rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
China : urban services and governance
The study addresses governance
            challenges in public service delivery in China. It builds on
            the citizen scorecard survey conducted in five Chinese
            cities in 2006 to gauge citizens experience with public
            services, and demonstrates the usefulness of citizens
            feedback for policy development and implementation. The
            survey found that citizens were generally pleased with urban
            public services, but worried about the associated fees.
            Compared with the official urban residents, the urban poor
            and rural migrants in cities reported sharper utilization
            constraints, lower readiness to complain or pay informal
            fees, and a much larger income share spent on public
            services. The reported citizens perceptions sometimes
            diverged from the evidence and pointed to significant
            information asymmetries. Explaining the survey results, the
            study reveals problems of inadequacy, inequality and
            misaligned incentives in public resource allocation. The
            study presents several successful experiments reducing the
            dependence on user fees in basic education and primary
            healthcare. It recognizes that China has been undertaking
            comprehensive reforms to enhance equity and quality in
            public service delivery. Such reforms have included measures
            to strengthen the regulatory, monitoring, and enforcement
            systems and accountability relationships. In the context of
            the ongoing reforms, this study highlights the need to: a)
            hold the provincial governments accountable for public
            service delivery performance; b) develop effective
            mechanisms to align public resources and incentives at each
            level of government with the national priorities; and c)
            develop proper means to empower the citizens. In this
            context, the study affirms that the Chinese government is
            rightly placing reforms in the intergovernmental,
            administrative, and public finance systems at the top of its agenda.
Changes in cross-border trade costs
            in the Pan-Arab free trade area, 2001-2008
The Pan-Arab Free Trade Area, negotiated
            under auspices of the Arab League, came into force in 1997.
            Under the agreement all tariffs on goods of Arab origin were
            to be removed by January 1, 2005. This paper summarizes the
            results of a firm-level survey in nine countries regarding
            the implementation of the Pan-Arab Free Trade Area. A
            majority of respondent companies report that tariffs on
            intra-regional trade have largely been removed, and that
            there has been a marked improvement in customs
            clearance-related procedures. Costs associated with
            administrative red tape and weaknesses in transport-related
            infrastructure services are ranked as the most important
            constraints to intra-regional trade. This suggests that from
            a policy perspective, efforts to reduce real trade costs
            deserve priority, including transportation and logistics
            services. Periodic monitoring and assessment of trade
            incentives and performance would help governments to
            benchmark performance and identify priority areas for
            action, at both the national and the sub-regional levels.
Big constraints to small firms'
            growth business environment and employment growth across firms
Using data on more than 56,000
            enterprises in 90 countries, this paper finds that objective
            conditions in the business environment vary substantially
            across firms of different sizes and that there are important
            non-linearities in their impact on employment growth. The
            paper focuses on four areas: access to finance, business
            regulations, corruption, and infrastructure. The results,
            particularly on the impacts of finance and corruption on
            growth, depend on whether and how the analysis accounts for
            the possible endogeneity of the business environment.
            Controlling for endogeneity revises the finding that small
            firms benefit most from access to finance, particularly for
            sources of finance associated with investment and growth.
            The findings are also sensitive to how small is defined.
            Differentiating micro (less than 10 employees) from other
            small firms shows that, while small firms can be
            disadvantaged in such an environment, micro firms tend to be
            proportionally less affected by a weak business climate 
            and, on occasion, it can help them to grow. Overall,
            allowing different size classifications provides insights
            into the impact of the business environment that are lost in
            more aggregate analyses.
Measuring the quality of education
            and health services : the use of perception data from Indonesia
Satisfaction surveys offer a potentially
            convenient and cost-effective means for measuring the
            quality of services. However, concerns about subjectivity
            and selection bias impede greater use of satisfaction data.
            This paper analyzes satisfaction data about health and
            educational services from the 2006 second round of the
            Governance and Decentralization Survey in Indonesia to
            assess whether satisfaction data can serve as reliable
            indicators of quality, despite dubiously high levels of
            reported satisfaction. The authors use an expectation
            disconfirmation model that posits that a users satisfaction
            with a facility improves with the (positive) difference
            between the actual quality of the facility and the
            households expected standard for quality, which is
            influenced by its socioeconomic characteristics. The
            findings show that, after taking into account the
            expectations of households, reported satisfaction does vary
            significantly with objective indicators of quality. The
            analysis also checks for possible selection bias affecting
            the results by using a two-stage selection model. The model
            yields policy-relevant insights into the aspects of service
            delivery that most affect satisfaction, highlights
            differences across rich and poor districts, and shows that
            once the role of expectations has been factored in, the
            variation in user satisfaction can be highly informative for
            policymakers and researchers alike.
Privatization and nationalization cycles
This paper studies the cycles of
            nationalization and privatization in resource-rich economies
            as a prime instance of unstable institutional reform. The
            authors discuss the available evidence on the drivers and
            consequences of privatization and nationalization, review
            the existing literature, and present illustrative case
            studies. This leads to the main contribution of the paper: a
            static and dynamic model of the choice between private and
            national regimes for the ownership of natural resources. In
            the model, the basic tradeoff is given by equality (national
            ownership) versus efficiency (private ownership). The
            connection between resource ownership and the
            equality-efficiency tradeoff is given by the incentives for
            effort that each regime elicits from workers. The resolution
            of the tradeoff depends on external and domestic conditions
            that affect the value of social welfare under each regime.
