rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Rohingya Refugee Camps and Forest
            Loss in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh : An Inquiry Using Remote
            Sensing and Econometric Approaches
How do refugee camps impact the natural
            environment? This paper examines the case study of Cox’s
            Bazar, Bangladesh, a district that hosts nearly 1 million
            Rohingya refugees in refugee camps. Using spatially explicit
            data on land-use / land cover and proximity to a camp
            boundary, the paper quantifies land-use changes across the
            district over time. To evaluate the extent to which the
            camps triggered additional forest loss, the analysis
            calculates total forest loss in the district and uses a
            difference-in-difference model that compares areas 0–5
            kilometers from a camp boundary (treatment) to areas 10–15
            kilometers away (control). The findings show that the rate
            of forest loss intensified near camps relative to the
            control area. The analysis reveals that areas experiencing
            camp-stimulated reductions in forest cover are also
            experiencing faster settlement expansion relative to the
            control area. Settlement expansion is largely concentrated
            in areas outside protected areas. This enhanced settlement
            expansion still occurs when pixels 0–1 kilometer from the
            camps are omitted, which is evidence that the results are
            not due to camp settlements expanding beyond the official
            camp borders. The results suggest that camps stimulate
            in-migration as Bangladeshis seek new economic opportunities
            and improved access to resources.
Rohingya Refugee Camps and Forest
            Loss in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh : An Inquiry Using Remote
            Sensing and Econometric Approaches
Policy Research Working Paper 9948 Rohingya Refugee Camps and Forest Loss in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh An Inquiry Using Remote Sensing and Econometric Approaches _Nfamara K. Dampha Colette Salemi Stephen Polasky_ Environment, Natural Resources & the Blue Economy Global Practice February 2022
Technology and Resilience
This paper estimates the impact of
            technology sophistication pre-COVID-19 on the performance of
            firms during the early stages of the pandemic. It exploits a
            unique data set covering firms from Brazil, Senegal, and
            Vietnam, using a treatment effect mediation framework to
            decompose the results into direct and indirect effects.
            Increasing pre-pandemic technology sophistication by one
            standard deviation is associated with 3.8 percentage points
            higher sales. Both effects are positive, but the direct
            effect is about five times larger than the indirect effect.
            The total effect on sales is markedly nonlinear with
            significantly smaller estimates of the reduction in sales
            for firms with more sophisticated pre-pandemic technology.
            The results are robust to different measures of digital
            responses and matching estimators.
Does Foreign Direct Investment
            Catalyze Local Structural Transformation and Human Capital
            Accumulation Evidence from China
This paper examines the effect of
            foreign direct investment on local structural transformation
            and human capital accumulation in China, exploiting
            variations in foreign direct investment inflows across
            manufacturing sub-sectors caused by China’s foreign direct
            investment deregulation and initial sectoral composition
            patterns across China’s cities and provinces. Using a panel
            of city-level data from 1990 to 2005, the paper shows that
            manufacturing foreign direct investment inflows greatly
            accelerated city-level structural transformation and human
            capital accumulation. By expanding access to the global
            market, foreign direct investment created a huge pull factor
            that drew excess labor away from farms into factories and
            services. Foreign direct investment has promoted high school
            and university enrollment by paying a higher wage premium
            for skilled workers and pushing up the skill premium. The
            positive effect on structural transformation is largely
            driven by export-oriented foreign direct investment, while
            market-seeking foreign direct investment has a much larger
            effect on college enrollment. High-skill foreign direct
            investment has a larger effect on college enrollment than
            low-skill foreign direct investment.
Pandemic, Climate Mitigation, and
            Reshoring : Impacts of a Changing Global Economy on Trade,
            Incomes, and Poverty
The resilience of global value chains
            has been put to the test by the COVID-19 pandemic, extreme
            weather events, and trade tensions spurred by growing
            economic nationalism and protectionism. Shocks in production
            and trade can be transmitted from one country to another by
            global value chains, although they can also help to lessen
            the blow of a domestic shock, such as a lockdown, and drive
            economic recovery. What shocks to global value chains should
            be anticipated in the coming years? Is it possible to design
            policies that can enhance resilience to trade shocks in
            developing countries without endangering growth? This paper
            explores simulations from the ENVISAGE global computable
            general equilibrium model to enhance understanding of the
            potential longer-term impacts of COVID-19 and the policy
            responses it engenders in developing countries. The paper
            assesses the likely impacts of measures designed to reshore
            production and reduce reliance on imports. It also evaluates
            other key factors shaping the global economy, including
            stylized scenarios to capture the essential elements of
            policies to achieve carbon emission reductions that will
            have an impact on trade.
