rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Does tariff liberalization increase
            wage inequality - Some empirical evidence
The objective of the paper is to answer
            an often asked question: If tariff rates are reduced, what
            will happen to wage inequality? The authors consider two
            types of wage inequality: between occupations (skills
            premium) and between industries. They use two large
            databases of wage inequality that have recently become
            available and a large data set of average tariff rates
            covering the period between 1980 and 2000. The authors find
            that tariff reduction is associated with higher
            inter-occupational and inter-industry inequality in poorer
            countries (those below the world median income) and the
            reverse in richer countries. However, the results for
            inter-occupational inequality must be treated with caution.
The effects of migration on child
            health in Mexico
The authors investigate the impact of
            international migration on child health outcomes in rural
            Mexico using a nationally representative demographic survey.
            They use historic migration networks as instruments for
            current household migration to the United States in order to
            correct for the possible endogeneity of migrant status. They
            find that children in migrant households have lower rates of
            infant mortality and higher birth-weights. The authors study
            the channels through which migration may affect health
            outcomes and find evidence that migration raises health
            knowledge in addition to the direct effect on wealth.
            However they also find that preventative health care, such
            as breastfeeding and vaccinations, is less likely for
            children in migrant households. These results provide a
            broader and more nuanced view of the health consequences of
            migration than is offered by the existing literature.
Poverty in rural and semi-urban
            Mexico during 1992-2002
This paper analyzes poverty in rural and
            semi-urban areas of Mexico (localities with less than 2,500
            and 15,000 inhabitants, respectively) and provides guidance
            on a social agenda and poverty alleviation strategy for
            rural Mexico. The analyses are based on INIGH and ENE data
            sets for 1992-2002. Monetary extreme poverty affected 42
            percent of the rural dwellers in dispersed rural areas and
            21 percent in semi-urban areas in 2002, slightly less than
            one decade earlier. Most of the rural poor live in dispersed
            rural areas and 13.2 million people live in poverty in rural
            Mexico with less than 15,000 inhabitants. It is
            disproportionately a feature of households whose main job is
            in the agricultural sector, as self-employed farmers or
            rural laborers, and that have at most a primary education.
            However, the incidence of extreme rural poverty has declined
            since 1996 but at a slower pace than the decline in urban
            poverty. Hence, the rural-urban poverty gap increased in
            recent years and in some places extreme poverty is at least
            four times higher in rural than in urban areas. Moreover,
            not only is the income gap in urban areas increasing, but
            also the gap between richer and poorer segments of the
            population in the rural areas is growing. Finally, the gap
            between rich and poor regions is still large.
Testing genuine saving
The World Bank has been publishing
            estimates of adjusted net or "genuine" saving
            since 1999. This measure of saving treats depletion of
            natural resources as a type of economic depreciation.
            Hamilton uses recent theoretical results relating growth in
            saving to growth in future consumption to provide a test of
            genuine saving using historical data. Did measured genuine
            saving in 1976, for example, "predict" the
            observed changes in consumption over subsequent decades? The
            author tests four alternative measures of saving
            econometrically. The worst measure, in terms of explained
            variation, is traditional net saving. Genuine saving
            adjusted to reflect population growth exhibits the worst fit
            with theory. Both gross saving and genuine saving perform
            better, with good concordance with theory, while genuine
            saving exhibits a moderate advantage in terms of goodness of fit.
Families, schools, and
            primary-school learning : evidence for Argentina and
            Colombia in an international perspective
This paper estimates the relationship
            between family background, school characteristics, and
            student achievement in primary school in two Latin American
            countries, Argentina and Colombia, as well as several
            comparison countries. The database used is the student-level
            international achievement data of the Progress in
            International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS), which tested
            the reading performance of fourth-grade students in 2001.
            The nationally representative samples have 3,300 students in
            Argentina and 5,131 students in Colombia. The emerging
            general pattern of results is that educational performance
            is strongly related to students' family background,
            weakly to some institutional school features, and hardly to
            schools' resource endowments. In an international
            perspective, estimated family background effects are
            relatively large in Argentina, and relatively small in
            Colombia. A specific Argentine feature is the lack of
            performance differences between rural and urban areas. A
            specific Colombian feature is the lack of significant
            differences between gender performance. Nonnative students
            and students not speaking Spanish at home have particularly
            weak performance in both countries. But there are no
            differences by parental occupation and no positive effects
            of kindergarten attendance. In Argentina, students perform
            better in schools with a centralized curriculum and
            ability-based class formation.
On the contribution of demographic
            change to aggregate poverty measures for the developing world
Recent literature and new data help
            determine plausible bounds to some key demographic
            differences between the poor and non-poor in the developing
            world. The author estimates that selective mortality-whereby
            poorer people tend to have higher death rates-accounts for
            10-30 percent of the developing world's trend rate of
            "$1 a day" poverty reduction in the 1990s.
            However, in a neighborhood of plausible estimates,
            differential fertility-whereby poorer people tend also to
            have higher birth rates-has had a more than offsetting
            poverty-increasing effect. The net impact of differential
            natural population growth represents 10-50 percent of the
            trend rate of poverty reduction.
Teacher shocks and student learning
            : evidence from Zambia
A large literature examines the link
            between shocks to households and the educational attainment
            of children. The authors use new data to estimate the impact
            of shocks to teachers on student learning in mathematics and
            English. Using absenteeism in the 30 days preceding the
            survey as a measure of these shocks they find large impacts:
            A 5 percent increase in the teacher's absence rate
            reduces learning by 4 to 8 percent of average gains over the
            year. This reduction in learning achievement likely reflects
            both the direct effect of increased absenteeism and the
            indirect effects of less lesson preparation and lower
            teaching quality when in class. The authors document that
            health problems-primarily teachers' own illness and the
            illnesses of their family members-account for more than 60
            percent of teacher absences; not surprising in a country
            struggling with an HIV/AIDS epidemic. The relationship
            between shocks to teachers and student learning suggests
            that households are unable to substitute adequately for
            teaching inputs. Excess teaching capacity that allows for
            the greater use of substitute teachers could lead to larger
            gains in student learning.
Decentralization and service delivery
Dissatisfied with centralized approaches
            to delivering local public services, a large number of
            countries are decentralizing responsibility for these
            services to lower-level, locally elected governments. The
            results have been mixed. The paper provides a framework for
            evaluating the benefits and costs, in terms of service
            delivery, of different approaches to decentralization, based
            on relationships of accountability between different actors
            in the delivery chain. Moving from a model of central
            provision to that of decentralization to local governments
            introduces a new relationship of accountability-between
            national and local policymakers-while altering existing
            relationships, such as that between citizens and elected
            politicians. Only by examining how these relationships
            change can we understand why decentralization can, and
            sometimes cannot, lead to better service delivery. In
            particular, the various instruments of
            decentralization-fiscal, administrative, regulatory, market,
            and financial-can affect the incentives facing service
            providers, even though they relate only to local
            policymakers. Likewise, and perhaps more significantly, the
            incentives facing local and national politicians can have a
            profound effect on the provision of local services. Finally,
            the process of implementing decentralization can be as
            important as the design of the system in influencing service
            delivery outcomes.
The effect of school type on
            academic achievement : evidence from Indonesia
Using data from Indonesia, Newhouse and
            Beegle to evaluate the impact of school type on academic
            achievement of junior secondary school students (grades
            7-9). Students that graduate from public junior secondary
            schools, controlling for a variety of other characteristics,
            score 0.15 to 0.3 standard deviations higher on the national
            exit exam than comparable privately schooled peers. This
            finding is robust to OLS, fixed-effects, and instrumental
            variable estimation strategies. Students attending Muslim
            private schools, including Madrassahs, fare no worse on
            average than students attending secular private schools. The
            results provide indirect evidence that higher quality inputs
            at public junior secondary schools promote higher test scores.
The effect of school type on
            academic achievement : evidence from Indonesia
# WPS3604

