rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Does growth generate jobs in Eastern
            Europe and Central Asia
In Eastern Europe and Central Asia, the
            link from growth to jobs was tenuous in the first decade of
            the transition, giving rise to the notion of jobless growth.
            Yet, European countries suffered large job losses during the
            recent recession, suggesting that jobs and growth are
            closely entwined. This study takes a new look at this issue.
            It provides a cross-country analysis of the employment
            intensity of growth over the last decade and a half in
            Eastern Europe and Central Asia, which includes the 11
            Central and Eastern European countries that joined the EU
            since 2004, the countries of former Yugoslavia, the
            Countries of Independent States and Turkey. The authors
            compare these findings with other regions in the world. The
            paper shows that the responsiveness of employment to output
            increased in the second decade of the transition. It also
            finds that in some instances employment growth increases
            with reforms of labor and product markets, stronger
            macroeconomic policy frameworks, better governance, and more
            economic integration and diversification.
What goes up must come down --
            cyclicality in public wage bill spending
This paper analyzes the cyclicality of
            public sector wage bill spending in Europe and Central Asia
            and assesses the impact of wage bill spending on fiscal
            discipline before, during, and after the global financial
            crisis of 2008/09. While there are important differences
            across countries, the results show that public sector wage
            bill spending tends to behave strongly pro-cyclically,
            especially in transition economies. Moreover, while wage
            bill spending is pro-cyclical during both good and bad
            times, adjustments during economic downturns tend to be
            sharper than expansions during periods of economic booms. In
            addition, there is evidence of political cycles, with
            stronger wage bill growth in pre-election periods. Finally,
            the analysis reveals that while the size of the wage bill
            does not seem to systematically affect fiscal discipline
            across countries, expansions within countries over time are
            associated with deteriorating fiscal positions. These
            findings provide a strong impetus for public wage and
            employment policies that aim to restrain excessive growth of
            the wage bill during boom periods. This prospective
            management of the wage bill would not only reduce the need
            for painful adjustments during periods of fiscal
            consolidation, but also contribute to strengthening the
            overall countercyclical and stabilizing impact of fiscal policies.
Development through seasonal worker
            programs : the case of New Zealand's RSE program
Seasonal worker programs are
            increasingly seen as offering the potential to be part of
            international development policy. New Zealand's
            Recognised Seasonal Employer program is one of the first and
            most prominent of programs designed with this perspective.
            This paper provides a detailed examination of this policy
            through the first six seasons. This includes the important
            role of policy facilitation measures taken by governments
            and aid agencies. The evolution of the program in terms of
            worker numbers is discussed, along with new data on the
            (high) degree of circularity in worker movements, and new
            data on (very low) worker overstay rates. There appears to
            have been little displacement of New Zealand workers, and
            new data show Recognised Seasonal Employer workers to be
            more productive than local labor and that workers appear to
            gain productivity as they return for subsequent seasons. The
            program has also benefitted the migrants participating in
            the program, with increases in per capita incomes,
            expenditure, savings, and subjective well-being. Taken
            together, this evidence suggests that the program is largely
            living up to its promise of a "triple win" for
            migrants, their sending countries in the Pacific, and New Zealand.
Access to finance, product
            innovation and middle-income traps
This paper studies interactions between
            access to finance, product innovation, and labor supply in a
            two-period overlapping generations model with an endogenous
            skill distribution and credit market frictions. In the model
            lack of access to finance (induced by high monitoring costs)
            has an adverse effect on innovation activity not only
            directly but also indirectly, because too few individuals
            may choose to invest in skills. If monitoring costs fall
            with the number of successful projects, multiple equilibria
            may emerge, one of which, a middle-income trap,
            characterized by low wages in the design sector, a low share
            of the labor force engaged in innovation activity, and low
            growth. A sufficiently ambitious policy aimed at alleviating
            constraints on access to finance by innovators may allow a
            country to move away from such a trap by promoting the
            production of ideas and improving incentives to invest in skills.
