rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
20 medium sized firms (SMEs) have been squeezed out from the formal loan market, and they have been forced to turn to the informal financial markets with much higher interest rates.<sup>24</sup> The efficiency and flexibility of the market for bank loans are also limited by the domination of public-sector banks, which have systematically favored state enterprises at the expense of private firms.<sup>25</sup> In the late 1990s and early 2000s, two-thirds of all bank credit seems to have been granted to the state sector. Thus, even though private firms produce most of GDP today, China’s character as a market economy is still constrained by the domination of government institutions in financial markets.

Another well known weakness of financial markets in China is that bank lending often has been “soft” in the sense that a large fraction of the loans have turned out to be nonperforming (paying neither interest rates nor amortization). Indeed, according to many observers, 30-40 percent of the stock of loans by public-sector banks was non-performing around year 2000.<sup>26</sup> It is often also asserted that many bank managers expected government authorities to bail them out in the event of severe financial difficulties in the future – if so, a pronounced example of moral hazard in the financial system.

The share of non-performing loans is believed to subsequently have fallen to less than 10 percent due to the transfer of a large volume of such loans to special asset management companies, as well as due to the recapitalization of some of the banks by government funds.<sup>27</sup> The large flow of deposits of household saving into state banks at low (occasionally negative) real interest rates has also helped avoid an acute financial crisis in the bank system.

For these reasons, the risk of an immanent financial crisis in China is remote. Indeed, the Chinese government has sufficient financial resources to avoid financial instability in the near future, even with a “new round” of non-performing loans, and only modest recovery

> 24 McKinsey Global Institute (2006, pp. 65-66) estimates the informal loan market at US $ 100 billion (about 5 percent of GDP), with interests often in the interval 15-20 percent.

> 25 According to the OECD (2005a, Figure 3.2), more than 90 percent of total bank assets are owned by the public-sector banks.

> 26 See, for instance, Lardy (2000); Chow (2002, pp. 229-30); Aziz and Duenwald (2002); Asian Development Bank (2004); and OECD (2005a, Table 3.4).

> 27 See, for instance, (2006, March 25) and Dobson (2006). The latter study calculates that the Chinese taxpayers have injected US $ 231 billion since 1999 to fix up the balance sheets of three of China’s Big Four Banks. McKinsey Global Institute (2006, p. 32) estimates that more than US $ 300 billion worth of nonperforming loans has been transferred from the large state commercial banks to asset-management companies since their creation in 1998.
**Figure 2: Evidence on what works in education has mushroomed**

<!-- Start of picture text --> Access Learning<br>250<br>300<br>200 250<br>200<br>150<br>150<br>100<br>100<br>50<br>50<br>0 0<br>1981 1992 1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 2016 1981 1992 1998 2001 2004 2007 2010 2013 2016<br>Number of cumulative studies Number of cumulative studies<br><!-- End of picture text --> Source: Authors’ adaptation using International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) (2016) and Evans and Popova (2016).

**Figure 3: Interventions not targeted specifically to girls may in fact deliver bigger gains to girls A thought experiment**

<!-- Start of picture text --> 0.6<br>0.5<br>0.4<br>0.3<br>0.2<br>0.1<br>0<br>Girls Boys Girls Boys<br>Girl‐targeted intervention General education intervention<br>Increased learning<br>(standard deviations)<br><!-- End of picture text -->

**Two real‐life examples**

21
# **3 Village-Level Governance in Zimbabwe**

Village governance in Zimbabwe has been resistant to pressures from either above or below. Villages are led by village heads; local leaders who allocate land, run village courts and help to broker a wide range of development programs, including food aid distribution. There are an estimated 24,000 village heads across Zimbabwe (Zamchiya, 2011). These leaders remain the most important point of contact for most rural villagers (Ncube, 2011), but they are frequently accused of bias and abuse of power.

The possibility for bottom-up reform is limited due to the fact that these leaders are not subject to regular election. The vast majority of these leaders inherit their positions from within their village’s founding family and rule for life.<sup>5</sup> Community members have little formal recourse against village heads who govern poorly, although they may be able to apply social or moral pressure under some circumstances. Importantly, Shona village heads have traditionally worked with a handful of senior kinsmen to hear disputes and make decisions, and these councils of advisers historically provided a check on their decision-making.(Bourdillon, 1976, p. 79).

The possibility for effective top-down reform has been constrained by central government’s capacity and incentives. At independence in 1980, the Zimbabwean government was committed to reigning in patrimonial village-level governance. However, as the state became more politicized, this may have further complicated the central government’s interactions with village heads.<sup>6</sup> At that time, lack of capacity made it difficult for the central government to check the power of village-level leaders.