## **The Effect of School Type on Academic Achievement: Evidence from Indonesia**

## David Newhouse International Monetary Fund

Kathleen Beegle World Bank KEYWORDS: education, Indonesia, private JEL classifications: O12, O15, I21

## World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3604, May 2005

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at http://econ.worldbank.org._

* Direct Correspondence: David Newhouse, IMF, 700 19th Street NW, Washington DC 2043; Phone: 202623-5682; E-mail: dnewhouse@imf.org.  We thank Elizabeth King, Joe Newhouse, two anonymous referees, and participants of seminars at the World Bank Resident Mission in Jakarta, Minnesota Development Economics Conference, and Cornell University for useful comments.
Agricultural trade reform and the
            Doha development agenda
Anderson and Martin examine the extent
            to which various regions, and the world as a whole, could
            gain from multilateral trade reform over the next decade.
            They use the World Bank's linkage model of the global
            economy to examine the impact first of current trade
            barriers and agricultural subsidies, and then of possible
            outcomes from the World Trade Organization's Doha
            round. The results suggest moving to free global merchandise
            trade would boost real incomes in Sub-Saharan Africa and
            Southeast Asia (and in Cairns Group countries)
            proportionately more than in other developing countries or
            high-income countries. Real returns to farm land and
            unskilled labor and real net farm incomes would rise
            substantially in those developing country regions, thereby
            alleviating poverty. A Doha partial liberalization could
            take the world some way toward those desirable outcomes, but
            more so the more agricultural subsidies are disciplined and
            applied tariffs are cut.
Business cycle synchronization and
            regional integration: a case study for Central America
In early January 2003, the United States
            and Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and
            Nicaragua launched official negotiations for the Central
            American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), a treaty that would
            expand NAFTA-style trade barrier reductions to Central
            America. With deeper trade integration between Central
            America and the United States, it is expected that there
            will be closer links in business cycles between Central
            American countries and the United States. The paper finds a
            relatively low degree of business cycle synchronization
            within Central America as well as between Central America
            and the United States. The business cycle synchronization is
            expected to increase only modestly with further trade
            expansion, making the coordination of macroeconomic policies
            within CAFTA somewhat less of a priority.
Business cycle synchronization and
            regional integration: a case study for Central America
# WPS3584

