rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Growth and competitiveness as
            factors of Eurozone external imbalances : evidence and
            policy implications
The paper assesses the contribution of
            key factors associated with external imbalances in the
            Eurozone through the estimation of a panel-data vector
            autoregressive model over 1975-2011. Growth fluctuations,
            initially associated with demand booms triggered by
            unusually low interest rates and later with demand
            contractions resulting from the crisis and policy
            adjustments, have been key drivers of current account
            fluctuations. Changes in competitiveness, measured by real
            exchange rates or unit labor costs, have played a less
            important role. Demand shocks have contributed more to
            current account balance dynamics in the Eurozone periphery
            than in the core, whereas competitiveness has been a less
            prominent factor in the periphery but relatively more
            important in the core. Changes in competitiveness are
            positively associated with changes in growth. Preventing
            imbalances from building up in a context of growing
            financial integration and easy finance warrants enhanced
            mutual surveillance of fiscal imbalances, but also better
            regulation of credit markets to prevent excess leverage and
            concentration of lending in investments prone to speculative
            bubbles. Coordination of fiscal policy across the Eurozone
            would facilitate the management of external imbalances
            without placing an often unwarranted burden on fiscal
            tightening in countries with sound fiscal positions affected
            by credit booms. The policies of internal devaluation
            implemented in the periphery, aimed at promoting external
            competitiveness, may have had only limited effectiveness in
            restoring the external balance to equilibrium.
In the wake of the global crisis :
            evidence from a new quarterly database of export competitiveness
Over the past two decades, international
            trade has become a privileged engine of growth for much of
            the developing world. With the global economy evolving
            continuously and rapidly, countries must pay close attention
            to their positioning on the map of global trade and
            production. Within this framework, countries must also
            become aware of how they fare relative to competitors and to
            their past export performance. Of particular importance is
            the extent to which their performance is driven by exporter
            own supply-side capacity as opposed to external or
            compositional factors, including product and geographical
            specialization and how these trends compare across
            countries. This paper describes a new initiative that uses
            quarterly data for 2005q1-2013q1 to compute comparable
            indicators of export performance for 228 countries and
            territories. The database, the Export Competitiveness
            Database, reveals interesting patterns in trade performance.
            Export performance, stripped of compositional effects, was
            strongest for countries from the Asia and Pacific region, on
            average. Moreover, such performance was almost entirely
            driven by exporting country specific factors, with changes
            reflecting growth in volume rather than price developments.
            All emerging and developing regions have, on average,
            improved export performance. The indicators in the database
            trace the legacy of supply-side capacity and the overall
            export performance of the double-dip recession in the euro
            area. An illustrative set of results suggests that the
            paper's measure of competitiveness correlates to a
            country's nominal and real effective exchange rate,
            factors that are commonly perceived as important
            determinants of competitiveness.
Gender, ethnicity and cumulative
            disadvantage in education : evidence from Latin American and
            African censuses
This paper studies the impact of gender
            and ethnicity on educational outcomes using cross-country
            evidence from Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, Senegal, and Sierra
            Leone. It uses the Minnesota Population Center's
            Integrated Public Use Microdata Series-International
            database, which includes individual-level data from large,
            harmonized, and representative samples of country censuses.
            Using an estimation method analogous to
            difference-in-differences, the paper finds that gender-based
            differences in literacy, primary school completion, and
            secondary school completion are larger for minority ethnic
            groups compared with others or, alternatively,
            ethnicity-based differences are larger for women compared
            with men. The findings suggest that the intersection of
            gender and ethnicity confers cumulative disadvantage for
            minority groups, especially in Latin America. The paper
            discusses the implications of these findings on the design
            of, targeting in, and resource allocation for development programs.
The challenge of measuring hunger
There is widespread interest in the
            number of hungry people in the world and trends in hunger.
