            factors affect banks' decisions independent of a
            borrower's creditworthiness.  Thus, in times of tight
            money, firms that would otherwise have received loans may be
            denied them and have to postpone or cut back investment
            plans.  The authors use their model to specify an equation
            relating aggregate private investment to aggregate output
            and to two credit market variables.  Their findings show
            that interest rates and credit volume exert a joint
            influence on the behavior of private investment in the
            countries examined.
Administrative valuation of Soviet
            agricultural land : results using Lithuanian production data
New land tenure arrangements in the USSR
            require that agricultural producers pay for land use.  The
            current distorted pricing system and the absence of
            functioning land markets complicate land valuation, and slow
            the adoption of new property relations.  In a market economy
            that functions well, agricultural land would earn its
            approximate marginal value product in agricultural
            production.  This value can be measured empirically from
            production data and can serve as an appropriate initial
            value for users' fees. The author estimates marginal
            value products for land for 1,032 collective and state farms
            in Lithuania using farm-level data for 1986 and 1987 and
            compares the marginal value products derived from actual
            received producer prices with those derived from border
            prices with alternative assumed exchange rates for the ruble.
An observation on the bias in
            clinic-based estimates of malnutrition rates
Clinic-based data on malnutrition are
            the most readily available for following malnutrition levels
            and trends in most countries, but there is a bias inherent
            in clinic-based estimates of malnutrition rates. The authors
            compare annual clinic-based malnutrition data and those from
            four household surveys in Jamaica. The clinic data give
            lower estimates of malnutrition than the survey data in all
            four cases - significantly so in three. The size of the bias
            was variable over time, so the clinic data were not a good
            indicator of either levels of trends in nutrition status.
Relative deprivation and migration :
            theory, evidence, and policy implications
The authors examine the importance of
            absolute income and relative deprivation incentives for
            internal and international migration in developing country
            households.  Empirical results, based on Mexican village
            data, support the hypothesis that households' relative
            deprivation in the village reference group is significant in
            explaining migration by household members to destinations
            where a reference group substitution is unlikely and the
            returns to migrations are high.  Independent of relative
            deprivation, village households wisely pair their members
            with the labor markets in which the returns to their human
            capital are likely to be greatest.  The results suggest that
            a specific type of migration constitutes a response to a
            specific configuration of variables, and the role of
            relative deprivation appears to differ for internal and
            international migration.  Taking relative deprivation into
            account when studying migration is shown to have important
            implications for development policy.  For example, economic
            development that does not redress intravillage income
            inequalities may become associated with more migration.
Interest rate policy in Egypt : its
            role in stabilization and adjustment
An appropriate interest rate policy is
            considered essential to the success of stabilization and
            adjustment programs that Egypt might undertake. The broad
            objectives of such a policy would include deregulating
            credit and investment, raising the interest rate, and
            developing a "core" short-term debt market to
            serve as a reference point for market determination of
            interest rates.  And as the government moves away from a
            regulated environment of controlled credit and regulated
            investment toward a more liberal system, interest rates will
            be the prices that guide investment decisions and ensure
            allocative efficiency.  The authors describe some of the
            structural problems Egypt's economy has faced in the
            past decade and policy initiatives that the government has
            undertaken, and review the economy's financial sector.
            They analyze the role that interest rate policy could play
            in Egypt's stabilization and adjustment program,
            particularly how it would affect the outcomes of the
            important objectives of attracting workers'
            remittances, encouraging domestic residents to hold deposits
            in local currency, and increasing investment efficiency.
            The authors recommend that changes in the level and
            structure of interest rates be planned in several steps and
            carried out in conjunction with other adjustment measures,
            such as reducing the budget deficit, reforming public
            enterprises, and streamlining public investment.
Poverty, policy, and
            industrialization : lessons from the distant past
Pessimists say industrialization
            increased poverty; optimists say it did not. The authors
            argue that how much industrialization eradicates poverty
            depends on the form industrialization takes. It is not
            economic growth by itself, but the processes and policies
            associated with different growth regimes which make the poor
            poorer. The authors address two questions : 1) what happened
            to the proportionate share of the population living in
            poverty, and to the living standards of the poor, during
            nineteenth century industrial revolutions?; and 2) why did
            poverty statistics behave the way they did? Modern economic
            growth may erode traditional entitlements that serve as
            safety nets in preindustrial societies. It may be convenient
            to think otherwise, but typically the poor in preindustrial
            European and North American societies were not supported by
            the family and private institutions. Much of the
            responsibility for the poor lay with the state and other
            formal, statelike institutions that intervened in food
            markets. Where laissez-faire policies were adopted during
            the Industrial Revolution, as in America and England, many
            of the poor (especially the extremely poor) became more
            vulnerable to adverse conditions.
Regional integration among
            developing countries, revisited
Economic integration among developing
            countries became an important policy issue in the 1960s and
            early 1970s. But although intraregional trade increased in
            some trading groups, it remained a modest share of total
            trade. However, dramatic changes in the world economy have
            affected the environment for regional integration and
            cooperation. The formation of new, powerful economic and
            trading blocs, such as the single market of the European
            Community, the US-Canada free trade area, initiatives in the
            Pacific basin, and the transition to market economies in
            Central and perhaps Eastern Europe, seems to have fostered a
            trend toward new regionalism in the world economy. The
            virtual failure of the GATT negotiations may speed this up.