Specifically, in the 1980s, the Zimbabwean government tried to reduce the influence of village-level traditional leaders by stripping them of powers. It set up 6-member elected village-level development committees – VIDCOs – which were intended to check the power of village heads and push forward legal and agricultural reforms. Interestingly, two of the six members of VIDCOs were supposed to be chosen by civil society organizations to represent women and youths (Munro, 1998, p.243). However, in most rural com-

> 5Our survey asked the current village head when and why the previously village head was removed from office. The vast majority of village heads ruled until they died or were bed-ridden by illness; only 5 percent of village heads had been removed for reasons related to performance or community divisions. Similarly, 94 percent of the village heads in our sample said they did not fear being demoted by anyone, including community members and government officials.

6The government of national unity formed following the contentious 2009 elections made little difference to this general trend.

10
# **1. Introduction**

The paper forecasts growth trends in the developing world, and for a large sample of countries, identifies the main forces likely to underpin growth in the period 2005-14. The paper presents real per capita GDP growth forecasts for all developing countries for the next ten year period. For 55 of these countries,<sup>1</sup> representing all major world regions except Europe and Central Asia and accounting for close to 80% of the developing world’s GDP, the paper presents real per capita GDP growth forecasts that reflect the growth effects of various growth determinants assuming that these evolve following past trends.

The forecasting exercise contributes to the literature a collection of econometrically derived country forecasts of real per capita GDP growth for the next decade and all developing countries in the world. Such forecasts are often an input into various types of economic sector work – from debt sustainability analysis to scenario building for macroeconomic and policy modeling exercises, and we could not find a set of growth forecasts of this kind in the literature. The IMF’s World Economic Outlook, the World Bank’s Unified Surveys and CAS documents publish country growth forecasts for only the next 3 to 5 years, while the World Bank’s Global Economic Prospects report presents growth forecasts at the regional, not the country level.

Our analysis, based on a cross country regression framework, suggests that for the average developing country the growth effects of continued improvements in public infrastructure will be larger than those of improved secondary school enrollment, trade openness, and financial deepening. The joint contribution of increases in these growth factors to average, annual real per capita GDP growth in the developing world in the next decade is

> 1 We focused on the group of fifty five developing countries, which jointly with twenty three developed countries, is a part of the panel data used by Loayza _et al_ . (2005) to estimate the cross-country growth model employed in this study. The rest of the developing countries were not part of the panel data because of missing data on real per capita GDP growth. The bulk of the excluded countries are transition economies, countries that did not exist during the sample period, and very small developing economies.

2
|Foreign Ownership (proportion)|0.163|0.218|0.049|-0.004|-0.569|-0.623|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||(0.962)|(0.960)|(0.963)|(0.964)|(1.021)|(1.017)|
|Female Ownership Y:1 N:0|5.939***|5.949***|5.975***|5.978***|5.944***|5.982***|
||(0.652)|(0.650)|(0.652)|(0.652)|(0.710)|(0.710)|
|Skills Obstacle (0-4)|0.646**|0.659**|0.651**|0.649**|0.740**|0.745**|
||(0.269)|(0.267)|(0.269)|(0.268)|(0.293)|(0.292)|
|How Much Of An Obstacle:|-0.006|-0.004|-0.006|0.000|-0.036|-0.042|
|Transport?|||||||
||(0.209)|(0.209)|(0.209)|(0.209)|(0.223)|(0.223)|
|Firm Purchased Fixed Assets|-1.041*|-0.987*|-1.063*|-1.029*|-0.606|-0.587|
|Y:1 N:0|||||||
||(0.556)|(0.557)|(0.557)|(0.557)|(0.588)|(0.588)|
|Power Outages (days)|-0.145**|-0.146**|-0.152**|-0.156**|-0.084|-0.087|
||(0.068)|(0.067)|(0.068)|(0.068)|(0.075)|(0.074)|
|Courts Obstacle (cell average)|-0.536|-0.404|-0.562|-0.438|-1.390*|-1.336|
||(0.738)|(0.734)|(0.742)|(0.739)|(0.811)|(0.813)|
|Crime Losses Y:1 N:0|-0.664|-0.671|-0.626|-0.650|-0.809|-0.831|
||(0.670)|(0.670)|(0.668)|(0.668)|(0.701)|(0.704)|
|Firm Inspected Y:1 N:0|-0.869|-0.899|-0.880|-0.885|-1.325**|-1.327**|
||(0.606)|(0.604)|(0.604)|(0.604)|(0.658)|(0.659)|
|How Much Of An Obstacle:|-0.243|-0.231|-0.258|-0.258|-0.351|-0.345|
|Tax Rates|||||||
||(0.229)|(0.228)|(0.229)|(0.228)|(0.255)|(0.255)|
|How Much Of An Obstacle:|0.032|0.034|0.024|0.041|0.075|0.080|
|Labor Regulations?|||||||
||(0.301)|(0.300)|(0.301)|(0.301)|(0.329)|(0.329)|
|Population (logs)|-38.368***|-37.069***|-42.373***|-43.149***|-46.382***|-46.717***|
||(10.833)|(10.729)|(10.841)|(10.831)|(11.098)|(11.036)|
|Urbanization (%)|1.630***|1.633***|1.611***|1.616***|1.378***|1.418***|
||(0.406)|(0.411)|(0.407)|(0.409)|(0.456)|(0.457)|
|WBL Index|15.209*|14.790*|15.746*|15.280*|28.689***|28.240***|
||(8.451)|(8.393)|(8.524)|(8.382)|(8.905)|(8.822)|
|Women can work the same|2.882|2.999|2.756|2.816|1.375|1.508|
|night hours as men Y:1 N:0|||||||
||(2.879)|(2.861)|(2.818)|(2.785)|(3.206)|(3.190)|
|Women can work in the same|-1.485|-0.858|-1.410|-0.815|-2.446|-1.892|
|industries as men Y:1 N:0|||||||
||(2.114)|(2.094)|(2.087)|(2.066)|(2.184)|(2.189)|
|Ratio of Female to Male|2.474***|2.720***|2.562***|2.852***|2.956***|3.113***|
|Population|||||||
||(0.556)|(0.566)|(0.562)|(0.561)|(0.715)|(0.706)|

