rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Measuring beginner reading skills :
            an empirical evaluation of alternative instruments and their
            potential use for policymaking and accountability in Peru
Based on analysis of reading performance
            data from 475 third-graders in Peru, this study makes
            recommendations on improving reading tests, choice of
            reading standards, and how to present the results at the
            school and individual levels. The paper reviews the
            literature on using reading skills measurement in the early
            grades to guide policymaking, strengthen accountability, and
            improve education quality. It uses data generated from the
            same students using two common approaches to measuring
            reading skills: an individually-administered oral fluency
            test, and a group-administered written comprehension test
            designed by the Ministry of Education for the 2006 universal
            standard test of second grade reading comprehension. These
            two approaches have sometimes been presented as competing
            alternatives, but the paper shows that it is better if they
            are used together, as complements. Based on psychometric
            analysis, the paper shows that both the oral and written
            tests adequately measured students' reading abilities.
            The results show that reading fluency and comprehension are
            correlated: fluent readers are more likely to understand
            what they read than non-fluent readers. The strength of the
            fluency-comprehension relationship depends on the level of
            fluency, the difficulty of the questions, and social
            characteristics of the school. The paper recommends using
            improved versions of both tests to evaluate early grade
            reading skills, as a central element of a system of
            accountability for results. It proposes a model for
            reporting test results desgned to highlight the importance
            of reading standards, mobilize the education community to
            reach them, track progress, and identify students in need of
            extra support.
Measuring beginner reading skills :
            an empirical evaluation of alternative instruments and their
            potential use for policymaking and accountability in Peru
WPS4812 Policy ReseaRch WoRking PaPeR 4812 Measuring Beginner Reading Skills An Empirical Evaluation of Alternative Instruments and their Potential Use for Policymaking and Accountability in Peru _Ines Kudo Jorge Bazan_ The World Bank Latin America & the Caribbean Region Human Development Department Education Sector January 2009
Month of birth and children's
            health in India
The authors use data from three waves of
            the India National Family Health Survey to explore the
            relationship between the month of birth and the health
            outcomes of young children in India. They find that children
            born during the monsoon months have lower anthropometric
            scores compared with children born during the fall and
            winter months. The authors propose and test four hypotheses
            that could explain such a correlation. The results emphasize
            the importance of seasonal variations in affecting
            environmental conditions at the time of birth and
            determining the health outcomes of young children in India.
            Policy interventions that affect these conditions could
            effectively impact the health and achievement of these
            children, in a manner similar to nutrition and micronutrient
            supplementation programs.
The developing world's bulging
            (but vulnerable) "middle class"
The "developing world's middle
            class" is defined here as those who are not poor when
            judged by the median poverty line of developing countries,
            but are still poor by US standards. The "Western middle
            class" is defined as those who are not poor by US
            standards. Although barely 80 million people in the
            developing world entered the Western middle class over
            1990-2002, economic growth and distributional shifts allowed
            an extra 1.2 billion people to join the developing
            world's middle class. Four-fifths came from Asia, and
            half from China. Most of the new entrants remained fairly
            close to poverty, with incomes now bunched up just above $2
            a day. The vulnerability of this new middle class to
            aggregate economic contractions is evident in the fact that
            one in six people in the developing world live between $2
            and $3 per day. Over time, the developing world has become
            more sharply divided between countries with a large middle
            class and those with a relatively small one, with Africa
            prominent in the latter group. Poor people in countries with
            smaller middle classes may well be more exposed to slowing
            economic growth.
