rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Can public works programs reduce
            youth crime evidence from Papua New Guinea's urban
            youth employment project
Crime rates in Papua New Guinea's
            capital city of Port Moresby are among the highest in the
            world. Few youth work, and good jobs are scarce. In 2013,
            the National Capital District Commission partnered with the
            World Bank to implement the Urban Youth Employment Project.
            The project offers out-of-school and out-of-work youth two
            months of public works employment or, for academically
            qualified candidates, six months of classroom and on-the-job
            training. This paper presents difference-in-difference
            estimates of project impacts on participants' social
            and criminal behavior, 12 to 18 months after completion. The
            control group consists of observably similar youth living in
            areas not served by the program. Project participants became
            less likely to hang out with friends at night, have a best
            friend involved in crime, and have friends involved in
            fights or robberies. The program also increased subsequent
            employment rates, and significantly reduced aggressive
            behavior and gratuitous property damage. However, there is
            little robust evidence that the program reduced
            participants' engagement in or exposure to crime.  The
            study concludes that the program had strong and healthy
            effects on participants' peer group and behavior, but
            more limited effects on the socioeconomic causes of crime.
Is Poverty in Africa mostly chronic
            or transient evidence from synthetic panel data
Absent actual panel household survey
            data, this paper constructs, for the first time, synthetic
            panel data for more than 20 countries accounting for
            two-thirds of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this
            process, the analysis employs repeated cross sections that
            span, on average, a six-year period for each country. The
            analysis suggests that all these countries as a whole have
            had pro-poor growth. One-third of the poor population
            escaped poverty during the studied period, which is larger
            than the proportion of the population that fell into poverty
            in the same period. The region also saw a 9 percent
            reduction in poverty and a 28 percent increase in the size
            of the middle class. However, chronic poverty remains high,
            and a considerable proportion of the population is
            vulnerable to falling into poverty. There is some limited
            evidence that most resource-rich and middle-income countries
            have more upward mobility than downward mobility.
            Post-secondary education is especially strongly associated
            with higher upward mobility and less downward mobility,
            which holds to some extent for female-headed and urban households.
Consumption smoothing and shock
            persistence : optimal simple fiscal rules for commodity exporters
A common criticism of balanced budget
            fiscal rules is that they increase the consumption
            volatility of financially constrained households who are
            unable to smooth consumption. This paper evaluates the
            welfare consequences of simple fiscal rules in a model of a
            small commodity-exporting country with a share of
            financially constrained households, where fiscal policy
            takes the form of transfers. A main finding is that balanced
            budget rules for commodity revenues often outperform more
            sophisticated fiscal rules where commodity revenues are
            saved in a Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF). Because commodity
            price shocks are typically highly persistent, the
            households' current income is close to their permanent
            income, making balanced budget rules close to optimal. For
            commodities like oil, where price shocks are highly
            persistent, it is optimal to spend more than two-thirds of
            windfall revenues in times of high prices, and in some cases
            even spend the entire windfall. But for commodities where
            price shocks are less persistent, like bananas or sugar, the
            optimal rule involves spending less than half of
            above-average commodity revenues (with the rest saved in a
            SWF). It is also best to respond counter-cyclically to
            non-resource GDP shocks, because those shocks are less
            persistent (and also affect households other income). The
            government does not have the ability to perfectly smooth
            constrained households’ consumption without adversely
            affecting unconstrained households.
How much labor do South African
            exports contain
Like many emerging economies, South
            Africa has identified exports as an engine for more
            inclusive, job-intensive growth. However, employment growth
            did not follow the substantial export growth that South
            Africa experienced in the 2000s. This paper uses a newly
            developed World Bank database -- the Labor Content of
            Exports -- to show that the composition of South
            Africa's export growth helps to understand the weak
            relationship between export and employment growth. Minerals
            exports, which propelled export as well as wage growth, are
            not job intensive and as a result supported far less job
            growth. Minerals have also increasingly become an enclave
            sector with few backward linkages to the domestic economy.