## **Business Cycle Synchronization and Regional Integration: A Case Study for Central America**

Norbert Fiess World Bank nfiess@worldbank.org

### **Abstract**

In early January 2003, the United States and Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua launched official negotiations for the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), a treaty that would expand NAFTA-style trade barrier reductions to Central America. With deeper trade integration between Central America and the United States, it is expected that there will be closer links in business cycles among Central America and the United States. The aim of this paper is to assess the degree of business cycle synchronization between Central America and the United States. We find a relatively low degree of business cycle synchronization within Central America as well as between Central America and the United States. We further expect that based on the current trade structure between Central America and the United States, business cycle synchronization with the United States is expected to increase only modestly with further trade expansion, making the coordination of macro policies within CAFTA somewhat less of a priority.

### JEL: F15, F42

Keywords: Regional integration, business cycle synchronization, trade structure, CAFTA

### World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3584, April 2005

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at http://econ.worldbank.org._ 1
Comparative review of microfinance
            regulatory framework issues in Benin, Ghana, and Tanzania
The authors investigate the microfinance
            regulatory regimes in Benin, Ghana, and Tanzania, with a
            view to identifying key issues and lessons on how the
            overall regulatory framework affects integration of
            microfinance institutions into the financial system. The
            authors find that recognizing different tiers of both
            regulated and unregulated institutions in a financial
            structure facilitates financial deepening and outreach to
            otherwise underserved groups in urban and rural areas. That
            environment promotes sustainable microfinance under shared
            performance standards and encourages regulatory authorities
            to develop appropriate prudential regulations and staff
            capacity. Case studies of the three countries raise
            important issues on promoting microfinance development
            vis-à-vis regulating them. Laws to regulate activities other
            than intermediation of public deposits into loans can result
            in disproportionately restrictive and unmanageable
            standards, even as dynamic microfinance sectors have emerged
            without conducive regulatory regimes. The authors use the
            three countries' regulatory experiences to highlight
            the importance of differentiating when prudential
            supervision is warranted and when regulatory oversight
            suffices, and to identify the agencies to carry out
            regulation. They address an important issue that has
            received scant attention, measuring and paying for the costs
            of regulating microfinance, and the need to build technical
            capacity of supervisory and regulatory staff.
Capital markets and e-fraud: policy
            note and concept paper for future study
The technological dependency of
            securities exchanges on internet-based (IP) platforms has
            dramatically increased the industry's exposure to
            reputation, market, and operational risks. In addition, the
            convergence of several innovations in the market are adding
            stress to these systems. These innovations affect everything
            from software to system design and architecture. These
            include the use of XML (extensible markup language) as the
            industry IP language, STP or straight through processing of
            data, pervasive or diffuse computing and grid computing, as
            well as the increased use of Internet and wireless. The
            fraud is not new, rather, the magnitude and speed by which
            fraud can be committed has grown exponentially due to the
            convergence of once private networks on-line. It is
            imperative that senior management of securities markets and
            brokerage houses be properly informed of the negative
            externalities associated with e-brokerage and the possible
            critical points of failure that exist in today's
            digitized financial sector as they grow into tomorrow's
            exchanges. The overwhelming issue regarding e-finance is to
            determine the true level of understanding that senior
            management has about on-line platforms, including the
            inherent risks and the depth of the need to use it wisely.
            Kellermann and McNevin attempt to highlight the various
            risks that have been magnified by the increasing
            digitalization of processes within the brokerage arena and
            explain the need for concerted research and analysis of
            these as well as the profound consequences that may entail
            without proper planning. An effective legal, regulatory, and
            enforcement framework is essential for creating the right
            incentive structure for market participants. The legal and
            regulatory framework should focus on the improvement of
            internal monitoring of risks and vulnerabilities, greater
            information sharing about these risks and vulnerabilities,
            education and training on the care and use of these
            technologies, and better reporting of risks and responses.
            Public/private partnerships and collaborations also are
            needed to create an electronic commerce (e-commerce)
            environment that is safe and sound.
The contribution of skilled
            immigration and international graduate students to U.S. innovation
The impact of international students and
            skilled immigration in the United States on innovative
            activity is estimated using a model of idea generation. In
            the main specification a system of three equations is
            estimated, where dependent variables are total patent
            applications, patents awarded to U.S. universities, and
            patents awarded to other U.S. entities, each scaled by the
            domestic labor force. Results indicate that both
            international graduate students and skilled immigrants have
            a significant and positive impact on future patent
            applications, as well as on future patents awarded to
            university and nonuniversity institutions. The central
            estimates suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number
            of foreign graduate students would raise patent applications
            by 4.7 percent, university patent grants by 5.3 percent, and
            nonuniversity patent grants by 6.7 percent. Thus, reductions
            in foreign graduate students from visa restrictions could
            significantly reduce U.S. innovative activity. Increases in
            skilled immigration also have a positive, but smaller,
            impact on patenting.