Political institutions and human
            development - does democracy fulfil its
            'constructive' and 'instrumental' role
Institutions are a major field of
            interest in the study of development processes. The authors
            contribute to this discussion concentrating our research on
            political institutions and their effect on the non-income
            dimensions of human development. First, they elaborate a
            theoretical argument why and under what conditions
            democracies compared to autocratic political systems might
            perform better with regards to the provision of public
            goods. Due to higher redistributive concerns matched to the
            needs of the population democracies should show a higher
            level of human development. In the following they analyze
            whether our theoretical expectations are supported by
            empirical facts. The authors perform a static panel analysis
            over the period of 1970 to 2003. The model confirms that
            living in a democratic system positively affects human
            development measured by life expectancy and literacy rates
            even controlling for GDP. By analyzing interaction effects
            they find that the performance of democracy is rather
            independent of the circumstances. However, democracy leads
            to more redistribution in favor of health provision in more
            unequal societies.
Political institutions and human
            development - does democracy fulfil its
            'constructive' and 'instrumental' role
WPS4818 Policy ReseaRch WoRking PaPeR 4818 Political Institutions and Human Development Does Democracy Fulfill its 'Constructive' and 'Instrumental' Role?

_Sebastian Vollmer Maria Ziegler_ The World Bank Development Research Group Macroeconomics and Growth Team January 2009
Main drivers of income inequality in
            central European and Baltic countries - some insights from
            recent household survey data
Present levels of income inequality in
            Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland,
            Slovakia, and Slovenia remain considerably higher than their
            pre-transition levels, although the relative pace of change
            over time has varied quite a bit across countries. Using
            data from the 2006 European Union Survey of Income and
            Living Conditions, this paper finds that prevailing levels
            of income inequality in these countries continue to be low
            by international standards, and that this is in large part
            due to the very high redistributive impact of direct taxes
            and public transfers. In addition to the instrumental role
            of tax and transfer policies in redistributing income, the
            paper highlights the important role played by differences in
            education levels and labor market participation rates in
            explaining observed inequalities across people and across
            different regions (although not in explaining observed
            differences across countries). The paper includes an
            analysis of key factors that help explain observed variation
            across countries in the level of public support for
            redistribution, including peoples' economic background
            and relative success in life, whether they perceive poverty
            to be associated with factors within or outside the control
            of those it afflicts (for example, laziness/lack of
            willpower vs. injustice in society).
Social health insurance vs.
            tax-financed health systems - evidence from the OECD
This paper exploits the transitions
            between tax-financed health care and social health insurance
            in the OECD countries over the period 1960-2006 to assess
            the effects of adopting social health insurance over tax
            finance on per capita health spending, amenable mortality,
            and labor market outcomes. The paper uses regression-based
            generalizations of difference-in-differences and
            instrumental variables to address the possible endogeneity
            of a country's health system. It finds that adopting
            social health insurance in preference to tax financing
            increases per capita health spending by 3-4 percent, reduces
            the formal sector share of employment by 8-10 percent, and
            reduces total employment by as much as 6 percent. For the
            most part, social health insurance adoption has no
            significant impact on amenable mortality, but for one
            cause-breast cancer among women-social health insurance
            systems perform significantly worse, with 5-6 percent more
            potential years of life lost.
A curse of comparison evidence on
            reference groups for relative income concerns
This paper proposes that individuals
            care about the relative income of proximate reference
            groups. Making use of self-reported life satisfaction as a
            proxy for unobservable utility, the relative income of
            siblings is tested for relevance as a reference point for
            new sample data from Venezuela. Having greater perceived
            income than one's siblings is found to be positively
            linked to individual life satisfaction. This evidence
            supplements the scarce economic research on reference
            groups, supporting the hypothesis that individuals with
            proximate characteristics and resembling opportunities in
            life serve as points of comparison.
Leveling the intra-household playing
            field : compensation and specialization in child labor allocation
This paper analyzes changes in the
            allocation of child labor within the household in reaction
            to exogenous shocks created by a social program in
            Nicaragua. The paper shows that households that randomly
            received a conditional cash transfer compensated for some of
            the intra-household differences, as they reduced child labor
            more for older boys who used to work more and for boys who
            were further behind in school. The results also show that
            households that randomly received a productive investment
            grant, in addition to the basic conditional cash transfer
            benefits, both targeted at women, show an increased
            specialization of older girls in nonagricultural and
            domestic work, but no overall increase in girls' child
            labor. The findings suggest that time allocation and
            specialization patterns in child labor within the household
            are important factors to understand the impact of a social program.
