rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
may increase fertility, assuming children are a normal good. On the other hand, including women‟s names on property documents can change the balance of power in a relationship and, if women have preferences for lower fertility and fertility decisions are made through family bargaining, can decrease fertility. Land titling can also influence the value of children, for example, by affecting parents‟ options about where to live in old age. Lastly, when people have a legal right to their property and no longer have to squat to retain control of it, their time can be used for other purposes. Changes in the value of mothers‟ time may also affect fertility. Field (2003a) finds a strong effect of the land titling program on fertility behavior, with eligible households who had been exposed to the program exhibiting roughly a 20% reduction in annual birth rates in the few years after the program.

In a separate study of the same program, Field (2003b) analyzes the effects of the program on hours of work, location of entrepreneurial activity and child labor force participation, using a similar evaluation strategy. The impact estimates indicate that land titling increased labor hours, shifted labor supply away from work at home and toward work in the outside market and led to substitution of adult for child labor. On average, labor hours increased by 17%, the probability of working inside the home decreased by 47% and the probability of child labor declined by 27%.

Another study of land titling is that of Galiani and Schargrodksy (2009), which examines the effects of land titling in an urban area of Buenos Aires. When the squatters had originally settled on the land, they thought it was public land, but it was actually private land. In 1984, a law was passed expropriating the former owners‟ land (with compensation) and entitling current occupants. Some original owners accepted the governmental decision and compensation, while others challenged the decision in drawn-out lawsuits (some of which are still pending). Galiani and Schargrodsky exploit the variation in the owners‟ decision to accept or challenge the law to identify the effects of land titling on occupants‟ behavior. Although it is conceivable that owners with more favorable land quality would have been more likely to contest the appropriation, Galiani and Schargrodsky show that this was not the case and that the parcels of land for which owners contested or did not contest the appropriation were actually highly comparable and basically next to each other. For this reason, their analysis considers the land titling ”treatment” exogenous from the point of view of the squatters.

Galiani and Schargrodsky find substantial effects of the land titling program on household behaviors using data from two surveys, performed in 2003 and 2007, and focusing on 245 56
32 converts to the participatory approach-with strong statistical findings that increasing participation directly causes better project performance.

Three questions which are important for practice and policy are not explored here. First, does participation directly cause better project performance across all sectors? One cannot blindly extrapolate the results in this study across all sectors, since this data is only from rural water supply projects. The economic characteristics of rural water as a good would seem to promote the importance of direct beneficiary participation; these economic characteristics vary across goods provided by projects in other sectors. Second, what policy instruments help to achieve more effective participation? The behavior of project beneficiaries, staff in project agencies, and other suppliers responds to incentives, but there is little documented experience on creating incentives in public sector agencies for promoting and incorporating participation. Finally, can experiences with participation help to clarify the analysis of the deficiencies inherent in either a purely individualistic 'market" or a purely statist 'government' approach to development? An analytic approach that incorporates participation might examine the various mechanisms whereby cooperative action by groups can overcome the inefficiency of individualistic solutions--e.g, from 'free riding' or strategic (mis)revelation of private information--while avoiding the limitations of centralized government. These "informal' methods of cooperation have been explored by a number of authors (Ostrom, Schroeder and Wynne 1993, DeSoto 1989, Wade 1988) but much remains to be leamed.
estimated by Robinson and Yeh (2011).<sup>13</sup> HIV-prevalence in the sample is about 3% and compares to national HIV rates of 6.6 % in Tanzania, and 5.3% in rural Tanzania (DHS 2008). About 1 in 5 is infected with a curable STI.

# **III. Empirical Framework and Results**

Our basic specification is the following: where yijt is the outcome of interest for individual i in location j in period t. Our negative shock (Shockit) takes a value of 1 if there is a shock in period t and zero otherwise. The vector X′it includes individual level time-varying controls for migration and employment type (agriculture, formal, self-employed).<sup>14</sup> Fixed effects include: individual FE (γi), location FE (ζj -which are absorbed by the individual FE), and time FE (λt). Standard errors are clustered at the location (sub-village) level.<sup>15</sup>

# _Select Expenditures_

We first examine the association between negative shocks and individual expenditures. The original study did not contain a full expenditure module, so we are unable to examine the relationship between shocks and overall expenditures. What we have are questions on select expenditures made in the past month and past four months at the time of the survey. For expenditures over the past month, women were asked about

> 13 Robinson & Yeh (2011) define women who engage in transactional sex in their study as unmarried women who are at least 18 years of age and have multiple concurrent sexual partners, while we define transactional sex as any woman who reports being paid for sex.

