rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Disasters and economic welfare : can
            national savings help explain post-disaster changes in consumption
The debate on whether natural disasters
            cause significant macroeconomic impacts and indeed hinder
            development is ongoing. Most analyses along these lines have
            focused on impacts on gross domestic product. This paper
            looks beyond this standard national accounting aggregate,
            and examines whether traditional and alternative national
            savings measures combined with adjustments for the
            destruction of capital stocks may contribute to better
            explaining post-disaster changes in welfare as measured by
            changes in consumption expenditure. The author concludes
            that including disaster asset losses may help to better
            explain variations in post-disaster consumption, albeit
            almost exclusively for the group of low-income countries.
            The observed effect is rather small and in the range of a
            few percent of the explained variation. For low-income
            countries, capital stock and changes therein, such as forced
            by disaster shocks, seem to play a more important role than
            for higher-income economies, where human capital and
            technological progress become crucial. There are important
            data constraints and uncertainties, particularly regarding
            the quality of disaster loss data and the shares of capital
            stock losses therein. Another important challenge
            potentially biasing the results is the lack of data on
            alternative savings measures for many disaster-exposed
            lower-income countries and small island states.
A special safeguard mechanism for
            agricultural imports and the management of reform
The record of traditional safeguard
            provisions of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and
            the World Trade Organization provides useful information
            about how a special agricultural safeguard might be made
            effective. The success of existing safeguard or flexibility
            provisions to sustain long-run liberalization programs stems
            from their requiring objective, transparent, and
            participatory decisions on the application of the import
            restrictions they allow. The proposed special agricultural
            safeguard expands by arithmetic formula the bounds within
            which a Member may impose a new import restriction.
            Analysis reported here suggests that the formulas provide a
            poor guide for policy, indicating that they would frequently
            prescribe action that is not needed and fail to prescribe
            action when it would be appropriate.  Analysis of the
            existing agricultural safeguard, to which the special
            agricultural safeguard is similar, indicates that it has
            functioned not as an allowance for occasional response to
            unusual situations but as an expansion of the limits Members
            have accepted through tariff bindings. To be useful, the
            special agricultural safeguard should do more than provide
            formulas for import restrictions. It should provide for
            objective and participatory processes that would bring
            forward relevant information and guide an objective and
            balanced accounting of the interests at play.
Adjusting to trade-policy changes in
            export markets : evidence from U.S. antidumping duties on
            Vietnamese catfish
A large literature studies the effects
            of trade policy changes on developing-country exports on
            household incomes, and recent contributions have
            increasingly addressed the effects of administered
            protection, such as anti-dumping duties. In 2003 the United
            States imposed anti-dumping tariffs on imports of catfish
            from Vietnam ranging from 37 to 64 percent. As a result,
            Vietnamese exports of catfish to the U.S. market declined
            sharply, thus providing a unique opportunity to study the
            effects of U.S. trade policy changes on Vietnamese families.
            Using data on Vietnamese households, the authors study the
            responses of catfish producers in the Mekong delta of
            Vietnam between 2002 and 2004. The evidence suggests that
            the rate of growth of income of households that depended on
            catfish sales was significantly affected. In addition, the
            anti-dumping duties triggered significant exit from catfish
            farming. Households adjusted by moving out of catfish
            aquaculture and into wage labor markets and agriculture, but
            not into other aquaculture activities. Finally, the evidence
            also suggests that households found it difficult to change
            their catfish production levels, and that performance in
            aquaculture affects other household economic activities.
Tax compliance perceptions and
            formalization of small businesses in south Africa
This paper is based on large-scale
            surveys of formal and informal small businesses in South
            Africa, including questions about their experiences and
            perceptions about tax compliance, tax morale, and related
            variables. The survey findings suggest that formalization is
            more likely to take place in urban areas, involving
            relatively larger firms, and those who already use proper
            bookkeeping. Informal firms who said they were likely to
            register for tax in the near future were more likely than
            other informal firms to report higher satisfaction with
            government services, and to believe most businesses pay
            their taxes. The most-cited advantages of being registered
            for tax included better access to government services,
            better access to financing, and better opportunities for growth.