            To minimize economic losses and avoid marginalization,
            regional groups of developing countries must increasingly
            work out common positions and join one of the influential
            groups. Both factors require the gradual yet rapid
            dismantling of barriers to the free flow of production
            factors within regional groups. Obviously, intraregional
            trade cannot become an alternative to trade flows that are
            basically oriented to the world market. But in the 1990s,
            intraregional trade and economic relations are likely to
            grow parallel to, or even at a higher rate than,
            extraregional contacts.
How a change in Brazil's sugar
            policies would affect the world sugar market
Although Brazil is the world's
            largest sugarcane producer, only one-third of the cane it
            grows is used to produce sugar; the rest is used to produce
            ethanol as fuel for automobiles.  Still, Brazil is the
            world's fourth largest sugar producer.  This paper asks
            what it would mean for Brazil and for the world sugar market
            if Brazil were to shift largely away from ethanol to sugar
            production.  This question is of keen interest for the world
            sugar market because such a shift -- although politically
            difficult -- is possible. Brazil's system of
            controlling the sugarcane and sugar industries to ensure
            enough ethanol for domestic fuel needs is costly.  The
            author concludes that although Brazil could influence world
            sugar prices significantly in the short run, it could not
            influence them to its short- or long-term advantage by
            restricting production.  Indeed, to the extent that Brazil
            could make world prices more stable by allowing its
            producers increased flexibility in production, removing
            existing production controls could provide not only
            substantial economic gains (in terms of increased exports to
            Brazil), but also more stable world prices.  For other
            producers, there could be a tradeoff in terms of lower but
            more stable income.
Cote d'Ivoire - Fiscal policy
            with fixed nominal exchange rates
Cote d'Ivoire represents an ideal
            opportunity for a case study of the effects of fiscal policy
            in a developing country with a fixed exchange rate. For the
            last 15 years, the growth of the Ivorian economy has been
            dramatically affected by both exogenous factors and the
            responses of fiscal policy.  After a commodity boom in
            1976-77, expansionary fiscal policies increased the price of
            nontradable goods relative to tradable goods.  Government
            deficits induced large external deficits.  The authors
            analyze the structure of government spending and revenues to
            investigate whether there is a relationship between the
            large government deficits and the Ivorian economy's
            poor performance during the 1980s.  They also examine what
            factors determine the real exchange rate and the external balance.
The impact of policy in African
            agriculture : an empirical investigation
The last two decades have witnessed a
            decline in Africa's agricultural exports and a sharp
            rise in the region's food imports.  With over 70
            percent of Africa's people dependent on agriculture for
            their livelihood, getting agriculture moving in Africa is
            one of the most important formidable challenges facing
            Africa in the 1990s.  There is now wide recognition that
            government policies have contributed to Africa's crisis
            and that policy reforms can help foster restored growth.
            This report examines the link between government policy and
            agricultural performance across countries and over most of
            the past two decades.  The analysis confirms that
            governments' agricultural pricing and marketing
            arrangements and their macroeconomic policies have slowed
            agricultural growth.  In particular, overvalued currencies
            have often caused the largest distortions.  Recent trends,
            however, offer evidence that policy reforms have helped
            improve agricultural growth where these reforms have
            sustained agricultural procedures.  The author also offers
            evidence that government policies have been substantially
            responsible for Africa's growing food imports, by
            encouraging urban migration and by lowering the prices for
            imported foods relative to domestically-grown foods. This
            study contributes to a better understanding of the causes of
            Africa's agricultural crisis and can help forge a
            consensus on how to restore vitality in African agriculture.
A sensitivity analysis of
            cross-country growth regressions
A vast amount of literature uses
            cross-country regressions to find empirical links between
            policy indicators and long-run average growth rates. The
            authors study whether the conclusions from existing studies
            are robust or fragile when small changes in the list of
            independent variables occur. They find that although
            "policy" appears to be importantly related to
            growth, there is no strong independent relationship between
            growth and almost every existing policy indicator. They also
            find that very few macroeconomic variables are robustly
            correlated with cross-country growth rates. They clarify the
            conditions under which one finds convergence of per capita
            output levels and confirm the positive correlation between
            the share of investment in GDP and long-run growth. They
            conclude that all findings using the share of exports in GDP
            could be obtained almost identically using the total trade
            or import share and also that few commonly used fiscal
            indicators are robustly correlated with growth. Finally, the
            authors highlight the importance of considering alternative
            specifications in cross-country growth regressions.
An atheoretic evaluation of success
            in structural adjustment
The author presents and implements a
            methodology for assessing the success of structural
            adjustment based on a "fixed effect" method. He
            examines data for 75 countries over 11 years. Performance
            indicators include measures of inflation, economic growth,
            external balance, and physical investment. He measures
            government policies in terms of spending, trade regime,
            financial deepening, and real exchange rate policy. The
            empirical estimates he obtains suggest that ranking
            countries by adjusted economic performance yields
            significantly different results than ranking them by
            historical performance. Further, countries following a
            prescription of relatively low government spending, deep
            financial markets, and outward orientation in trade policy
            performed significantly better than those that did not. This
            prescription was correlated significantly with more rapid
            economic growth, current accounts with lower deficits,
            expanded investment, and reduced inflation.