> 14 Migration is of interest because it may be the case that shocks lead to urban migration which may expose women to different sexual networks that have higher STI prevalence.  We note that migration itself is a potential outcome of a negative shock and is considered a "bad control" and should not be included as a covariate (see Angrist and Pischke 2009).  We note however, that our main estimates (Table 3) are unchanged when migration is included as a covariate, and our goal is to see if migration attenuates the effect that shocks have on our outcomes of interest.

> 15 Standard errors are similar when clustered at the individual level.

10
16 urban poverty line and the lower rural poverty line emerge, which would violate utility-consistency in Diagram 5, and may lead to a gross underestimation of poverty in rural areas.

In short, we conclude that the construction of a poverty line is plagued by inherent utility-consistency problems. In this section we argued that, due to rationing of basic services, the identification of thresholds for basic services jointly with thresholds for basic foods is an intricate matter. In the previous section we indicated that it is equally intricate to find different food bundles that give the same nutrition and the same utility level to households, whether it be over time (revealed preferences) or between locations (heterogeneous preferences).

# **4 Evidence from Mozambique and Ghana**

The results of sections 2 and 3 signpost that a context-specific _food poverty line_ might downscale the burden associated to low quality food, while a context-specific _overall poverty line_ might downscale the burden of unavailable basic services. Therefore, after an evaluation of the intricacies involved in constructing a (food) poverty line, we proceed with the empirical testing of the arguments with survey data from Mozambique and from Ghana.

First, to highlight the significance of quality vis-à-vis quantity of foods, we estimate food Engel-curves, disentangling the calories from their price and looking at diets between 1,000 and 2,500 Kcal per capita per day. Next, to explore the extent to which relatively low prices of basic foods in rural areas might phase out with relatively high (implicit) prices of basic services, we compare poverty patterns under a national poverty line with the patterns that emerge under an urban-rural poverty line and we briefly look at the effects of adding specificity to the poverty line beyond adjustments to rural-urban consumption and price patterns.

# _Data and poverty line_

We employ data from large-scale household surveys in Mozambique and Ghana and refer to INE (1998, 2004, 2010) and to GSS (2014) for a detailed description. For the respective country and the respective years, we list - in Table 1 - the key variables for assessing the diets and the poverty patterns.
# **1. Introduction**

Because of their well-documented, positive short-term effect on welfare (see, for instance, Bastagli et al., 2016), cash transfers have constituted the majority of safety net interventions implemented to mitigate the effects of COVID-19 on households. Since the start of the pandemic, cash transfers have represented 42 percent of total social assistance programs and 24 percent of all global social protection measures to respond to COVID-19 (Gentilini et al. 2021).<sup>2</sup> The initial design of many cash transfer programs reflected an objective to shield vulnerable households and individuals from the negative impacts of the unfolding COVID-19 pandemic. However, and increasingly, cash transfer measures are also being used to support workers in low- and middle-income countries to offset losses of incomes and revenues induced by COVID-19 (De La Flor et al., 2021; Gentilini et al., 2021).

This paper takes stock of the Emergency Cash Transfer (ECT) provided to informal workers in urban Sierra Leone and implemented shortly after the onset of the pandemic, from June to August 2020. Our aim is to contribute to the evolving literature on the relationship between cash transfers and labor market outcomes for informal sector workers. While most studies that assess the impact of cash transfers look at outcomes related to consumption and subjective well-being, the targeting parameters and transfer size of the ECT allow us to also look at the relationship between the transfers and labor market outcomes of self-employed households in the informal sector, thus adding to the emerging strand of literature that explores the linkages between social assistance and employment-related outcomes in low-income settings (Bassier et al., 2021; Bhorat et al., 2021; Gerard et al., 2020).

> 2 Data until May 14, 2021.

2
producing these sorts of outcomes. We also provide empirical evidence largely consistent with the predictions of this theoretical framework.

The Paris Declaration’s call for increased use of recipient systems in managing aid is not oblivious to the risks involved. The document explicitly acknowledges that weak country systems make aid less effective. Recipients, with technical assistance from donors, are urged to strengthen their public financial management (PFM) systems and formulate a credible national development strategy where one does not exist. In the meantime, using those systems, despite their flaws, is believed to strengthen them: “Donors can help build capacity and trust by using country systems to the fullest extent possible, while accepting and managing the risks involved...” (OECD, 2009a: 27).

Donors’ decisions to place trust in country systems or, alternatively, to micro-manage aid using their own parallel systems, are influenced by both donor and recipient characteristics. Where recipient PFM capacity is stronger, the likelihood of a corruption scandal tarnishing the donor agency’s reputation is lowered, and aid funds are more likely to be spent productively in implementing a national development program. Development goals are more likely to be achieved if donors’ use of country systems is at least somewhat responsive to the quality of those systems. However, there are other reasons to believe that donors’ reliance on country systems will be sub-optimal in most cases.