Credit constraints, agricultural
            productivity, and rural nonfarm participation : evidence
            from Rwanda
Although the potentially negative
            impacts of credit constraints on economic development have
            long been discussed conceptually, empirical evidence for
            Africa remains limited. This study uses a direct elicitation
            approach for a national sample of Rwandan rural households
            to assess empirically the extent and nature of credit
            rationing in the semi-formal sector and its impact using an
            endogenous sample separation between credit-constrained and
            unconstrained households. Being credit constrained reduces
            the likelihood of participating in off-farm self-employment
            activities by about 6.3 percent while making participation
            in low-return farm wage labor more likely. Even within
            agriculture, elimination of all types of credit constraints
            in the semi-formal sector could increase output by some 17
            percent. Two suggestions for policy emerge from the
            findings. First, the estimates suggest that access to
            information (education, listening to the radio, and
            membership in a farm cooperative) has a major impact on
            reducing the incidence of credit constraints in the
            semi-formal credit sector. Expanding access to information
            in rural areas thus seems to be one of the most promising
            strategies to improve credit access in the short term.
            Second, making it easy to identify land owners and transfer
            land could also significantly reduce transaction costs
            associated with credit access.
Is there a farm-size productivity
            relationship in African agriculture evidence from Rwanda
Whether the negative relationship
            between farm size and productivity that is confirmed in a
            large global literature holds in Africa is of considerable
            policy relevance. This paper revisits this issue and
            examines potential causes of the inverse productivity
            relationship in Rwanda, where policy makers consider land
            fragmentation and small farm sizes to be key bottlenecks for
            the growth of the agricultural sector. Nationwide plot-level
            data from Rwanda point toward a constant returns to scale
            crop production function and a strong negative relationship
            between farm size and output per hectare as well as
            intensity of labor use that is robust across specifications.
            The inverse relationship continues to hold if profits with
            family labor valued at shadow wages are used, but disappears
            if family labor is rather valued at village-level market
            wage rates. These findings imply that, in Rwanda, labor
            market imperfections, rather than other unobserved factors,
            seem to be a key reason for the inverse farm-size
            productivity relationship.
Surges and stops in FDI flows to
            developing countries : does the mode of entry make a difference
This paper investigates the factors
            associated with foreign direct investment "surges"
            and "stops," defined as sharp increases and
            decreases, respectively, of gross foreign direct investment
            inflows to the developing world and differentiated based on
            whether these events are led by waves in greenfield
            investments or mergers and acquisitions. Greenfield-led
            surges and stops occur more frequently than mergers and
            acquisitions-led ones and different factors are associated
            with the onset of the two types of events. Global liquidity
            is the only factor significantly associated with a surge,
            regardless of its kind, while decline in global economic
            growth and a surge in the preceding year are the only
            predictors of a stop. Greenfield-led surges and stops are
            more likely in low-income and resource-rich countries than
            elsewhere. Global growth, financial openness, and domestic
            economic and financial instability enable mergers and
            acquisitions-led surges. These results differ from those in
            the literature on surges and stops and are particularly
            relevant in countries where foreign direct investments
            dominate capital flows.
International interventions to build
            social capital : evidence from a field experiment in Sudan
Over the past decade the international
            community, especially the World Bank, has conducted programs
            to increase local public service delivery in developing
            countries by improving local governing institutions and
            creating social capital. This paper evaluates one such
            program in Sudan to answer the question: Can the
            international community change the grassroots civic culture
            of developing countries to increase social capital? The
            paper offers three contributions. First, it uses
            lab-in-the-field measures to focus on the effects of the
            program on pro-social preferences without the confounding
            influence of any program- induced changes on local governing
            institutions. Second, it tests whether the program led to
            denser social networks in recipient communities. Based on
            these two measures, the effect of the program was a
            precisely estimated zero. However, in a retrospective
            survey, respondents from program communities characterized
            their behavior as being more pro-social and their
            communities more socially cohesive. This leads to a third
            contribution of the paper: it provides evidence for the
            hypothesis, stated by several scholars in the literature,
            that retrospective survey measures of social capital over
            biased evidence of a positive effect of these programs.