Pandemic, Climate Mitigation, and
            Reshoring : Impacts of a Changing Global Economy on Trade,
            Incomes, and Poverty
Policy Research Working Paper 9955 Pandemic, Climate Mitigation, and Reshoring Impacts of a Changing Global Economy on Trade, Incomes, and Poverty _Maksym Chepeliev Maryla Maliszewska Israel Osorio-Rodarte Maria Filipa Seara e Pereira Dominique van der Mensbrugghe_ Macroeconomics, Trade and Investment Global Practice March 2022
Do Judges Favor Their Own Ethnicity
            and Gender : Evidence from Kenya
Evidence from high-income countries
            suggests that judges often exhibit in-group bias, favoring
            litigants that share an identity with the judge. However,
            there is little evidence on this phenomenon from the Global
            South. Collecting the available universe of High Court
            decisions in Kenya, this paper leverages the random
            assignment of cases to judges to evaluate the existence of
            in-group bias along gender and ethnic lines. It finds that,
            relative to a baseline win rate of 43 percent, defendants
            are 4 percentage points more likely to win if they share the
            judge's gender and 5 percentage points more likely to
            win if they share the judge~^!!^s ethnicity. The paper finds
            that the written judgements are on average shorter and less
            likely to be cited when defendants who are of the same
            gender or ethnicity as the judge win their case. This is
            consistent with in-group biased decisions being of lower
            quality. In addition, the findings show that female
            defendants are less likely to win the case if the judge
            exhibits stereotypical or negative attitudes towards women
            in their writings.
Balancing Work and Childcare :
            Evidence from COVID-19 School Closures and Reopenings in Kenya
This paper identifies the impact of
            childcare responsibilities on adult labor supply in the
            context of COVID-19-related school closures in Kenya. It
            compares changes in parents’ labor participation after
            schools partly reopened in October 2020 for households with
            children in a grade eligible to return against households
            with children in adjacent grades. Using
            nationally-representative panel data from World Bank phone
            surveys in 2020–21, the findings show that the partial
            reopening increases affected adults’ weekly labor hours by
            22 percent, with increases concentrated in household
            agriculture. The results suggest that school closures
            account for over 30 percent of the fall in average work
            hours in the first few months after COVID-19 cases were
            detected. The effects are driven by changes in household
            childcare burdens and child agricultural labor when a
            student returns to school. The impacts are not significantly
            different by sex of the adult. Although both women and men
            increased hours spent on childcare during the pandemic,
            women benefited more than men from reductions in childcare
            needs, but took on more of the childcare burden when the
            returning student was a net childcare provider. The results
            highlight the importance of siblings in household childcare
            and suggest that policies that increase childcare
            availability and affordability could increase adult labor
            supply in Kenya.
Gender Differences in Household
            Coping Strategies for COVID-19 in Kenya
Understanding how different households
            cope with COVID-19 among a vulnerable population is
            important for the policy design aiming at relieving hunger
            and poverty in a low income setting. This paper uses
            original household data from five waves of a phone survey
            conducted between May 2020 and June 2021 in Kenya (sample
            size 31,715) and investigates the gender differences in
            household coping strategies during the COVID-19 shock. It
            finds that female-headed households are less likely to cope
            by selling assets or taking loans, compared with male-headed
            households. Instead, femaleheaded households rely more on
            social networks to cope. No difference in coping by reducing
            meals is observed across these two types of households. This
            paper documents that the reasons behind the gender
            difference include that female-headed households are poorer,
            and they are more likely to rely on friends and family to
            cope with shocks even prior to the COVID-19 shock. The
            findings suggest that widowed and divorced women are in high
            need of relief programs, and governments should provide
            easily accessible loans to avoid negative impacts in the
            long term from households selling assets.