            In contrast, manufacturing exports support jobs and wages
            primarily in input-providing sectors, where indirect
            manufacturing employment is nearly 4.5 times greater than
            direct manufacturing employment. The paper also documents a
            shift in the labor content of global value chain–intensive
            manufacturing sectors away from direct manufacturing to
            indirect services. Such a shift has been biased toward
            skilled labor. As a results of these trends, labor in
            services sectors has been the main beneficiary of South
            Africa's export growth, absorbing more than half of the
            growth in wage income from exports over the 2000s, primarily
            by supplying inputs to other sectors' exports.
The economics of forced displacement
            : an introduction
Forced displacement -- defined as the
            displacement of refugees and internally displaced persons
            due to violence -- has reached an unprecedented scale and
            global attention during the past few years, particularly in
            the aftermath of the Syrian refugee crisis in 2011 and the
            European Union's migration crisis in 2015. As this
            plight gained momentum, economics found itself unprepared to
            answer the basic questions surrounding refugees and
            internally displaced persons. Few economists or institutions
            were working on forced displacement. Economic theory or
            empirics had little to offer in articles published in
            journals. Data were scarce, unreliable, or inaccessible. Can
            economics rise to the challenge? Is the economics of forced
            displacement different from neoclassical economics? Can
            off-the-shelves models be used to study forced displaced
            populations? What is missing to do the economics of forced
            displacement? What are the data constraints that limit
            economists in this work? This paper provides a first
            nontechnical introduction to these topics. The paper argues
            that the modeling of utility, choice, risk, and information
            in a short-term setting is the key to address the problem.
            Neoclassical economics lacks some of the theoretical
            ingredients that are needed, but recent developments in game
            theory, neuroeconomics, and behavioral economics have opened
            new horizons that make the task of modeling forced
            displacement within reach. Empirics is clearly limited by
            the scarcity of quality data, but an example shows how
            welfare economists can start working with existing data.
            Economists have no excuse to maintain the status quo and
            should get on with the work on forced displacement.
On the frontlines of scaling-up : a
            qualitative analysis of implementation challenges in a CDD
            project in rural India
This paper analyzes four years of
            qualitative data observing a large participatory
            anti-poverty project in India as it scales up from its first
            phase (covering 400,000 households) to its second (covering
            800,000 households). Focusing on the frontlines of change --
            at the village level, the analysis finds that the key
            difference between implementation in the two phases of the
            project was that facilitators in the first phase deployed a
            discourse that was carefully "co-produced" with
            its beneficiaries. Through careful groundwork and creative
            improvisation, facilitators incorporated the interests of
            multiple stakeholders on the ground while bringing
            beneficiaries into the project. However, as the project
            scaled up, participants were mobilized quickly with a
            homogenous and fixed script that lacked the kind of
            improvisation that characterized the first phase, and which
            failed to include diverse stakeholder interests, objectives,
            and voices. These differences significantly reduced the
            intensity of participation and its concomitant social
            impacts. The study finds that the work of facilitators was
            embedded in a larger shift in organizational priorities
            within the project, which in turn was responding to a shift
            in the political climate.
Financial inclusion and inclusive
            growth : a review of recent empirical evidence
There is growing evidence that
            appropriate financial services have substantial benefits for
            consumers, especially women and poor adults. This paper
            provides an overview of financial inclusion around the world
            and reviews the recent empirical evidence on how the use of
            financial products -- such as payments services, savings
            accounts, loans, and insurance -- can contribute to
            inclusive growth and economic development. This paper also
            discusses some of the challenges to achieving greater
            financial inclusion and directions for future research.