45
Policy Research Working Paper 7020

# **Abstract**

Rates of return to investments in schooling have been estimated since the late 1950s. In the 60-plus year history of such estimates, there have been several attempts to synthesize the empirical results to ascertain patterns. This paper presents comparable estimates, as well as a database, that use the same specification, estimation procedure, and similar data for 139 economies and 819 harmonized household surveys. This effort to compile comparable estimates holds constant the definition of the dependent variable, the set of control variables, the sample definition, and the estimation method for all surveys in the sample. The results of this study show that (1) the returns to schooling are more concentrated around their respective means than previously thought; (2) the basic Mincerian model used is more stable than may have been expected; (3) the returns to schooling are higher for women than for men; (4) returns to schooling and labor market experience are strongly and positively associated; (5) there is a decreasing pattern over time; and (6) the returns to tertiary education are highest.

This paper is a product of the Education Global Practice Group. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The authors may be contacted at hpatrinos@ worldbank.org _The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
Act No. 98, Skills Development Act, Vol. 401, 2 November 1998 No. 19420 Notice 458 of 2012, Department of Transport. National Road Traffic Act 1996(Act No. 93 of 1996) Amendment of the National Road Traffic Regulations The South African Revenue Service (SARS), Transporter or remover licensing at - - - <u>http://www.sars.gov.za/ClientSegments/Customs Excise/Processing/Pre assessment/Licensing/Pages/Transporter or-remover-of-goods.aspx</u> South African Association of Freight forwarders Trading Terms and Conditions adopted by John Fish Agencies (Pty) LTD (as an example) Cross-Border Transport Agency (CBRT) PERMIT FEES <u>http://www.grsp.org.za/index.php/members/116-cross-border-road-transport-agency</u> The Customs and Excise Act, 1964 Draft Customs Control Bill, 2012 NQF Act 2008, Government notice for qualification and unit standards Integrated and Sub-Sector B-BBEE Charters of Transport (2008)

[Study] Technical Report: Road Freight Transport Services Diagnostic Study, USAID/ Southern Africa 2011

# **Singapore**

Singapore Registry of Accredited Multimodal Transport Operators <u>http://www.sla.org.sg/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=165ec408-7fd3-4e5f-8510-e56d26d2f9ab&groupId=10175</u> Companies Act Ch.50 Standard Trading Conditions (STC) by Singapore Logistics Association (SLA)

# **Thailand**

The Multimodal Transport Act, B.E. 2548, Bhumiphol Adulyadej, Rex. Given on the 11th Day of July B.E. 2548; Being the 60th Year of the Present Reign.

Carriage of goods by sea act,B.E.2534 (1991) Limited companies - Civil and Commercial Code, Sec 610 - (carriage of goods) TIFFA / TAFA Standard Trading Condition (1990)

[Study] Pichanusakorn P.Thailand to challenge logistics liberalization impact: how regulatory reform can promote sound investment climate and equalize competition between local and foreign operators. School of Law, University of Thai Chamber of Commerce, Thailand.