            This leads to a discussion of how external conditionssuch
            as the commodity priceand domestic conditionssuch as the
            tax system-- affect the choice of private vs. national
            regimes. In particular, the analysis identifies the
            determinants of the observed cycles of privatization and nationalization.
Reshaping the international monetary
            architecture : lessons from Keynes' plan
As the global economy undergoes profound
            changes, it is becoming apparent that the so-called
            "Revived Bretton Woods System" has increased the
            overall vulnerability of the global financial architecture.
            Therefore, it is worth revisiting the origins of the Bretton
            Woods conference, and pointing out the relevance for todays
            framework of Keynes original 1942 plan for an International
            Clearing Union. This note explores the main characteristics
            of Keynes' original plan, by revisiting his original
            writings between 1940 and 1944, and outlining its relevance
            to the current debate on the international financial
            architecture. The note suggests that reforms of the
            international financial architecture should include
            anchoring the international monetary system on sounder
            institutional ground.
The value of vocational education :
            high school type and labor market outcomes in Indonesia
This paper examines the relationship
            between the type of senior high school attended by
            Indonesian youth and their subsequent labor market outcomes.
            This topic is very timely, given the governments recent
            decision to dramatically expand vocational enrollment. The
            analysis controls for an unusually rich set of predetermined
            characteristics, and exploits longitudinal data spanning 14
            years to separately identify cohort and age effects. There
            are four main findings. First, students are sorted into
            different school types largely on the basis of their
            entering exam score. Public schools attract the
            highest-scoring students, while private vocational schools
            serve the lowest-scoring students. Second, after controlling
            for a variety of characteristics, including test scores,
            male public school graduates earn a substantial premium over
            their privately schooled counterparts. Third, private
            vocational school graduates fare at least as well as private
            general graduates, despite coming from more disadvantaged
            socioeconomic backgrounds. Finally, the returns to public
            vocational education have declined sharply for the most
            recent cohort of men. This raises important concerns about
            the current expansion of public vocational education, and
            the relevance of the male vocational curriculum in an
            increasingly service-oriented economy.
Revising the roads investment
            strategy in rural areas : an application for Uganda
Based on extensive data collection in
            Uganda, this paper demonstrates that the rural access index,
            as defined today, should not be a government objective
            because the benefit of such investment is minimal, whereas
            achieving rural accessibility at less than 2 kilometers
            would require massive investments that are not sustainable.
            Taking into account the fact that plot size is limited on
            average to less than 1 hectare, a farmers transport
            requirement is usually minimal and does not necessarily
            involve massive investments in infrastructure. This is
            because most farmers cannot fully load a truck or pay for
            this service and, even if productivity were to increase
            significantly, the production threshold would not be reached
            by most individual farmers. Therefore, in terms of public
            policy, maintenance of the existing rural roads rather than
            opening new roads should be given priority; the district
            feeder road allocation maintenance formula should be revised
            to take into account economic potential and, finally, policy
            makers should devote their attention to innovative marketing
            models from other countries where smallholder loads are
            consolidated through private-based consolidators.
The long-run impacts of adult deaths
            on older household members in Tanzania
HIV/AIDS is drastically changing the
            demographic landscape in high-prevalence countries in
            Africa. The prime-age adult population bears the majority of
            the mortality burden. These missing prime-age adults have
            implications for the socioeconomic well-being of surviving
            family members. This study uses a 13-year panel from
            Tanzania to examine the impacts of prime-age mortality on
            the time use and health outcomes of older adults, with a
            focus on long-run impacts and gender dimensions. Prime-age
            deaths are weakly associated with increases in working hours
            of older women when the deceased adult was co-resident in
            the household. The association is strongest when the
            deceased adult was living with the elderly individual at the
            time of death and for deaths in the distant past, suggesting
            that shorter-run studies may not capture the full extent of
            the consequences of adult mortality for survivors. Holding
            more assets seems to buffer older adults from having to work
            more after these shocks. Most health indicators are not
            worse for older adults when a prime-age household member
            died, although more distant adult deaths are associated with
            an increased probability of acute illness for the surviving
            elderly. For deaths of children who were not residing with
            their parents at baseline, the findings show no impact on
            hours worked or health outcomes.
Toward a theory of optimal financial structure
Each institutional arrangement in a
            financial system has both advantages and disadvantages in
            mobilizing savings, allocating capital, diversifying risks,
            and processing information when facilitating financial
            transactions. Meanwhile, the factor endowment in an economy
            at each stage of its development determines the optimal
            industrial structure in the real sector, which in turn
            constitutes the main determinant of the size distribution
            and risk features of viable enterprises with implications
            for the appropriate institutional arrangement of financial
            services at that stage. Therefore, there is an endogenously
            determined optimal financial structure for the economy at
            each stage of development.