Measuring subjective expectations in
            developing Countries : a critical review and new evidence
The majority of economic decisions taken
            by individuals are forward looking and thus involve their
            expectations of future outcomes. Understanding the
            expectations that individuals have is thus of crucial
            importance to designing and evaluating policies in health,
            education, finance, migration, social protection, and many
            other areas. However, the majority of developing country
            surveys are static in nature and do not contain information
            on the subjective expectations of individuals. Possible
            reasons given for not collecting this information include
            fears that poor, illiterate individuals do not understand
            probability concepts, that it takes far too much time to ask
            such questions, or that the answers add little value. This
            paper provides a critical review and new analysis of
            subjective expectations data from developing countries and
            refutes each of these concerns. The authors find that people
            in developing countries can generally understand and answer
            probabilistic questions, such questions are not prohibitive
            in time to ask, and the expectations are useful predictors
            of future behavior and economic decisions.  The paper
            discusses the different methods being tried for eliciting
            such information, the key methodological issues involved,
            and the open research questions. The available evidence
            suggests that collecting expectations data is both feasible
            and valuable, suggesting that it should be incorporated into
            more developing country surveys.
The regional dimension of
            north-south trade-related R&D spillover
This paper examines the impact of trade
            with Japan, North America, and the European Union on
            technology diffusion and total factor productivity growth in
            Korea, Mexico, and Jordan. Measures of foreign research and
            development are constructed based on industry-specific
            research and development in the North, North-South trade
            patterns, and input-output relations in the South. The
            findings show that technology diffusion and productivity
            gains tend to be regional. Jordan benefits mainly from trade
            with the European Union, Korea from trade with Japan, and
            Mexico from trade with North America. In other words, the
            dynamic version of the "natural trading partners"
            hypothesis holds for these countries.
Measuring skilled migration rates :
            the case of small states
Recent changes in information and
            communication technologies have contributed to a dramatic
            increase in the degree of integration and interdependency of
            countries, markets, and people. Against this background, one
            aspect of particular concern for small states is the
            international movement of people. This paper focuses on this
            particularly important aspect of globalization, with
            emphasis on the movement of skilled people and its
            relationship with country size. In addition to overall
            skilled migration, it provides evidence that controls for
            migration age in order to distinguish between those educated
            in the home country and those educated abroad. The authors
            discuss the growth implications of the brain drain from
            small countries and policies that may help control it.
North-south trade-related technology
            diffusion, brain drain and productivity growth : are small
            states different
The economies of small developing states
            tend to be more fragile than those of large ones. This paper
            examines this issue in a dynamic context by focusing on the
            impact of the brain drain on North-South trade-related
            technology diffusion and total factor productivity growth in
            small and large states in the South. There are three main
            findings. First, productivity growth increases with
            North-South trade-related technology diffusion and education
            and the interaction between the two, and decreases with the
            brain drain. Second, the impact of North-South trade-related
            technology diffusion, education, and their interaction on
            productivity growth in small states is more than three times
            that for large countries, with the negative impact of the
            brain drain thus more than three times greater in small than
            in large states. And third, the greater loss in productivity
            growth in small states has two brain drain-related causes: a
            substantially greater sensitivity of productivity growth to
            the brain drain, and brain drain levels that are more than
            five times greater in small than in large states.
Wealth : crucial but not sufficient
            evidence from Pakistan on economic growth, Child labor, and schooling
The relationship between wealth and
            child labor has been widely examined. This paper uses three
            rounds of time-series, cross-sectional data to examine the
            relationship between wealth and child labor and schooling.
            The paper finds that wealth is crucial in determining a
            child's activities, but that this factor is far from
            being a sufficient condition to enroll a child in school.