            Current global counts rely on combining each country's
            total food balance with information on distribution patterns
            from household consumption expenditure surveys. Recent
            research has advocated for calculating hunger numbers
            directly from these same surveys. For either approach,
            embedded in this effort are a number of important details
            about how household surveys are designed and how these data
            are then used. Using a survey experiment in Tanzania, this
            study finds great fragility in hunger counts stemming from
            alternative survey designs. As a consequence, comparable and
            valid hunger numbers will be lacking until more effort is
            made to either harmonize survey designs or better understand
            the consequences of survey design variation.
Sanitation and externalities :
            evidence from early childhood health in rural India
This paper estimates two sources of
            benefits related to sanitation infrastructure access on
            early childhood health: a direct benefit a household
            receives when moving from open to fixed-point defecation or
            from unimproved sanitation to improved sanitation, and an
            external benefit (externality) produced by the
            neighborhood's access to sanitation infrastructure. The
            paper uses a sample of children under 48 months in rural
            areas of India from the Third Round of District Level
            Household Survey 2007-08 and finds evidence of positive and
            significant direct benefits and concave positive external
            effects for both improved sanitation and fixed-point
            defecation. There is a 47 percent reduction in diarrhea
            prevalence between children living in a household without
            access to improved sanitation in a village without coverage
            of improved sanitation and children living in a household
            with access to improved sanitation in a village with
            complete coverage. One-fourth of this benefit is due to the
            direct benefit leaving the rest to external gains. Finally,
            all the benefits from eliminating open defecation come from
            improved sanitation and not other sanitation solutions.
Does migration foster exports
            evidence from Africa
This paper aims at assessing the impact
            of migration on export performance and more particularly the
            effect of African migrants on African trade. Relying on a
            new data set on international bilateral migration recently
            released by the World Bank spanning from 1980 to 2010, the
            authors estimate a gravity model that deals satisfactorily
            with endogeneity. The results first indicate that the
            pro-trade effect of migration is higher for African
            countries, a finding that can be partly explained by the
            substitution between migrants and institutions (the
            existence of migrant networks compensating for weak contract
            enforcement, for instance). This positive association is
            particularly important for the exports of differentiated
            products, suggesting that migrants also play an important
            role in reducing information costs. Moreover, focusing on
            intra-African trade, the pro-trade effect of African
            migrants is larger when migrants are established in a more
            geographically and ethnically distant country. All these
            findings highlight the ability of African migrants to help
            overcome some of the main barriers to African trade: the
            weakness of institutions, information costs, cultural
            differences, and lack of trust.
What explains Rwanda's drop in
            fertility between 2005 and 2010
Following a decade-and-a-half stall,
            fertility in Rwanda dropped sharply between 2005 and 2010.
            Using a hierarchical age-period-cohort model, this paper
            finds that the drop in fertility is largely driven by cohort
            effects, with younger cohorts having substantially fewer
            children than older cohorts observed at the same age. An
            Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition is applied on two successive
            rounds of the Demographic and Health Survey. The findings
            show that improved female education levels account for the
            largest part of the fertility decline, with improving
            household living standards and the progressive move toward
            non-agricultural employment being important secondary
            drivers. The drop in fertility has been particularly salient
            for the younger cohorts, for whom the fertility decline can
            be fully explained by changes in underlying determinants,
            most notably the large increase in educational attainment
            between 2005 and 2010.
