rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Bridging Bangladesh and India :
            Cross-Border Trade and the Motor Vehicles Agreement
This paper studies the effects of
            removing transport and trade barriers between Bangladesh and
            India on aggregate real income and the distribution of
            population and real income within both countries. The paper
            uses a spatial general equilibrium model calibrated to these
            two economies, along with road network travel time
            calculated using GPS data, to measure changes in economic
            outcomes given changes in trade costs across regions. The
            paper focuses on the Motor Vehicles Agreement between
            Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Nepal and full transport and
            trade integration between Bangladesh and India. The
            counterfactual exercises show that decreasing transport and
            trade barriers between Bangladesh and India can lead to up
            to a 7.6 percent increase in national real income for India
            and a 16.6 percent increase for Bangladesh.
Links between Growth, Inequality,
            and Poverty : A Survey
Is there a trade-off between raising
            growth and reducing inequality and poverty? This paper
            reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on the
            complex links between growth, inequality, and poverty, with
            causation going in both directions. The evidence suggests
            that growth can be effective in reducing poverty, but its
            impact on inequality is ambiguous and depends on the
            underlying sources of growth. The impact of poverty and
            inequality on growth is likewise ambiguous, as several
            channels mediate the relationship. But most plausible
            mechanisms suggest that poverty and inequality reduce
            growth, at least in the long run. Policies play a role in
            shaping these relationships and those designed to improve
            equality of opportunity can simultaneously improve
            inclusiveness and growth.
Integration of Venezuelan Refugees
            and Migrants in Brazil
An unprecedented number of Venezuelans
            have left behind the worsening economic and social crisis at
            home to look for better future prospects. Brazil is hosting
            about 261,000 Venezuelans as migrants, asylum seekers, or
            refugees, which, at 18 percent, constitutes the largest
            share of Brazil’s 1.3 million refugees and migrants
            population (as of October 2020). Although previous
            literature on other host countries found that Venezuelan
            refugees and migrants are struggling to secure high-paying
            jobs that are commensurate with their education, little is
            known about their access to education and social protection.
            This paper fills this gap by analyzing various
            administrative and census data to explore whether Venezuelan
            migrants and refugees face differential access to education,
            the formal labor market and social protection programs. It
            finds that even though there is minimum legal constraints
            and work permits are relatively easy to obtain, Venezuelan
            refugees and migrants face challenges integrating into the
            education system, social protection programs and the formal
            labor market. The results suggest that Venezuelan refugees
            and migrants have faced downgrading in grades at school and
            occupations at work. They are more likely to attend
            overcrowded schools than their host community counterparts
            and more likely to do inferior jobs characterized by
            temporality, lower wages and higher hours worked. Overall,
            the results suggest that improvement in school capacity,
            accreditation of Venezuelan education or degrees and
            relocation to places with favorable employment opportunities
            may facilitate integration.
Natural Capital and Sovereign Bonds
Natural capital is related to government
            bonds through the macroeconomy and credit risks. This paper
            estimates this relationship from the long-term,
            between-country view and the short-term, within-country
            view. The paper cautions against the former, as it is
            dominated by income differences. These are de facto
            ingrained, as they cannot be overcome by short-term policy
            efforts. The within-country view is unaffected by the
            ingrained income bias and leaves room for recent natural
            capital changes to affect bond yields. The paper finds that
            non-renewables (fossil fuels and mineral assets) raise bond
            yields, possibly due to the resource curse. Renewables
            (forests and agricultural wealth) lower borrowing costs
            because they are economically worthwhile investments.
            Protected areas are more likely to be luxury investments.
The Realities of Primary Care :
            Variation in Quality of Care Across Nine Countries in
            Sub-Saharan Africa
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted
            the centrality of primary care in protecting people’s health
            and well-being during and beyond crises. It has also
            provided an opportunity to strengthen and redesign primary
            care so that it will better serve its purpose. However,
            to-date there is limited evidence on the quality of service
            delivery in primary care. Service Delivery Indicators
            surveys have attempted to fill this gap. Using Service
            Delivery Indicators surveys of 7,810 health facilities and
            66,151 health care providers in nine Sub-Saharan African
            countries, this paper investigates the quality of care
            across five domains to understand a citizen’s experience of
            primary care in his/her country. The results indicate
            substantial heterogeneity in the quality of primary care
            service delivery between and within countries. The
            availability of basic equipment, infrastructure, and
            essential medicines varies—public facilities, facilities in
            rural areas, and non-hospitals are more lacking compared
            with private facilities, urban facilities, and hospitals. In
            terms of patient care, health care providers’ ability to
            correctly diagnose and treat common health conditions is low
            and variably distributed. COVID-19 has catalyzed a long
            overdue health system redesign effort, and the Service
            Delivery Indicators surveys offer an opportunity to examine
            carefully the quality of service delivery, with an eye
            toward health system reform.
