rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Are markets learning : behavior in
            the secondary market for Brady bonds
The authors analyze some aspects of the
            market for Brady bonds (restructured debt in developing
            countries).  They focus on how the debt crisis in Mexico in
            1994 affected risk assessment (as measured by the stripped
            spread) in other Brady countries, especially Poland.  Their
            main finding: The risk premium (in a single country) has a
            behavior (one unit root), consistent with the hypothesis
            that it reflects new market information.  Among stripped
            yields, co-movements of sovereign risk premia were stronger
            during the period of highest volatility in the Mexican
            crisis.  In the case study of Mexico and Poland, they do not
            reject cointegration for the period July 1994-July 1995;
            they do reject it for July 1995-July 1996.  The crisis had a
            strong permanent effect on risk assessment in Mexico (about
            55 basis points).  Different Brady bonds responded
            differently to the Mexican crisis.  Countries with similar
            pre-crisis means and volatility reacted similarly (in terms
            of absolute deviation and the degree of co-movement with the
            Mexican bonds).  Other factors (region, oil producers, date
            of Brady deal) did not explain observed patterns.  There was
            convergence of volatility during the highly volatile period
            of the Mexican crisis.  These   results suggest that
            traders' behavior in assessing the sovereign risk of
            Brady countries is not constant over time, and responds
            especially to the level of market uncertainty.  Herd
            behavior increases with risk, leading (in a volatile
            environment) to even more volatility.  Learning is likely to
            spill over because traders have limited experience with, and
            limited information about, developing countries.  The
            decrease in co-movements of sovereign risk premia in the
            second period of the sample could indicate that markets were
            learning -that is, gathering information about, and
            experience in, the developing countries, so that the issue
            of learning spillover was less relevant.  But it could also
            signal that no relevant shock existed to generate such
            spillover effects, although the market was still vulnerable
            to country-specific shocks.  On that issue, further research
            is needed.
The usefulness of private and public
            information for foreign investment decisions
Using a specially designed survey of
            Japanese firms planning investments in Asia, the authors
            emphasize the importance of privately held information in
            making foreign investment decisions. Information on
            operating conditions based on direct experience in a country
            is likely to be the most credible information, but for
            investors new to a country, information inferred from
            observing others investing in that country may be more
            influential. Initially, in fact, observing the actions of
            competitors seems to lead to cascading investments in that
            country, apparently through herd behavior (as in China and
            Vietnam). Countries which do not draw a critical mass of
            investors are in danger of being bypassed for significant
            periods. Publicly available information is important in
            helping shape average perceptions about a country, leading
            potential investors to view particular locations favorably.
            Privately held information complements that public
            information, and accounts for important variations in
            investment plans. Subjective perceptions about policy on
            foreign direct investments are also important. Policy
            designed to attract investors -for example, special zones
            for foreign investors- have been successful in many
            instances, especially in East Asia, but have also been a
            waste of scarce investment resources when not appropriately
            planned. And such policy is of little value in attracting
            those already investing in a country, or those who already
            perceive rivals to be active there.
Population aging and financing of
            government liabilities in New Zealand
In New Zealand in the next 50 years, an
            aging population is expected to elevate government
            liabilities and weaken the government's fiscal
            position.  To maintain fiscal balance, the government must
            either substantially pre-fund future increases  in its
            liabilities or significantly raise taxes in the
            2030's-40's, following few small possible tax cuts
            in the next 10 to 15 years.  Expected fiscal problems are
            related to the increasing costliness of publicly providing
            for health care and retirement.  Moreover, the aging
            population's negative effects on the fiscal balance
            could be exacerbated by any slackening in economic
            performance or in fiscal prudence.  Long-term fiscal
            projections for the country, and literature on the problem,
            indicate that the most effective way to contain the expected
            rise in government liabilities is to reform health care and
            pension policies.