Caste and punishment : the legacy of
            caste culture in norm enforcement
Well-functioning groups enforce social
            norms that restrain opportunism, but the social structure of
            a society may encourage or inhibit norm enforcement. This
            paper studies how the exogenous assignment to different
            positions in an extreme social hierarchy - the caste system
            - affects individuals' willingness to punish violations
            of a cooperation norm. Although the analysis controls for
            individual wealth, education, and political participation,
            low-caste individuals exhibit a much lower willingness to
            punish norm violations that hurt members of their own caste,
            suggesting a cultural difference across caste status in the
            concern for members of ones own community. The lower
            willingness to punish may inhibit the low castes ability to
            sustain collective action and so may contribute to its
            economic vulnerability.
Agent orange and the prevalence of
            cancer among the Vietnamese population 30 years after the
            end of the Vietnam war
During the Vietnam War, more than 70
            million liters of military herbicide were sprayed over the
            combat zone. This study uses self and proxy-reported data on
            cancer status obtained from a nationally representative
            health survey of the Vietnamese population (N=158,019),
            combined with measures of military herbicide exposure
            computed from detailed information on US and allied wartime
            military activities. No significant difference in the
            prevalence of reported cancer is detected between communes
            with some degree of exposure and those with none. When
            restricting the analysis to exposed communes and adopting a
            continuous measure of herbicide exposure, there is evidence
            of a dose-response relationship; among communes that were
            exposed, increasing exposure to past military spraying is
            associated with increasing prevalence of reported cancer in
            2001-2002. There is mixed evidence as to whether cohorts
            born before or after the end of the spraying campaigns are
            equally affected.
Causality between external debt and
            capital flight in Sub-Saharan Africa
Over the past few decades, the foreign
            liabilities of the majority of countries in Sub-Saharan
            Africa have grown dramatically, propelling most nations into
            the status of Highly Indebted Poor Countries, when these
            liabilities reached unsustainable levels in the 1990s. At
            the same time, increases in capital flight from the region
            followed a parallel trend, leading scholars to draw on
            "revolving door" models to explain the apparent
            positive covariation of external debt and capital flight in
            the region. This paper investigates the causality between
            external debt and capital flight in a cross-section of
            Sub-Saharan African countries using co-integration and
            error-correction models. Although dual causality, which is
            consistent with the revolving door hypothesis, cannot be
            rejected for the majority of countries, empirical evidence
            highlights the lead of external debt over capital flight.
            The significance of error-correction terms points to a
            long-run co-integrating relationship between external debt
            and capital flight in a large number of countries.
Technology adoption and factor
            proportions in open economies : theory and evidence from the
            global computer industry
Theories of international trade assume
            that all countries use similar and exogenous technologies in
            the production of any good. This paper relaxes this
            assumption. The marriage of literatures on biased technical
            change and trade yields a tractable theory, which predicts
            that differences in factor endowments and intellectual
            property rights bias technical change toward particular
            factor intensities, and thus unit factor input requirements
            can vary across economies. Using data on net exports of a
            single industry, computers, intellectual property rights and
            factor endowments for 73 countries during 1980-2000, the
            paper shows that once technological choices are considered,
            countries with different factor endowments can become net
            exporters of the same product.
Global inequality and the global
            inequality extraction ratio: the story of the past two centuries
Using social tables, the author makes an
            estimate of global inequality (inequality among world
            citizens) in the early 19th century. The analysis shows that
            the level and composition of global inequality have changed
            over the past two centuries. The level has increased,
            reaching a high plateau around the 1950s, and the main
            determinants of global inequality have become differences in
            mean country incomes rather than inequalities within
            nations. The inequality extraction ratio (the percentage of
            total inequality that was extracted by global elites) has
            remained surprisingly stable, at around 70 percent of the
            maximum global Gini, during the past 100 years.
Criss-crossing globalization :
            uphill flows of skill-intensive goods and foreign direct investment
This paper documents an unusual and
            possibly significant phenomenon: the export of skills,
            embodied in goods, services or capital from poorer to richer
            countries. The authors first present a set of stylized
            facts. Then, using a measure that combines the
            sophistication of a countrys exports with the average
            income level of destination countries, they show that the
            performance of a number of developing countries - notably
            China, Mexico and South Africa - matches that of much more
            advanced countries - such as Japan, Spain and the United
            States. The authors create a new combined dataset on foreign
            direct investment (covering greenfield investment as well as
            mergers and acquisitions). The analysis shows that flows of
            foreign direct investment to developed countries from
            developing countries - like Brazil, India, Malaysia and
            South Africa - as a share of their GDP, are as large as
            flows from developed countries - like Japan, Korea and the
            United States. The authors suggest that it is not just the
            composition of exports but their destination that matters.
            In both cross-sectional and panel regressions, with a range
            of controls, a measure of uphill flows of sophisticated
            goods is significantly associated with better growth
            performance. These results suggest the need for a deeper
            analysis of whether the benefits of development might derive
            not from deifying comparative advantage but from defying it.