Coping with Disasters : Two
            Centuries of International Official Lending
Official ending is much larger than
            commonly known, often surpassing total private cross-border
            capital flows, especially during wars, financial crises and
            natural catastrophes. This paper assembles the first
            comprehensive long-run dataset of official international
            loans, covering 230,000 loans, grants and guarantees
            extended by governments, central banks, and multilateral
            institutions in the period 1790–2015. Historically, wars
            have been the main catalyst of government-to-government
            lending. The scale of official credits granted in and around
            WW1 and WW2 was particularly large, easily surpassing the
            scale of total international bailout lending after the 2008
            crash. During peacetime, development finance and financial
            crises are the main drivers of official cross-border
            finance, with official flows often stepping in when private
            flows retrench. In line with predictions of recent
            theoretical contributions, this paper finds that official
            lending increases with the degree of economic integration.
            In financial crises, governments help those countries to
            which they have greater trade and banking exposure, hoping
            to reduce the collateral damage to their own economies.
            Since the 2000s, official finance has made a sharp comeback,
            largely due to the rise of China as an international
            creditor and the return of central bank cross-border lending
            in times of stress, this time through swap lines.
Welfare Impact of Hosting Refugees
            in Ethiopia
This paper examines the welfare impact
            of hosting refugees in Ethiopia, one of the largest
            refugee-hosting countries worldwide. Identification comes
            from a large spatial difference in within-village temporal
            changes in refugee intensity, following a recent upsurge in
            the flow of refugees into the country. The findings reveal
            different implications depending on the type of household
            welfare metric. While reducing consumption expenditure per
            capita and increasing the probability of falling into
            consumption poverty, hosting refugees has no effect on
            wealth and the status of wealth poverty. Decomposing
            consumption expenditure per capita into food, education, and
            other nonfood components, the results further reveal that
            hosting refugees alters the composition of consumption, as
            it solely affects food consumption expenditure. The
            consumption effects prevail in rural areas with no effects
            in urban centers while no heterogeneity is found concerning
            wealth and wealth poverty results. Key mechanisms explaining
            the adverse consumption effects include displacement of
            hosts from salaried employment and a spike in prices of
            agricultural inputs but not changes in the extent of
            societal cooperation.
What Prevents More Small Firms from
            Using Professional Business Services An Information and
            Quality-Rating Experiment in Nigeria
Why do more small firms in developing
            countries not use the market for professional business
            services like accounting, marketing, and human resource
            specialists? Two key reasons may be that firms lack
            information about the availability of these services, and
            that they struggle to distinguish the quality of good versus
            bad providers. A brand recognition exercise finds that most
            small firms are unaware of most providers in this market,
            and a survey of service providers reveals that they largely
            rely on word-of-mouth and informal reputation mechanisms for
            acquiring customers. This study set up a business services
            marketplace that contains information about the different
            providers present in the market and used mystery shopper
            visits to develop a quality ratings system. A randomized
            experiment with more than 1,000 firms provided access to
            this marketplace to the treatment group and randomized
            whether firms received just information or also quality
            ratings. The provision of quality ratings information shifts
            small firms’ preferences over which provider they would like
            to use, increasing the average quality rating of their
            preferred providers by 0.2 to 0.4 ratings points out of 5.
            However, neither the provision of information nor these
            quality ratings had any significant impact on the likelihood
            that small firms go on to hire a business service provider
            over the subsequent six months. The results suggest that
            alleviating information frictions alone is insufficient to
            increase usage of professional business services.
Does Participation in Global Value
            Chains Reduce Spatial Inequalities within Countries
This paper examines whether a country’s
            participation in global value chains supports spatial
            convergence in the domestic economy. In theory, production
            disintegration through “unbundling” makes industrial
            development less lumpy, providing opportunities for smaller
            cities to plug and play in niche spaces while not having to
            fight the agglomeration economies offered by large
            metropolitan areas. Using data on the size distribution of
            cities within countries and the Organisation for Economic
            Co-operation and Development’s Trade in Value Added
            database, the paper finds that integration in global value
            chains is strongly associated with greater concentration in
            large urban agglomerations, not less. A unit standard
            deviation increase in domestic value added in exports of
            intermediate products is associated with a decline of 0.1
            standard deviation in the Zipf coefficient, an index
            measuring spatial dispersion. Spatial concentration is
            strongest for global value chains involving
            knowledge-intensive business services and high-technology manufacturing.
When Distance Drives Destination,
            Towns Can Stimulate Development
While city migrants see their welfare
            increase much more than those moving to towns, many more
            rural-urban migrants end up in towns. This phenomenon,
            documented in detail in Kagera, Tanzania, begs the question
            why migrants move to seemingly suboptimal destinations.
            Using an 18-year panel of individuals from this region and
            information on the possible destinations from the census,
            this study documents, through dyadic regressions and
            controlling for individual heterogeneity, how the deterrence
            of further distance to cities (compared to towns) largely
            trumps the attraction from their promise of greater wealth,
            making towns more appealing destinations. Education
            mitigates these effects (lesser deterrence from distance,
            greater attraction from wealth), while poverty reduces the
            attraction of wealth, consistent with the notion of urban
            sorting. With about two-thirds of the rural population in
            low-income countries living within two hours from a town,
            these findings underscore the importance of vibrant towns
            for inclusive development.