Structural change, fundamentals, and
            growth : a framework and case studies
Developing countries made considerable
            gains during the first decade of the 21st century. Their
            economies grew at unprecedented rates, resulting in large
            reduction in extreme poverty and a significant expansion of
            the middle class. But more recently that progress has slowed
            with an economic environment of lackluster global trade, not
            enough jobs coupled with skills mismatches, continued
            globalization and technological change, greater income
            inequality, unprecedented population aging in richer
            countries, and youth bulges in the poorer ones. This essay
            examines how seven key countries fared from 1990-2010 in
            their development quest. The sample includes Brazil, India,
            Vietnam and four African countries -- Botswana, Ghana,
            Nigeria, and Zambia -- all of which experienced rapid growth
            in recent years, but for different reasons. The patterns of
            growth are analyzed in each of these countries using a
            unifying framework that draws a distinction between the
            "structural transformation" and
            "fundamentals" challenges in growth. Out of the
            seven countries, the traditional path to rapid growth of
            export oriented industrialization only played a significant
            role in Vietnam.
Stronger together : intra-household
            cooperation and household welfare in Malawi
It has long been recognized that
            household decision-making may not result in outcomes
            consistent with the unitary household model. Within the
            collective bargaining framework, consumption decisions would
            be driven by the spouse with greater bargaining power, while
            the outcomes would still be Pareto efficient. Within the
            non-cooperative framework, households would not achieve
            Pareto efficient outcomes, and under the simplest
            representation, bargaining power would not affect
            consumption decisions. This paper develops a model that
            allows consumption patterns and labor supply to be affected
            by both bargaining power and non-cooperation. The model
            highlights the potential gains from improving bargaining
            power versus increasing cooperation between spouses, and
            presents conditions under which relatively large gains would
            be expected from moving to more equitable bargaining power
            versus achieving intra-household cooperation. The
            model's predictions are in turn tested using a unique
            panel data set on married couples in rural Malawi. The
            analysis shows that, relative to increasing wives'
            bargaining power, improving cooperation between spouses
            would exert larger and statistically significant positive
            impacts on total household income and consumption
            expenditures per capita, as well as the share of household
            consumption devoted to public goods. Supported also by
            cross-country qualitative research, the results suggest that
            household public goods are relatively important to both
            women and men in rural Malawi, husbands' capacity to
            control wives' incomes is relatively limited, and
            development programs that promote intra-household
            cooperation could lead to greater gains in income and
            household public goods provision compared with interventions
            focusing exclusively on women's empowerment.
Do private water utility operators
            care about regulatory agencies in developing countries
This paper shows that the creation of an
            independent regulatory agency is often not a necessary or
            sufficient condition to help attract private participation
            in the operation and financing of the water and sanitation
            sector in developing countries. However, the odds of an
            impact are significantly higher for Latin American and
            Caribbean countries and, to a lesser extent, Eastern
            European countries, than for any other region. Higher income
            levels and higher prices are also correlated with higher
            effectiveness of independent regulatory agencies in
            attracting private sector financing.  Analysis of the impact
            on various types of public-private partnership contracts
            shows that, at the margin, independent regulatory agencies
            are irrelevant in general, for the contract choice, except
            for greenfield projects, for which such agencies may be
            counterproductive at the margin.
How survey-to-survey imputation can fail
This paper proposes diagnostics to
            assess the accuracy of survey-to-survey imputation methods
            and applies them to examine why imputing from the Household
            Income and Expenditure Survey into the Labor Force Survey
            fails to accurately project poverty trends in Sri Lanka
            between 2006 and 2009. Survey-to-survey imputation methods
            rely on two key assumptions: (i) that the questions in the
            two surveys are asked in a consistent way and (ii) that
            common variables of the two surveys explain a large share of
            the intertemporal change in household expenditure and
            poverty. In addition, differences in sampling design can
            lead validation tests to underestimate the accuracy of
            survey-to-survey predictions. In Sri Lanka, the causes of
            failure differ across sectors. In the urban sector, the
            primary culprit is differences between the two surveys in
            the design of the questionnaire. In the rural and estate
            sectors, the set of common variables in the prediction model
            does not adequately capture changes in poverty. The paper
            concludes that in Sri Lanka, survey-to-survey imputation
            between the Household Income and Expenditure Survey and the
            Labor Force Survey cannot produce accurate poverty estimates
            unless the Labor Force Survey adds additional questions on
            assets and is redesigned to use a questionnaire that is
            compatible with the Household Income and Expenditure Survey.