Tailoring civil service pay analysis
            and advice to context : challenges, approaches, and the case
            of Lao PDR
The adequacy of compensation for
            government workers and the affordability of the public
            sector wage bill are important concerns for many developing
            countries. Suitable pay is considered a necessary -- albeit
            far from sufficient -- condition for attracting and
            retaining skilled public sector staff. This paper makes the
            case for conducting fine-grained analysis of pay and
            compensation issues in order to enable an accurate
            assessment of the challenges faced and thereby to generate
            good-fit reform recommendations that are both principled and
            feasible. The first part of the paper focuses on prevalent
            challenges in pay reform, both contextual and analytical. It
            builds on the experiences from three very different
            settings: Armenia, the Lao Peoples Democratic Republic, and
            Mongolia. The study begins by surveying some of the common
            difficulties in conducting granular analysis on civil
            service compensation. It then outlines a series of
            methodological approaches that can prove useful in
            developing comprehensive, targeted, and nuanced pay analyses
            and discusses how it is possible to overcome potential
            limitations in practice. The second half of the paper
            presents a case study of pay and compensation analysis in
            Lao PDR. The study illuminates how a number of these
            approaches can be combined in assessing a specific set of
            pay challenges and generating robust recommendations
            tailored to context. A brief postscript, with the benefit of
            hindsight on what subsequently happened on the ground in Lao
            PDR, reflects on the limitations of technical analysis in
            motivating reform implementation in practice.
Financial sector policy in practice
            : benchmarking financial sector strategies around the world
Policy makers use financial sector
            strategies to formulate a holistic policy for their national
            financial sectors. This paper examines and rates financial
            sector strategies around the world based on how well they
            formulate development targets, arrangements for systemic
            risk management, and implementation plans. The strategies
            are also rated on whether they consider policy trade-offs
            between financial development and systemic risk management.
            The rated strategies are then benchmarked against a wide
            range of country characteristics. The analysis finds that
            the scope and quality of national strategies for the
            financial sector are influenced by the country's type
            of legal system, its level of income and macroeconomic
            stability, the existing financial depth and inclusion, the
            share of foreign ownership in the national financial sector,
            and the experience of past financial crises. Giving due
            consideration to policy trade-offs, particularly between
            financial development and systemic risk management, remains
            the weakest part of these strategies. Countries with civil-
            and religious-based law and those with a higher share of
            foreign ownership in their financial system address the
            policy trade-offs more often.
An alternative estimate of
            school-based management impacts on students'
            achievements : evidence from the Philippines
This paper aims to estimate the impact
            of school-based management on students' test scores in
            the Philippines. Estimation results using double
            differencing combined with propensity score matching show
            that school-based management increases the average national
            achievement test score by 4.2 points over three years. The
            increase in mathematics reached 5.7 points. This is larger
            than the estimate previously reported from the Philippines,
            probably because the sample schools had learned about
            implementation of school-based management from experiences
            accumulated in other provinces that introduced it earlier.
            The empirical results also show that schools with
            experienced principals and teachers are eager to introduce
            school-based management.
Coping with risk : the effects of
            shocks on reproductive health and transactional sex in rural Tanzania
Transactional sex is believed to be an
            important risk-coping mechanism for women in Sub-Saharan
            Africa and a leading contributor to the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
            This paper uses data from a panel of women in rural Tanzania
            whose primary occupation is agriculture. The analysis finds
            that following a negative shock (such as food insecurity),
            unmarried women are about three times more likely to have
            been paid for sex. Regardless of marital status, after a
            shock women have more unprotected sex and are 36 percent
            more likely to have a sexually transmitted infection. These
            empirical findings support the claims that transactional sex
            is not confined to commercial sex workers and that
            frequently experienced shocks, such as food insecurity, may
            lead women to engage in transactional sex as a risk-coping behavior.
Tapering talk : the impact of
            expectations of reduced federal reserve security purchases
            on emerging markets
In May 2013, Federal Reserve officials
            first began to talk of the possibility of tapering their
            security purchases. This tapering talk had a sharp negative
            impact on emerging markets. Different countries, however,
            were affected very differently. This paper uses data on
            exchange rates, foreign reserves and equity prices between
            April and August 2013 to analyze who was hit and why. It
            finds that emerging markets that allowed the real exchange
            rate to appreciate and the current account deficit to widen
            during the prior period of quantitative easing saw the
            sharpest impact. Better fundamentals (the budget deficit,
            the public debt, the level of reserves, or the rate of
            economic growth) did not provide insulation. A more
            important determinant of the differential impact was the
            size of the country's financial market: countries with
            larger markets experienced more pressure on the exchange
            rate, foreign reserves, and equity prices. This is
            interpreted as showing that investors are better able to
            rebalance their portfolios when the target country has a
            relatively large and liquid financial market.