Invisible or Mainstream Disability
            in Surveys and Censuses in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
This paper examines to what extent
            household surveys and censuses in low- and middle-income
            countries include disability questions and the types of
            questions under use. A pool of 734 data sets and 1,297 data
            set-years from 133 low- and middle-income countries from
            2009 to 2018 were screened for disability questions, which
            were classified by type of questions: Washington Group short
            set of questions, other functional difficulty questions,
            activities of daily living, broad activity limitation,
            general disability, and other disability questions. Only 31
            percent of the data sets under review had at least one
            disability-related question and 15 percent of the datasets
            of low- and middle-income countries have functional
            difficulty questions that meet international standards,
            whether the Washington Group short set or other functional
            difficulty questions. The most commonly found disability
            question is the general question “Do you have a disability?”
            which does not produce meaningful and internationally
            comparable data. The adoption of functional difficulty
            questions such as the Washington Group short set in national
            censuses and surveys and in international surveys is needed
            to monitor the implementation of the 2030 Agenda for
            Sustainable Development as well as the Convention on the
            Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
Trade, Jobs, and Worker Welfare
This paper examines the welfare effects
            of international trade on workers in a new dynamic general
            equilibrium discrete choice model of labor mobility, where
            the workers’ choice set of jobs is endogenous. The analysis
            exploits differential exposure of sectors and regions to
            destination-specific demand shocks to estimate the impacts
            of exports on wages, employment, and labor mobility, using
            employer-employee panel data for Brazil. It then employs the
            same empirical strategy to estimate structural parameters
            and the different components of changes in model-implied
            worker welfare. Counterfactual simulations show that the
            endogenous number of job options significantly magnifies the
            welfare effects of trade shocks.
Machine Learning in International
            Trade Research : Evaluating the Impact of Trade Agreements
Modern trade agreements contain a large
            number of provisions besides tariff reductions, in areas as
            diverse as services trade, competition policy, trade-related
            investment measures, or public procurement. Existing
            research has struggled with overfitting and severe
            multicollinearity problems when trying to estimate the
            effects of these provisions on trade flows. This paper
            builds on recent developments in the machine learning and
            variable selection literature to propose novel data-driven
            methods for selecting the most important provisions and
            quantifying their impact on trade flows. The proposed
            methods have the advantage of not requiring ad hoc
            assumptions on how to aggregate individual provisions and
            offer improved selection accuracy over the standard lasso.
            The analysis finds that provisions related to technical
            barriers to trade, antidumping, trade facilitation,
            subsidies, and competition policy are associated with
            enhancing the trade-increasing effect of trade agreements.
A General Equilibrium Assessment of
            the Economic Impact of Deep Trade Agreements
This paper explores the economic impacts
            of preferential trade agreements, focusing on the provisions
            they contain, beyond phasing out tariffs. Clustering 278
            preferential trade agreements based on 906 provisions
            grouped into 18 policy areas, three clusters are obtained
            for which a trade elasticity to preferential trade agreement
            is estimated using structural gravity. A series of full
            general equilibrium counterfactual situations for endowment
            economies is simulated, revealing the economic impacts of
            deepening existing trade agreements and signing new
            ones—that is, the intensive and extensive margins of
            preferential trade agreements. The paper illustrates the
            method with a general deepening of existing preferential
            trade agreements worldwide. Focusing on the examples of the
            Latin America and the Caribbean and East Asia and Pacific
            regions, the paper shows that deepening preferential trade
            agreements leads to higher trade and welfare effects than
            signing new ones.
Estimating the Gains from
            International Diversification : The Case of Pension Funds
For pension funds, international assets
            represent an opportunity to improve their returns while
            possibly reducing risks. Nonetheless, pension funds in many
            developing countries face regulations that limit the choice
            of international investments. This paper proposes a new
            methodology to estimate the gains from international
            diversification in which the optimal asset allocation of
            pension funds is constrained by financial frictions. The
            empirical strategy is applied to the aggregate holdings of
            pension funds in a large group of countries to calculate the
            gains from increasing the current level of exposure to
            international securities. The methodology should give policy
            makers the opportunity to identify jurisdictions where
            pension funds could benefit the most from expanding their
            foreign holdings.
Does Gender Equality in Labor
            Participation Bring Real Equality Evidence from Developed
            and Developing Countries
Drawing on various macro- and micro-data
            sources, the authors present robust evidence of an inverted
            U-shaped relationship between female labor force
            participation and inequality. Overall, female labor force
            participation is found to have a strong and significant
            dis-equalizing impact in at least three groups of developing
            countries with relatively low initial levels of
            participation. A decile-level analysis shows that female
            labor force participation has higher levels of returns among
            top deciles compared with the lower deciles in the
            developing countries analyzed. This evidence focuses
            attention on the importance of developing policies
            specifically targeting women in lower deciles of the income distribution.