            Alternatively, a new welfare-tracking survey that satisfies
            these conditions could be established.
Inequality is bad for growth of the
            poor (but not for that of the rich)
The paper assesses the impact of overall
            inequality, as well as inequality among the poor and among
            the rich, on the growth rates along various percentiles of
            the income distribution.  The analysis uses micro-census
            data from U.S. states covering the period from 1960 to 2010.
            The paper finds evidence that high levels of inequality
            reduce the income growth of the poor and, if anything, help
            the growth of the rich. When inequality is deconstructed
            into bottom and top inequality, the analysis finds that it
            is mostly top inequality that is holding back growth at the bottom.
Inflation and indivisible investment
            in developing economies
In countries with limited access to
            finance, firms accumulate retained earnings to finance
            indivisible investment projects. McKinnon (1973) illustrates
            that when cash is used as a primary store of value,
            inflation may discourage investment as it increases the cost
            of accumulating retained earnings. This paper formalizes
            this argument in a dynamic framework and provides a simple
            calibration of the model that suggests sizable effects of
            inflation on investment. The mechanism is particularly
            relevant for small firms, as firms with lower cash flows
            must accumulate retained earnings for longer periods of time
            to meet the price of indivisible investment goods.
            Consistent with the model, empirical evidence suggests that
            inflation disproportionately reduces investment in small firms.
The return of "patrimonial
            capitalism" : review of Thomas Piketty's capital
            in the 21st century
The paper provides a detailed review of
            Thomas Piketty's book "Capital in the 21st
            century." It focuses on the new contributions of the
            book, and in particular on its unified treatment of economic
            growth, functional income distribution, and concentration of
            personal income. It concludes that Piketty's
            reinvigoration of classical and empircally-drven approach is
            likely to have a profound impact on economics.
The dynamics of centralized
            procurement reform in a decentralized state : evidence and
            lessons from Indonesia
A central policy of the Government of
            Indonesia's strategy for enhancing its country's
            economic and social development is to develop infrastructure
            and expand service delivery. Public procurement reform is a
            key component of this policy. Despite the decentralization
            of financial responsibility and authority to relatively
            autonomous local level governments, procurement reform in
            Indonesia is a centrally-driven effort. In this paper, we
            examine the extent to which procurement reform is
            translating into improvements in sub-national performance.
            Data on local government procurement expenditures point to
            an overall decline in the volume of procurement, especially
            in poorer districts. This paper uses qualitative case
            studies of procurement reform in six local governments and
            finds that local government leadership is associated with
            the uptake of reform. There is little evidence to suggest
            that procurement reform has been
            "demand''-led, since neither the private
            sector nor Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) have been
            active in advocating for procurement reform.
Trade flows and trade disputes
This paper introduces a new data set and
            establishes a set of basic facts and patterns regarding the
            trade that countries fight about under World Trade
            Organization (WTO) dispute settlement. The paper
            characterizes the scope of products, as well as the levels
            of and changes to the trade values, market shares, volumes,
            and prices for those goods that eventually become subject to
            WTO litigation. The first result is striking heterogeneity
            in the level of market access at stake across disputes: for
            example, 14 percent of cases over disputed import products
            feature bilateral trade that is less than $1 million per
            year and another 15 percent feature bilateral trade that is
            more than $1 billion per year. Nevertheless, some strong
            patterns emerge from a more detailed examination of the
            data. Both high- and low-income complainants tend to suffer
            important losses in foreign market access in the products
            that ultimately become subject to dispute. Furthermore,
            although the respondent's imposition of an allegedly
            WTO-inconsistent policy is associated with reductions, on
            average, in trade values, volumes, and exporter-received
            prices, there is some evidence of differences in the size of
            these changes across the different types of policies under
            dispute and the potential exporter country litigants.
            Finally, these different types of policies under dispute can
            have dissimilar trade effects for the complainant relative
            to other (non-complainant) exporters of the disputed product
            and this is likely to affect the litigation allegiance of
            third countries.