Inflation in nontradables and the
            macroeconomic policy mix : a model with policy application
            to transition economies
The author analyzes the macroeconomic
            effects of inflation in the nontradables sector of a small
            open economy to suggest how different macroeconomic policies
            would facilitate structural adjustment after price
            liberalization in a transition economy.  She uses a
            Mundell-Fleming rational expectations model of a two-sector
            economy to study how inflation in the nontradables sector
            affects the exchange rate, relative prices, wages, and,
            indirectly, the movement of factors of production.  She
            applies the analysis to a cut in producer subsidies in the
            nontradables sector and assesses how macroeconomic policies
            involving the management of supply and demand might affect
            government objectives for the economy and redistribution.
            She concludes that to alleviate the transitory negative
            effects of a cut in producer subsidies, targeted household
            transfers combined with a tax cut, if possible, are superior
            to expansionary monetary and fiscal policies.  Making the
            tax cut less than the cut in subsidies and financing
            targeted lump-sum household transfers from government
            savings reduce the risk of poverty and external imbalances.
            The potential benefits from exchange rate management depend
            greatly on the level of wage discipline.
Does Mercosur's trade
            performance raise concerns about the effects of regional
            trade arrangements
A concern about regional trade
            arrangements (RTAs) is whether the discriminatory trade
            barriers applied to RTAs encourage high-cost imports from
            member countries at the expense of nonmember lower-cost
            goods. RTA impact evaluations have been hampered by a lack
            of appropriate empirical procedures for assessing their
            influence on trade level and direction. The author employs a
            new index for analyzing the static trade effects of an RTA.
            He examines export regional orientation changes combined
            with the revealed comparative advantage (RCA) index to
            identify trade pattern inefficiencies. This is applied to
            Mercosur countries' export statistics to determine if
            recent trade is evolving compatible with the countries'
            current comparative advantage. The results show the dynamic
            products in Mercosur's intra-trade are capital
            intensive goods which members have not displayed a strong
            export performance in outside markets. Neither the RCA
            indices nor factor proportion statistics indicate that
            Mercosur has a comparative advantage in those products. The
            evidence suggests Mercosur's trade barriers are
            responsible for the trade changes. Most favored nation
            tariffs on the fast growing products are above the average
            for all imports and provide Mercosur members with
            significant preferences. These findings constitute evidence
            on the potential adverse effects of regional trade
            arrangements on members and on third countries. Given the
            recent proliferation of RTAs, they highlight the need for
            further empirical research on the domestic and international
            effects of these arrangements, to better assess the pros and
            cons of regionalism.
The distribution of foreign direct
            investment in China
Foreign direct investment (FDI) has
            played a major role in China's push toward a
            market-oriented economy.  Recent inflows account for 40
            percent of combined flows of FDI to all developing
            countries, making China the biggest developing country FDI
            recipient.  This record is impressive, but certain problems
            must be overcome if FDI is to continue to help sustain the
            country's record growth rate and further its economic
            development.  For one thing, FDI in China is highly
            concentrated geographically, and its sector distribution is
            highly uneven.  The authors empirically analyze the
            geographic determinants of FDI in China.  They find that
            FDI's geographical distribution in China is determined
            mostly by GNP, infrastructure development, level of general
            education, and coastal location.  Although the sectoral
            distribution of FDI is coming into line with the rest of the
            world, in the past, FDI has been biased toward speculative
            types of investment, especially in the real estate sector.
Citizen complaints as environmental
            indicators : evidence from China
The complaints process in China provides
            useful information and helps encourage community
            participation in environmental policy.  But it also directs
            a big share of inspection resources to areas where people
            tend to complain.  After analyzing provincial data for
            1987-93, the authors find the subsequent allocation of
            resources biased, in terms of social welfare.  The incidence
            of complaints reflects potential abatement benefits and the
            intensity of exposure to highly visible pollutants.
            However, citizen complaints seem not to be affected by
            harmful pollutants that are less visible.  Basic education
            seems to have a strong independent effect on propensity to
            complain.  Relying on complaints alone would lead to
            inappropiately low allocation of inspection resources to
            less-educated, relatively silent regions.  To compensate for
            incomplete information upon which regulators must rely, the
            authors say that agencies should invest in public
            environmental education targeted especially to
            poorly-educated communities and consider outreach to
            encourage better communication.  The authors also recommend
            giving priority to technical risk assessments in determining
            resource allocation.