Evaluating the impact of Egyptian
            social fund for development programs
The Egyptian Social Fund for Development
            was established in 1991 with a mandate to reduce poverty.
            Since its inception, it has disbursed about $2.5 billion, of
            which nearly two-fifths was devoted to supporting
            microcredit and financing community development and
            infrastructure. This paper investigates the size of the
            impact of the Funds interventions, whether the benefits
            have been commensurate with the costs, and whether the
            programs have been targeted successfully to the poor. The
            core of the impact evaluation applies propensity-score
            matching to data from the 2004/2005 national Household
            Income, Expenditure and Consumption Survey. The authors find
            that Egypts Social Fund for Development programs have had
            clear and measurable effects, in the expected direction, for
            all of the programs considered: educational interventions
            have reduced illiteracy, health and potable water programs
            have lowered household spending on health, sanitation
            interventions have cut household spending on sanitation and
            lowered poverty, and road projects have reduced household
            transportation costs by 20 percent. Microcredit is
            associated with higher household expenditures in
            metropolitan areas and urban Upper Egypt, but not elsewhere.
            The Social Fund for Developments road projects generate
            benefits that, by some estimates, exceed the costs, as do
            health and potable water interventions; this is less evident
            for interventions in education and sanitation. The Fund
            argues that its mission is primarily social, and so should
            not be judged using a cost-benefit analysis. The Fund
            support for microcredit is strongly pro-poor; the other
            programs analyzed have a more modest pro-poor orientation.
Procurement in infrastructure : what
            does theory tell us
Infrastructure has particular challenges
            in public procurement, because it is highly complex and
            customized and often requires economic, political and social
            considerations from a long time horizon. To deliver public
            infrastructure services to citizens or taxpayers, there are
            a series of decisions that governments have to make. The
            paper provides a minimum package of important economic
            theories that could guide governments to wise
            decision-making at each stage. Theory suggests that in
            general it would be a good option to contract out
            infrastructure to the private sector under high-powered
            incentive mechanisms, such as fixed-price contracts.
            However, this holds under certain conditions. Theory also
            shows that ownership should be aligned with the ultimate
            responsibility for or objective of infrastructure provision.
            Public and private ownership have different advantages and
            can deal with different problems. It is also shown that it
            would be a better option to integrate more than one public
            task (for example, investment and operation) into the same
            ownership, whether public or private, if they exhibit
            positive externalities.
System-wide impacts of hospital
            payment reforms : evidence from central and eastern Europe
            and central Asia
Although there is broad agreement that
            the way that health care providers are paid affects their
            performance, the empirical literature on the impacts of
            provider payment reforms is surprisingly thin. During the
            1990s and early 2000s, many European and Central Asian
            countries shifted from paying hospitals through historical
            budgets to fee-for-service or patient-based-payment methods
            (mostly variants of diagnosis-related groups). Using panel
            data on 28 countries over the period 1990-2004, the authors
            of this study exploit the phased shift from historical
            budgets to explore aggregate impacts on hospital throughput,
            national health spending, and mortality from causes amenable
            to medical care. They use a regression version of
            difference-in-differences and two variants that relax the
            difference-in-differences parallel trends assumption. The
            results show that fee-for-service and patient-based-payment
            methods both increased national health spending, including
            private (out-of-pocket) spending. However, they had
            different effects on inpatient admissions (fee-for-service
            increased them; patient-based-payment had no effect), and
            average length of stay (fee-for-service had no effect;
            patient-based-payment reduced it). Of the two methods, only
            patient-based-payment appears to have had any beneficial
            effect on "amenable mortality," but there were
            significant impacts for only a couple of causes of death,
            and not in all model specifications.