Impact of COVID-19 on Labor Market
            Outcomes of Refugees and Nationals in Kenya
This paper investigates the labor market
            outcomes for refugee and urban national communities in Kenya
            during the COVID-19 pandemic, using five waves of a novel
            high-frequency phone survey collected between May 2020 and
            June 2021. Even after conditioning on age, gender,
            educational attainment, and area of living, only 32 percent
            of refugees were employed in February 2020 compared with 63
            percent of nationals. With the onset of the pandemic in
            March 2020, the share of employed for both refugees and
            nationals fell by around 36 percent, such that in May-June
            2020, only 21 percent of refugees were still employed
            compared with 40 percent of nationals. Using a panel setup
            with wave and location fixed effects, the analysis finds
            that the recovery in the share of employed, hours worked,
            and household incomes was slower and often stagnant for
            refugees compared with the recovery of nationals. These
            differences cannot be explained by demographic factors,
            living in an urban or camp environment, having been employed
            previously, or sectoral choice, suggesting that a third,
            unobservable “refugee factor” inhibits refugees’ recovery
            after a major shock and aggravates preexisting vulnerabilities.
The Impact of Covid-19 on Household
            Welfare in the Comoros : The Experience of a Small Island
            Developing State
This paper investigates the causal
            impact of a Covid-19 lockdown policy on the Comoros's
            household welfare, poverty, and labor market outcomes. The
            identification strategy uses the national government
            lockdown policy implemented to curtail the unexpected
            outbreak of Covid-19. The lockdown policy coincided with the
            2020 Harmonized Survey on Living Conditions of Households
            data collection, lending itself to a quasi-natural
            experiment in which households that were interviewed before
            the lockdown policy fall into the control group, while those
            that were interviewed after the lockdown fall into the
            treated group. The paper explores the impact of the Covid-19
            using descriptive regression analysis and estimates the
            causal impact using matching techniques. The analysis finds
            a reduction in household expenditure, increased poverty, and
            a reduction in the likelihood of employment. Investigation
            of differential impacts along the expenditure distribution
            finds larger impacts at the top of the distribution,
            suggesting that Covid-19 may have reduced inequality,
            although the poor were also negatively affected. The
            evidence also suggests that the ability to use assets as a
            coping mechanism was limited. In a context of limited safety
            nets and government interventions, stringent lockdown
            policies appear to increase the vulnerability of the poor.
Assessing the Effects of Natural
            Resources on Long-Term Growth : An Extension of the World
            Bank Long Term Growth Model
This paper extends the World Bank's
            Long-Term Growth Model (LTGM) with the addition of a natural
            resource sector to analyze how long-run growth evolves in
            resource-rich countries and the growth impacts of price
            shocks and resource discoveries. In the LTGM-Natural
            Resource Extension (LTGM-NR), commodity price shocks affect
            long-term economic growth through physical investment rates.
            As a large share of resource income typically accrues to the
            government, the size of the boost to investment in a price
            boom depends on the government’s fiscal rule. Fiscal rules
            that prioritize public investment, like a Hartwick Rule,
            generally lead to the largest increases in long-term growth.
            However, structural surplus rules, which save commodity
            revenues, can also boost growth if they free up savings for
            private investment. The response of growth to discoveries of
            natural resources is similar to the response to price
            shocks, although discoveries also produce a direct effect on
            real GDP, in addition to an indirect effect through
            investment. The LTGM¬-NR also captures the effect of other
            (non-resource) growth fundamentals in resource-rich
            economies, and it is better suited to general growth
            analysis in these countries than the standard LTGM. However,
            the LTGM-NR is a supply-side model, and so does not capture
            the short-run effects of price and discovery shocks that
            operate through aggregate demand.
Targeting in Tax Compliance
            Interventions : Experimental Evidence from Honduras
Tax authorities often use low-cost
            communication with taxpayers to encourage voluntary
            compliance and avoid other costly interventions. This paper
            reports findings from an experiment with more than 30,000
            taxpayers in Honduras, designed to assess how taxpayers with
            different risk scores respond to a communication
            intervention. Across several outcomes, the average effect of
            the intervention on compliance was 0. Contrary to the
            expectation of experts surveyed, only taxpayers considered
            to be at low risk of noncompliance increase their filing and
            reported income. Using rich administrative data and a causal
            forest algorithm, the paper finds that ex-ante predicted
            risk and responsiveness to the intervention are negatively
            correlated. These findings can inform the design of targeted
            interventions by tax authorities.