            Regardless of one's faith in retrospective
            self-reported survey measures, the results clearly point to
            zero impact of the program on pro-social preferences and
            social network density. Therefore, if the increase in
            self-reported behaviors is accurate, it must be because of
            social sanctions that enforce compliance with pro-social
            norms through mechanisms other than the social networks that
            were measured.
Domestic public debt in low-income
            countries : trends and structure
This paper introduces a new data set on
            the stock and structure of domestic debt in 36 low-income
            countries over the period 1971-2011. It characterizes the
            recent trends regarding the do-mestic public debt of
            low-income countries and explores the relevance of different
            arguments put forward on the benefits and costs of
            government borrowing in local public debt markets. The main
            stylized fact emerging from the data is the increase in
            domestic government debt since 1996. It is also observed
            that poor countries have been able to increase the share of
            long-term in-struments over time and that maturity
            lengthening went together with a decrease in borrowing
            costs. However, the concentration of the investor base,
            mainly dominated by commercial banks and the central bank,
            may crowd out lending to the private sector.
Informal firms and financial
            inclusion : status and determinants
Many firms in the developing world --
            including a majority of micro, small, and medium enterprises
            -- operate in the informal economy. The informal firms face
            a variety of constraints, making it harder for them to do
            business and grow. Lack of access to finance is often cited
            as the biggest operational constraint these firms face. This
            paper documents the use of finance and financing patterns of
            informal firms, highlights differences between use of
            finance by formal and informal firms, and identifies the
            most significant characteristics of informal firms that are
            associated with higher use of financial services. The
            analysis shows that use of loans and bank accounts for
            business by informal firms is very low and a vast majority
            finances their day-to-day operations and investments through
            sources other than financial institutions (internal funds,
            moneylenders, family, and friends). A majority of informal
            firm owners would like their firms to become formal but do
            not do so as it would require them to pay taxes. Registered
            firms are 54 percent more likely to have a bank account and
            32 percent more likely to have loans. Results also show that
            firm size, the level of education of the owner, and whether
            the owner has a job in the formal sector are significantly
            associated with financial inclusion of informal firms.
Wealth gradients in early childhood
            cognitive development in five Latin American countries
Research from the United States shows
            that gaps in early cognitive and noncognitive abilities
            appear early in the life cycle. Little is known about this
            important question for developing countries. This paper
            provides new evidence of sharp differences in cognitive
            development by socioeconomic status in early childhood for
            five Latin American countries. To help with comparability,
            the paper uses the same measure of receptive language
            ability for all five countries. It finds important
            differences in development in early childhood across
            countries, and steep socioeconomic gradients within every
            country. For the three countries where panel data to follow
            children over time exists, there are few substantive changes
            in scores once children enter school. These results are
            robust to different ways of defining socioeconomic status,
            to different ways of standardizing outcomes, and to
            selective non-response on the measure of cognitive development.
Institutional investment in
            infrastructure in developing countries : introduction to
            potential models
The link between infrastructure and
            economic growth is widely acknowledged -- as is the
            infrastructure gap, which can act as a break on growth in
            emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs). Since the
            global economic and financial crisis, the challenges of
            raising financing for infrastructure projects in EMDEs are
            also well known. The challenges come from stretched
            government finances and restrictions on global bank lending.
            Hence much attention has been focused on the potential for
            institutional investors as a growing potential source of
            financing. This paper argues that infrastructure projects
            can potentially deliver long-term returns, but investments,
            particularly in EMDEs need to be carefully structured to
            meet the needs of both sides. The paper first considers the
            existing types of institutional investors and their
            potential for filling the infrastructure financing gap. The
            challenges of adjusting asset allocations, particularly
            toward EMDE infrastructure, are discussed and examples of
            projects where institutional investors have been involved
            are given. Finally, the paper considers a range of models
            for the involvement of institutional investors in EMDEs and
            makes initial proposals for how to determine which model
            fits best in a particular country context.