Issues in comparing poverty trends
            over time in Cote de'Ivoire
Cote d'Ivoire conducted household
            surveys between 1985 and 1995, making it possible to trace
            changes in urban and rural poverty and changes in poverty
            among different socioeconomic groups.  During the decade
            surveyed, the country experienced a major recession.
            Poverty increased substantially and continued unabated in
            the year after devaluation, in part because much of the
            increase in export crop prices, especially for cocoa, was
            taxed away.  Between 1988 and 1993, urban poverty increased
            faster than rural poverty did, though mean expenditures in
            urban areas remained substantially above mean expenditures
            in rural areas.  Food crop farmers apparently suffered more
            than export crop farmers.  All in all these trends persisted
            after devaluation.  However, the authors found that
            exploring poverty trends across regions and socioeconomic
            groups raised questions about the patterns of change and the
            reliability of the data and the methods used to derive
            poverty estimates.  Secondary data cast some doubt on
            certain survey findings, suggesting that they may not have
            truly reflected real economic trends. The authors emphasized
            the need to draw reliable conclusions from time-series data
            in order to understand how policy reform affects poverty.
            They urged that far more attention be paid to comparability
            issues in designing and analyzing data and to developing
            better regional and temporal price indices, if reliable
            time-series data are to be generated for Sub-Saharan Africa.
Fiscal federalism in
            Bosnia-Herzegovina : The Dayton challenge
The authors describe Bosnia's
            current arrangements in fiscal federalism, outline the
            unique challenges that the Dayton system proposed, and draw
            lessons for the design of fiscal federal systems in
            ethnically diverse economies.  Traditional economic models
            of federalism suggest a government structure assuming there
            is an intent to achieve Pareto-efficiency for the entire
            country.  Current attitudes in Bosnia challenge this
            paradigm's aptness unmodified, since many people in
            each ethnic group see themselves as members of their group,
            rather than as Bosnians, and are not broadly concerned about
            the entire country's welfare or access to public
            services outside the group.  The motivation for the fiscal
            federalism structure proposed in the Dayton Accords is
            better interpreted as an effort to manage conflict between
            the ethnic groups.  Federalism, in a conflict management
            sense, does not require that each group be given its own
            state; rather it leads to the conclusion that institutions
            of power should be brought closer to the people so that
            decisionmaking can be more sensitive to the different ethnic
            groups.  Decentralization in this context is a means to
            lessen the   points where disagreement exists, rather than a
            structure to obtain economic efficiency.  Common
            institutions at the state, entity or canton levels are
            maintained, but only for functions that must be broader in
            scope.  The fiscal (and other) interdependencies flowing
            from these institutions present opportunities to build
            relationships and trust over time.  While the government
            structure included in Dayton is workable, governments must
            negotiate other arrangements to prevent, in the short to
            medium term, diseconomies of scale in providing certain
            services that are more cost-efficient at other levels.  In
            the latter scenario, services with geographic spillovers
            would be underprovided because governments would fail to
            adequately account for benefits received by other ethnic
            group members.  Further, little concern would be given to
            equitable distribution of services, resulting in widely
            different access across the country.  Better service
            delivery mechanisms -from a national, Pareto-efficient
            perspective- will not be selected given the very strong
            distaste for cross subsidies and minority group fears of
            larger group domination.  Despite these concerns, the
            authors conclude that more efficient arrangements can be
            expected to evolve over time as confidence in the government
            structures evolve.
Has Latin America's post-reform
            growth been disappointing
After years of poor economic
            performance, many Latin American countries undertook
            ambitious programs of macroeconomic stabilization and
            structural reform in recent years. This change in policy
            created high expectations for the region, and some observers
            have questioned whether actual growth outcomes have lived up
            to these expectations. The authors offer evidence that the
            response of economic growth to reforms in Latin America has
            not been disappointing. Because of their significant policy
            changes, and despite a global slowdown, Latin America did
            well to return to its historic growth rate of 2 percent per
            capita in 1990-93. Latin America has responded to changes in
            policy variables, as would have been predicted by the
            experience of other times and places. Those earlier
            experiences are summarized by a panel regression spanning
            many countries and multi-year periods from 1960 to 1993. To
            get consistent estimates of the parameters linking growth
            and policy variables, the authors use a dynamic panel
            methodology that both controls for unobserved time- and
            country-specific effects and accounts for the likely
            internal dynamism of the explanatory variables.