Measuring Disaster Crop Production
            Losses Using Survey Microdata : Evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa
Every year, disasters account for
            billions of dollars in crop production losses in low- and
            middle-income countries and particularly threaten the lives
            and livelihoods of those depending on agriculture. With
            climate change accelerating, this burden will likely
            increase in the future and accurate, micro-level measurement
            of crop losses will be important to understand disasters’
            implications for livelihoods, prevent humanitarian crises,
            and build future resilience. Survey data present a large,
            rich, highly disaggregated information source that is
            trialed and tested to the specifications of smallholder
            agriculture common in low- and middle-income countries.
            However, to tap into this potential, a thorough
            understanding of and robust methodology for measuring
            disaster crop production losses in survey microdata is
            essential. This paper exploits plot-level panel data for
            almost 20,000 plots on 8,000 farms in three Sub-Saharan
            African countries with information on harvest, input use,
            and different proxies of losses; household and
            community-level data; as well data from other sources such
            as crop cutting and survey experiments, to provide new
            insights into the reliability of survey-based crop loss
            estimates and their attribution to disasters. The paper
            concludes with concrete recommendations for methodology and
            survey design and identifies key avenues for further research.
Infrastructure State-Owned
            Enterprises : A Tale of Inefficiency and Fiscal Dependence
This paper examines the performance of
            infrastructure companies owned by the state, using the newly
            created World Bank Database of Infrastructure State-Owned
            Enterprises (SOEs). The data cover 19 countries and 135 SOEs
            between 2000 and 2018. The analysis reveals that
            infrastructure SOEs are large and have weak financial
            performance that generates significant fiscal risk. The
            paper introduces new measures of financial performance net
            of fiscal transfers and examines previously uncovered
            patterns of subsidies by sector. It examines the effect of
            state ownership by comparing the firms in the database with
            hundreds of comparable private firms, using coarsened exact
            matching. The findings show that relative to comparable
            private firms, infrastructure SOEs are less efficient,
            represent a larger share of gross domestic product, have
            larger liabilities as a share of gross domestic product and
            larger employment costs as a share of revenues, and yield
            lower returns on assets.
Smoke and Mirrors : Infrastructure
            State-Owned Enterprises and Fiscal Risks
Infrastructure is critical to economic
            development. When infrastructure companies are owned and
            operated by the government, however, they create significant
            sources of fiscal risk. These fiscal risks can be sizable,
            but they are often preventable with proper planning, risk
            assessment, and strict rules and procedures for corporate
            and fiscal governance. This paper examines fiscal risk
            stemming from state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the
            infrastructure sector in a sample of 135 firms in 19
            countries from an original database of SOE financials for
            2009–18. The paper develops a typology of fiscal risks and
            their determinants, builds new measures of fiscal injections
            to SOEs, and documents them using the novel database. The
            results show that governments support SOEs through a
            remarkably wide range of fiscal instruments. The fiscal cost
            of supporting infrastructure SOEs is usually below 1 percent
            of gross domestic product. Support is more prevalent and
            frequent than previously thought. The findings show that
            fiscal risk stems not only from “tail risk,” but also from
            the everyday operation of infrastructure SOEs. The paper
            calculates the Altman Z” score (a measure of default risk)
            and shows that it can be used to forecast the need for
            fiscal injections in SOEs.
Fiscal Risks from Early Termination
            of Public-Private Partnerships in Infrastructure
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) in
            infrastructure provision have expanded around the world
            since the early 1990s. Well-structured PPPs can unleash
            efficiency gains, but PPPs create liabilities for
            governments, including contingent ones. This paper assesses
            the fiscal risks from contingent liabilities from early
            termination of PPPs in a sample of developing countries. It
            analyzes the drivers of early termination and identifies
            systematic contractual, institutional, and macroeconomic
            factors that can help predict the probability that a PPP
            project will be terminated early, using a flexible
            parametric hazard regression. Using the probability
            distributions from the regression analysis, it simulates
            scenarios of fiscal risks for governments from early
            termination of PPPs in the electricity and transport
            sectors, adopting a value-at-risk approach. The findings
            indicate that the rate of early terminations decreases with
            direct government support, greater constraints on executive
            power, and the award of the PPP by subnational governments;
            it increases with project size and macro-financial shocks.
            The simulations show that fiscal risks from infrastructure
            PPP portfolios are not negligible in some countries,
            reaching as high as 2.8 percent of GDP. A severe
            macro-financial shock substantially increases the estimates,
            with the value at risk the year after the shock 11–20 times larger.