Educational and health impacts of
            two school feeding schemes : evidence from a randomized
            trial in rural Burkina Faso
This paper uses a prospective randomized
            trial to assess the impact of two school feeding schemes on
            health and education outcomes for children from low-income
            households in northern rural Burkina Faso. The two school
            feeding programs under consideration are, on the one hand,
            school meals where students are provided with lunch each
            school day, and, on the other hand, take-home rations that
            provide girls with 10 kg of cereal flour each month,
            conditional on 90 percent attendance rate. After running for
            one academic year, both programs increased girls enrollment
            by 5 to 6 percentage points. While there was no observable
            significant impact on raw scores in mathematics, the
            time-adjusted scores in mathematics improved slightly for
            girls. The interventions caused absenteeism to increase in
            households that were low in child labor supply while
            absenteeism decreased for households that had a relatively
            large child labor supply, consistent with the labor
            constraints. Finally, for younger siblings of beneficiaries,
            aged between 12 and 60 months, take-home rations have
            increased weight-for-age by .38 standard deviations and
            weight-for-height by .33 standard deviations. In contrast,
            school meals did not have any significant impact on the
            nutrition of younger children.
Educational and health impacts of
            two school feeding schemes : evidence from a randomized
            trial in rural Burkina Faso
WPS4976 Policy Research Working Paper 4976 Impact Evaluation Series No. 30 Educational and Health Impacts of Two School Feeding Schemes Evidence from a Randomized Trial in Rural Burkina Faso _Harounan Kazianga Damien de Walque Harold Alderman_ The World Bank Development Research Group Human Development and Public Services Team June 2009
The power of information : the
            impact of mobile phones on farmers' welfare in the Philippines
The authors explore the impact of access
            to information on poor farmers consumption. The analysis
            combines spatially coded data on mobile phone coverage with
            household panel data on farmers from some of the poorest
            areas of the Philippines. Both the ordinary least squares
            and instrumental variable estimates indicate that purchasing
            a mobile phone has a large, positive impact on the
            household-level growth rate of per capita consumption.
            Estimates range from 11 to 17 percent, depending on the
            sample and the specification chosen. The authors perform a
            range of reliability tests, the results of which all suggest
            that the instruments are valid. They also present evidence
            consistent with the argument that easier access to
            information allows farmers to strike better price deals
            within their existing trading relationships and to make
            better choices in terms of where they choose to sell their goods.
Are there diminishing returns to
            transfer size in conditional cash transfers
There is increasing evidence that
            conditional cash transfer programs can have large impacts on
            school enrollment, including in very poor countries.
            However, little is known about which features of program
            design -- including the amount of the cash that is
            transferred, how frequently conditions are monitored,
            whether non-complying households are penalized, and the
            identity or gender of the cash recipients -- account for the
            observed outcomes. This paper analyzes the impact of one
            feature of program design -- namely, the magnitude of the
            transfer. The analysis uses data from a program in Cambodia
            that deliberately altered the transfer amounts received by
            otherwise comparable households. The findings show clear
            evidence of diminishing marginal returns to transfer size
            despite the fact that even the larger transfers represented
            on average only 3 percent of the consumption of the median
            recipient households. If applicable to other settings, these
            results have important implications for other programs that
            transfer cash with the explicit aim of increasing school
            enrollment levels in developing countries.
Own and sibling effects of
            conditional cash transfer programs : theory and evidence
            from Cambodia
Conditional cash transfers have been
            adopted by a large number of countries in the past decade.
            Although the impacts of these programs have been studied
            extensively, understanding of the economic mechanisms
            through which cash and conditions affect household decisions
            remains incomplete. This paper uses evidence from a program
            in Cambodia, where eligibility varied substantially among
            siblings in the same household, to illustrate these effects.
            A model of schooling decisions highlights three different
            effects of a child-specific conditional cash transfer: an
            income effect, a substitution effect, and a displacement
            effect. The model predicts that such a conditional cash
            transfer will increase enrollment for eligible children -
            due to all three effects - but have an ambiguous effect on
            ineligible siblings. The ambiguity arises from the
            interaction of a positive income effect with a negative
            displacement effect. These predictions are shown to be
            consistent with evidence from Cambodia, where the
            child-specific program makes modest transfers, conditional
            on school enrollment for children of middle-school age.
            Scholarship recipients were more than 20 percentage points
            more likely to be enrolled in school and 10 percentage
            points less likely to work for pay. However, the school
            enrollment and work of ineligible siblings was largely
            unaffected by the program.