Why did Colombian private savings
            decline in the early 1990s
The sharp drop in private savings in the
            1990s in Colombia can be attributed to a decline in private
            disposable income and, to a lesser extent, to growth in
            consumption. The permanent decline in private disposable
            income in Colombia between 1950 and 990 is closely linked to
            tax increases. This trend was accentuated in the early 1990s
            by a reduction in corporations' gross operating
            surplus. Contrary to the usual hypothesis, the author shows
            that in the 1990s private consumption had a relatively minor
            effect on national savings. He highlights two findings.
            First, private consumption's recent behavior can hardly
            be called a boom. It declined throughout the second half of
            the 1980s before finally showing an upturn equivalent to 2
            percent of gross national product. Second, consumption of
            durable goods after trade reform cannot be blamed for the
            decline in private savings. In fact, savings began falling
            in 1988 and, until 1993, trade reform did not cause a stock
            adjustment of durable goods.
Integrating the unofficial economy
            into the dynamics of post-socialist economies : a framework
            of analysis and evidence
Over a third of economic activity in the
            former Soviet countries was estimated to occur in the
            unofficial economy by the mid-1990s; in Central and Eastern
            Europe, the average is close to one-quarter. Intraregional
            variations are great: in some countries 10 to 15 percent of
            economic activity is unofficial, and in some more than half
            of it. The growth of unofficial activity in most
            post-socialist countries, and its mitigating effect on the
            decline in official output during the early stages of the
            transition, have been marked. In this paper, the authors
            challenge the conventional view of how post-socialist
            economies function by incorporating the unofficial economy
            into an analysis of the full economy. Then they advance a
            simple framework for understanding the evolution of the
            unofficial economy, and the links between both economies,
            highlighting the main characteristics of
            "officialdom," contrasting conventional notions of
            "informal" or "shadow" economies, and
            focusing on what determines the decision to cross over from
            one segment to another. The initial empirical results seem
            to support hypothetical explanations of what determines the
            dynamics of the unofficial economy. The authors emphasize
            the speedy liberalization of markets, macro stability, and a
            stable and moderate tax regime. Although widespread, most
            "unofficialdom" in the region is found to be
            relatively shallow--subject to reversal by appropriate
            economic policies. The framework and evidence presented here
            have implications for measurement, forecasting, and
            policymaking--calling for even faster liberalization and
            privatization than already advocated. And the lessons in
            social protection and taxation policy differ from
            conventional advice.
Demand elasticities in international
            trade : are they really low
The authors analyze the U.S. demand for
            Bangladeshi imports for products restricted under the
            Multifiber Arrangement. Because Bangladesh is only a small
            supplier of these products and Latin American and Asian
            countries can supply close substitutes, the authors expected
            a high elasticity of demand for Bangladeshi imports, and
            they found consistently high estimates based on
            statistically significant coefficients. Their finding
            accords with trade theorists' prejudice that small
            countries can essentially behave as price takers, but
            conflicts with the empirical literature view that demand
            elasticities are low, rarely exceeding 3 and generally
            between 1 and 2. The authors' analysis differs from the
            existing literature in three ways: they derive a set of
            estimation equations from an explicit, utility-maximization
            model and use the estimated parameters of the utility
            function to obtain the Marshallian own-price and cross-price
            elasticities as well as the income elasticity of demand;
            they take explicit account of U.S. imports from competitors
            of Bangladesh, relying directly on competitors' prices;
            and they use highly disaggregated data that make the unit
            value of exports a better proxy for price than using
            aggregated export data commonly used in this literature. The
            authors outline their theoretical model for deriving their
            estimated equations in Section 1; preliminarily determine
            who Bangladesh's competitors are in Section 2; and
            estimate the demand equation derived in Section 1, and
            derive the price and income elasticities facing Bangladesh
            in Section 3.