Electoral accountability and local
            government spending in Indonesia
This paper takes advantage of the
            exogenous phasing of direct elections in districts and
            applies the double-difference estimator to measure impacts
            on (i) human development outcomes and (ii) the pattern of
            public spending and revenue generation at the district
            level. The analysis reveals that four years after the switch
            to direct elections, there have been no significant effects
            on human development outcomes. However, the estimates of the
            impact of Pilkada on health expenditures at the district
            level suggest that directly elected district officials may
            have become more responsive to local needs at least in the
            area of health. The composition of district expenditures
            changes considerably during the year and sometimes the year
            before the elections, shifting toward expenditure categories
            that allow incumbent district heads running as candidates in
            the direct elections to "buy" voter support.
            Electoral reforms did not lead to higher revenue generation
            from own sources and had no effect on the budget surplus of
            districts with directly elected heads.
The impact of funding models and
            foreign bank ownership on bank credit growth : is Central
            and Eastern Europe different
This paper provides new evidence on the
            factors affecting protracted credit contraction in the wake
            of the global financial crisis. The paper applies panel
            vector autoregressions to a global panel that consists of
            quarterly data for 41 countries for the period 2000-2011 and
            documents that domestic private credit growth is highly
            sensitive to cross-border funding shocks around the world.
            This relationship is significantly stronger in Central and
            Eastern Europe, a region with considerably stronger foreign
            presence, higher cross-border funding, and elevated
            loan-to-deposit ratios compared with the rest of the world.
            The paper shows that high foreign ownership per se does not
            appear to explain credit response differences to foreign
            funding shocks. Rather, there is a stronger response in
            countries that exhibit high loan-to-deposit ratios and a
            high reliance on foreign funding relative to local deposits.
            The results suggest that funding model differences were at
            the heart of the post-crisis credit contraction in several
            Central and Eastern European countries. These findings have
            important regulatory and supervisory implications for
            emerging countries in Central and Eastern Europe as well as
            for other countries.
"They Are Not Like Us" :
            Understanding Social Exclusion
Negative attitudes toward groups in
            society are widespread and underpin systematic processes of
            social exclusion that marginalize people and deny them
            opportunities and dignity. This paper looks at the processes
            underlying social exclusion. It uses data covering Eastern
            Europe and Central Asia to study the responses to a simple
            hypothetical survey question about which specific groups
            respondents would not like to have as neighbors. Unwelcoming
            attitudes toward groups such as immigrants, ethnic
            minorities, the poor, HIV  individuals, and others are
            surprisingly common. These attitudes fall into three
            distinct clusters: intolerance for the poor and for
            different lifecycle stages; intolerance toward stigmatized
            attributes and behaviors; and intolerance toward specific
            identity groups. An empirical analysis of the determinants
            of attitudes shows that country-specific factors are far
            more important than socio-economic characteristics. These
            findings could have important implications for theories
            about exclusion and for the design of appropriate social
            inclusion policies. The authors argue that strategies to
            address social exclusion need to consider ways to change
            social norms, attitudes, and behaviors toward disadvantaged
            groups. The paper explores potential entry points for change
            within formal and informal institutions.
Mobile money services development :
            the cases of the Republic of Korea and Uganda
This study intends to increase
            understanding of how different types of mobile money
            services have developed in different environments. For this
            purpose, two countries were selected, the Republic of Korea
            and Uganda. From these study cases, some conclusions emerge.
            The development of mobile banking services can appear at
            different stages of financial sector development, but it
            requires a vibrant and competitive telecommunications
            sector. The regulatory environment does not need to be very
            sophisticated for the mobile industry to emerge. However,
            some elements appear to be important. The legal framework
            should allow (or at least not explicitly forbid) nonbank
            financial institutions to issue money and use banking agents
            or correspondents. To ensure wider use of the service by the
            population, it is important to educate the population on the
            benefits of mobile money services.