[Report] Taxation and Investment in Thailand 2013 Reach, relevance and reliability. Deloitte.

# **Japan**

Freight Forwarding Business Law 1989, implementation rule article 7. Ministry of Transport Maritime Transportation Law 1949. Ministry of Transport 32
in Thailand, Bangladesh, and Malaysia used such an approach and have a record of success. Third, teacher resource centers at the district or sub-district level, for example, central schools, serve am the locus for short, recurrent inservice training and allow teachers the opportunity to familiarize themselves with new materials and meet fellow teachers. Examples of this approach are found in Ethiopia and Indonesia.

The effectiveness of in-service training programs wag further enhanced where systems for school-level support and supervision were established and the content explicitly designed to take account of the level of knowledge and experience of the typical course participant. Finally, a common source of problems was the under-funding of in-service training.

# Obiective 3: Increasina the Efficiency of Prooram Delivery

Attempts to increase the efficiency of resource application in primary education have focused on containing the cost per student, manipulating student flows, and reallocating available resources.

Containina cost oer student has been an important element of Bank supported strategies in many of the poorest countries. Since teachers, salaries often account for as high as 95% of the total expenditures on primary education, these efforts have centered on the efficient utilization and deployment of teachers.

A review of a sample of 30 projects, selected on the basis of their support for ambitious reform programs and approved between 1986 and 198821, found that almost 30% of them supported measures to increase the efficiency of teacher utilization. These measures included increaoing teacher/student ratios by promoting double-shift and multiple-grade teaching, and controlling teacher salary expenditures. Projects in Colombia and Senegal provide evidence of well designed multi-grade and double-shift systems. (See Box 2.) Manioulatina student flows through reduction in repetition and dropout rates and through changes in administrative procedures to raise the passing rates was another strategy to increase efficiency. This strategy was included in about one third of the projects in the above-mentioned sample. A few projects linked the analysis of cost per student to the cost per graduate, and were able to advocate increasing the former in order to reduce the latter, thereby increasing the input/output efficiency of the system.

The manipulation of student flows through automatic promotion did little to guarantee that pupils passing through the school system have actually learned something. A better strategy is to prevent failure through improvement 21 World Bank, "Annual Operational Review Fiscal 1988 Education and Training." 16
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skills, meaning that 80 percent of employers give these socio-emotional skills a ranking of 8 or above. Third ranked is the higher-order cognitive skill of language and oral communication (72 percent of employers), and hands-on training in discipline (technical) is ranked fourth, with approximately 70 percent of employers citing it as very important (Figure 1). Andreasson (2009)<sup>26</sup> finds similar results among business executives who identify that the skills most in demand in the next decade are “life skills”, defined as negotiating, networking, and working with cultural diversity (48 percent of the sample), followed by problem solving and leadership.

The two global studies that ask about skills gaps find very different patterns. The employers surveyed in Mourshed, Farell and Barton (2012) perceive a significant gap between supply and demand of all 13 skills explored in the survey. Whether a skill was ranked highly important or less important, there is a 12-18 percentage point gap between the share of employers who ranked a skill as very important and the share who ranked the new hires as very competent in the skills (figure 1). The gap between supply and demand of the most important skills – work ethic (15 percentage points) and teamwork (14 percentage points) – are similar to the gap between supply and demand of the least important skills – leadership and English proficiency - at a 13 percentage point skills gap. Manpower (2012),<sup>27</sup> on the other hand, finds the largest skills gap in professional skills (16 percentage points) and skilled labor (11 percentage points), both of which may include all four of our skills sets. The gaps in soft skills are much lower, where a 6 percentage point deficiency is calculated for interpersonal skills and motivational skills.

These global studies may oversimplify the patterns due to the different needs of employers in different contexts. Thus, we turn to comparisons of employers who are likely to have different skills needs, which may shed light on the mixed global results.

# **4.2  Regional Skills Demands**

> 26 The sample consists of 123 private sector respondents; 28 percent from Asia-Pacific and Western Europe, each, 27 percent from North America, and 12 percent from the Middle East and North Africa.

> 27 The samples consists of 38,077 employers in 41 countries where 10,323 are from the Americas, 8,786 from the Asia Pacific, and 19,059 from Europe (including Turkey and South Africa).  The survey asks “what is the main difficulty in filling vacancies” with potential responses including a range of concepts related to skills – professional skills, skilled labor, operating equipment, information skills, oral communication, foreign language, interpersonal skills, motivation, teamwork, flexibility, and so forth – as well as responses that are not skill-related, such as “lack of suitable candidates”,  “want higher pay”,  “does not want to work part time”, or “location not suitable”.

14