Own and sibling effects of
            conditional cash transfer programs : theory and evidence
            from Cambodia
WPS5001 Policy Research Working Paper 5001 Impact Evaluation Series No. 36 Own and Sibling Effects of Conditional Cash Transfer Programs Theory and Evidence from Cambodia _Francisco H. G. Ferreira Deon Filmer Norbert Schady_ The World Bank Development Research Group Poverty and Inequality Team & Human Development and Public Services Team July 2009
Forecasting local climate for policy
            analysis : a pilot application for Ethiopia
This paper describes an approach to
            forecasting future climate at the local level using
            historical weather station and satellite data and future
            projections of climate data from global climate models
            (GCMs) that is easily understandable by policymakers and
            planners. It describes an approach to synthesize the myriad
            climate projections, often with conflicting messages, into
            an easily-interpreted set of graphical displays that
            summarizes the basic implications of the ensemble of
            available climate models. The method described in the paper
            can be applied to publicly-available data for any country
            and for any number of climate models. It does not depend on
            geographic scale and can be applied at the subnational,
            national, or regional level. The paper illustrates the
            results for future climate for Ethiopia using future climate
            scenarios projects by 8 global climate models. The graphical
            displays of nine possible future climate regimes (average
            temperature, precipitation and their seasonal distribution)
            for each grid-cell about 50km X 50 km). It also provides the
            probability associated with each of the nine-climate regimes.
Aid and trust in country systems
The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid
            Effectiveness sets targets for increased use by donors of
            recipient country systems for managing aid. A consensus view
            holds that country systems are strengthened when donors
            trust recipients to manage aid funds, but undermined when
            donors manage aid through their own separate parallel
            systems. This paper provides an analytical framework for
            understanding donors decisions to trust in country systems
            or instead to micro-manage aid using their own systems and
            procedures. Where country systems are sufficiently weak, the
            development impact of aid is reduced by donors reliance on
            them. Trust in country systems will be sub-optimal, however,
            if donors have multiple objectives in aid provision rather
            than a sole objective of maximizing development outcomes.
            Empirical tests are conducted using data from an OECD survey
            designed to monitor progress toward Paris Declaration goals.
            Trust in country systems is measured in three ways: use of
            the recipients public financial management systems, use of
            direct budget support, and use of program-based approaches.
            The authors show using fixed effects regression that a
            donors trust in recipient country systems is positively
            related to (1) trustworthiness or quality of those systems,
            (2) tolerance for risk on the part of the donors
            constituents, as measured by public support for providing
            aid, and (3) the donors ability to internalize more of the
            benefits of investing in country systems, as measured by the
            donors share of all aid provided to a recipient.
Measures of investor and consumer
            confidence and policy actions in the current crisis
The current financial crisis has
            highlighted the danger that declines in confidence can have
            a self-fulfilling effect on economic activity. In this
            paper, the authors consider ways of measuring investor and
            consumer confidence, and try to explain the evolution of
            confidence using measures of financial volatility,
            investment performance, macroeconomic outcomes, and policy
            actions. They identify a link between investor and consumer
            confidence. Finally, they show that liquidity provision and
            easing of interest rates had only a limited effect on
            financial market spreads during the crisis, arguing for
            additional measures to address the loss of confidence. The
            paper focuses on the need for financial regulatory reform,
            and shows how the incentives to cooperate in this area are
            stimulated by a common shock to confidence.
Enhanced financial mechanisms for
            post 2012 mitigation
Despite the many calls to reform the
            CDM, its conceptual underpinnings are strong and it will
            most likely survive in the post-2012 climate regime. Some
            modifications may be considered in the short term to
            strengthen the effectiveness and transparency of the
            mechanism without modifying the Marrakesh Accords. In the
            medium term substantially increased mitigation efforts in
            developing countries may require a combination of three
            possible financial mechanisms: the current activity-based
            CDM albeit improved, a second market mechanism that would
            seek to improve the long term emission trends of developing
            countries by promoting broad based emission reduction
            programs primarily in the private sector, and a third
            financial mechanism outside of the market which would be an
            incentive for the adoption of policy changes leading to a
            low carbon path, but where emission reductions would not be
            used as international offsets.