Teacher opinions on performance
            incentives : evidence from the Kyrgyz Republic
This paper uses data from a post-hoc
            evaluation of a performance-based teacher incentive program
            in the Kyrgyz Republic to examine the opinions of teachers
            receiving different pay bonuses based on their performance
            as assessed by external evaluators. Overall, teacher
            opinions of the program were favorable, although teachers
            who received lower performance ratings held less favorable
            opinions about the motivational aspects of the program.
            Despite this, lower-rated teachers were more likely to
            report that they used what they learned to evaluate their
            own teaching, as compared with more highly rated teachers,
            and were more likely to take professional development
            courses in the years following the program's implementation.
Ride the wild surf : an
            investigation of the drivers of surges in capital inflows
Over the past 15 years, gross inflows to
            industrial and developing countries have enjoyed a wild
            ride. After reaching record highs in the run-up to the
            global financial crisis, they collapsed dramatically in
            2008-09. As signs of global recovery reappeared, capital
            inflows resumed although at different speeds. The recovery
            in flows was faster and sharper in developing countries.
            This paper aims at understanding the (domestic and external)
            drivers of these surges in gross inflows using quarterly
            data for 67 countries from 1975 to 2010. It finds that
            domestic and external factors have significant explanatory
            power in driving surges of inflows. This finding holds for
            the sample of industrial countries whereas domestic factors
            play a significantly larger role in explaining surges to
            developing countries. Zooming into the findings shows that:
            (a) financial booms tend to attract massive capital inflows,
            (b) surges to either industrial or developing countries are
            driven by regional contagion, and (c) strong growth and
            natural resource abundance are keys to attract inflows of
            foreign capital into developing countries.
Regulation and noncompliance :
            magnitudes and patterns for India's factories act
Noncompliance with regulations by
            enterprises is said to be rife in developing countries. Yet
            there is limited systematic evidence of the magnitude of
            noncompliance at the enterprise level. Making innovative use
            of two complementary data sources, this paper quantifies
            noncompliance for India's Factories Act without the
            question of illegality ever being raised directly with
            enterprises. The paper finds that more than twice as many
            firms are not complying as are complying. Further, the
            number of noncompliant firms is much larger than the number
            of firms adjusting out of the regulation. Thus noncompliance
            with the Factories Act is a key feature of the "missing
            middle" in India. The paper explores the main trends
            and patterns of noncompliance and highlights a number of key
            issues for further analytical and policy research.
Trade policy instruments over time
This paper surveys political-economic
            research on the variety of instruments that governments use
            to conduct international trade policy. It presents key
            insights on the relationships between instruments such as
            tariffs, quotas, voluntary export restraints, and other
            nontariff barriers, as well as the ebb and flow of the
            national use of temporary trade barriers such as
            antidumping, countervailing duties, and safeguards. The
            survey examines trends in use of these trade policy
            instruments over recent history; and it reviews the major
            theoretical and empirical explanations behind, and
            interrelationships between, their uses. Finally, the paper
            highlights potential institutional impacts of the General
            Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and subsequent World
            Trade Organization (WTO) on choice of policy instruments, as
            well as how  multilateral, unilateral, and preferential
            tariff liberalization may introduce political-economic
            shocks and affect incentives over time for how governments
            rely on different instruments.
Imports of intermediate inputs and
            country size
The paper analyzes the relationship
            between country size and the use of imported intermediate
            inputs by firms in 76 developing countries. Recent evidence
            indicates that the use of imported inputs can have a large,
            positive effect on productivity and growth, thus motivating
            a better understanding of the determinants of foreign
            inputs. The results confirm that, as is the case with
            exports, use of imported intermediate inputs is much higher
            at the extensive and intensive margins in small relative to
            large countries.  The results for imported inputs are
            comparable in magnitude with those for exports.