            This is particularly the case for rural girls. Nonparametric
            analysis shows a universal increase in school enrollment for
            rural girls from 1998 to 2006. This increase is independent
            of wealth (measured by per capita expenditure). Multinomial
            logit regression further shows that wealth is insignificant
            in determining rural girls' activity decisions. Thus,
            interventions to increase school enrollment should
            incorporate broad-targeted, demand-side interventions as
            well as supply-side interventions.
Age at first child : does education
            delay fertility timing the case of Kenya
Completing additional years of education
            necessarily entails spending more time in school. There is
            naturally a rather mechanical effect of schooling on
            fertility if women tend not to have children while
            continuing to attend high school or college, thus delaying
            the beginning of and shortening their reproductive life.
            This paper uses data from the Kenyan Demographic and Health
            Surveys of 1989, 1993, 1998, and 2003 to uncover the impact
            of staying one more year in school on teenage fertility. To
            get around the endogeneity issue between schooling and
            fertility preferences, the analysis uses the 1985 Kenyan
            education reform as an instrument for years of education.
            The authors find that adding one more year of education
            decreases by at least 10 percentage points the probability
            of giving birth when still a teenager. The probability of
            having one's first child before age 20, when having at
            least completed primary education, is about 65 percent;
            therefore, for this means a reduction of about 15 percent in
            teenage fertility rates for this group. One additional year
            of school curbs the probability of becoming a mother each
            year by 7.3 percent for women who have completed at least
            primary education, and 5.6 percent for women with at least a
            secondary degree. These results (robust to a wide array of
            specifications) are of crucial interest to policy and
            decision makers who set up health and educational policies.
            This paper shows that investing in education can have
            positive spillovers on health.
Democracy and reforms
The authors use a sample of 147
            countries to investigate the link between democracy and
            reforms. Democracy may be conducive to reforms, because
            politicians have the incentive to embrace growth-enhancing
            reforms to win elections. By contrast, authoritarian regimes
            do not have to worry as much about public opinion and may
            undertake reforms that are painful in the short run but
            bring future prosperity. This paper tests these hypotheses,
            using data on micro-economic reforms from the World
            Bank's Doing Business database. These data do not
            suffer the endogeneity issues associated with other datasets
            on changes in economic institutions. The results provide
            robust support for the claim that democracy is good for
            growth-enhancing reforms.
The use and misuse of computers in
            education : evidence from a randomized experiment in Colombia
This paper presents the evaluation of
            the program Computers for Education. The program aims to
            integrate computers, donated by the private sector, into the
            teaching of language in public schools. The authors conduct
            a two-year randomized evaluation of the program using a
            sample of 97 schools and 5,201 children. Overall, the
            program seems to have had little effect on students'
            test scores and other outcomes. These results are consistent
            across grade levels, subjects, and gender. The main reason
            for these results seems to be the failure to incorporate the
            computers into the educational process. Although the program
            increased the number of computers in the treatment schools
            and provided training to the teachers on how to use the
            computers in their classrooms, surveys of both teachers and
            students suggest that teachers did not incorporate the
            computers into their curriculum.
Bank activity and funding strategies
            : the impact on risk and returns
This paper examines the implications of
            bank activity and short-term funding strategies for bank
            risk and returns using an international sample of 1,334
            banks in 101 countries leading up to the 2007 financial
            crisis. Expansion into non-interest income generating
            activities such as trading increases the rate of return on
            assets, and it may offer some risk diversification benefits
            at very low levels.  Non-deposit, wholesale funding, by
            contrast, lowers the rate of return on assets, although it
            can offer some risk reduction at commonly observed low
            levels of non-deposit funding. A sizeable proportion of
            banks, however, attract most of their short-term funding in
            the form of non-deposits at a cost of enhanced bank
            fragility. Overall, banking strategies that rely prominently
            on generating non-interest income or attracting non-deposit
            funding are very risky, which is consistent with the demise
            of the U.S. investment banking sector.