The benefits of using country systems are mostly external (benefiting other donors) and realized only over the long term, while costs are short term and fully internalized by the donor. If donor agency _i_ chooses to help strengthen country systems, for example by providing aid in the form of budget support or technical assistance for PFM reform, it is in effect providing a public good for other donors. The stronger systems that result reduce reputational and fiduciary risks, and increase the developmental impact of aid funds, not only for donor _i_ ’s future aid but also for other donors. Meanwhile, donor _i_ incurs the full costs, in exposing its current aid funds to higher risks than if it bypassed recipient country systems.

Moreover, donor _i_ ’s provision of budget support (or technical assistance for PFM reform) conflicts with political imperatives to show visible achievements, attributable to its own aid funds, to skeptical taxpayers or elected officials at home. If (as is likely the case) officials in donor agency _i_ have short time horizons, incentives to under-invest in aid practices that strengthen rather than weaken country systems are aggravated. Donor _i_ (and other donors) will have an incentive to free ride on the investments of other donors, and manage aid through parallel systems using its own accounting, procurement and other procedures.

3
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1.00%<br>Coefficient Confidence interval (90%)<br>0.50%<br>0.00%<br>-0.50%<br>-1.00%<br>-1.50%<br>-2.00%<br>-2.50%<br>All workers Males Females Low-skilled High-skilled<br>Effect on informality (percent)<br>2005-2010 2005-2013 2005-2016 2005-2010 2005-2013 2005-2016 2005-2010 2005-2013 2005-2016 2005-2010 2005-2013 2005-2016 2005-2010 2005-2013 2005-2016<br><!-- End of picture text -->

**Notes:** Author's estimates using data from Bangladesh LFS and UN COMTRADE. The confidence intervals are set at the 90% level. These graphs are based on 2SLS regression computed to estimate effect of an increase in exports on real wages and informality. This relationship is estimated for different worker types (male, female, rural, skilled, unskilled, young, and old).

Although this effect is still significant for the time-span 2005 to 2013, the magnitude of the effect decreases substantially to 658 _takas_ . In turn, in the most prolonged period of analysis, 2005 to 2016, impacts dissipate, not only diminishing in magnitude of the coefficient but also becoming not statistically significant. Looking at manufacturing workers exclusively, we observe the same effects: a positive and decreasing effect on wages over time, notwithstanding that the only statistically significant results are those for the 2005 to 2013 period.

We also analyzed the effects of an increase in trade exposure on textiles and apparel workers’ outcomes, since the Bangladeshi export basket is highly concentrated in the garments industry. We found that the trend of dissipating effects over time holds, but no effect is statistically significant. A plausible explanation is that dissipation occurs very quickly; it may take less than five years for the expanding apparel industry to attract workers from other industries. In this case, we would not detect a significant effect on the apparel industry separately. Another possible explanation is that textiles and apparel industries tend to concentrate in a few sub-districts, reducing the number of observations the regressions capture, making it difficult to find conclusive results. Surprisingly, average wages of service sector workers increased by 4,810 _takas_ in the short term but drastically fell to a non-significant 219 _takas_ and 867 _takas_ when looking at three and six additional years (2005 to 2010 and 2005 to 2016).

Consistent with findings of Artuc et al. (2019) for India, better-off groups also benefitted the most from trade in terms of wages in Bangladesh. Average wage increases in sub-districts more exposed to the trade shock were substantially higher for males relative to females, high-skilled workers’ average wages increased five times more than low-skilled workers’ wages, and experienced workers’ wages grew twice as much as for younger workers. Interestingly, while wages increased 26
to baseline. In 2026, higher reserves boost oil production to nearly 2.2 million barrels per day, a 9 percent increase relative to baseline ( 2025, see Panel ssiiFF C) in almost all models. As oil accounts for about half of Angola’s economy, the ≈γγ x %ΔRR increase in oil production boosts total GDP by about four percentage points in 2026 (see Panel D).

After 2026, the impact on growth depends mostly on public investment, which, in turn, depends on how the government spends/saves the windfall revenue generated by the discovery (Panel E). The shock leads to extra revenues of 2-3 percent of baseline GDI until 2040 but declines sharply after that due to depleting oil reserves (see Appendix Figure 9).<sup>51</sup> This path is very similar across models and rules, except from the BBR-HR, which generate higher growth and, hence, higher oil revenues in the 2030s.

The BBR-HRs (both models) are the only rules that yield a faster growth rate for several years after the discovery shock. As above, the BBR-HRs invest all windfall oil revenue, which increases GDP growth (oil and non-oil) and private investment vis-à-vis the baseline.<sup>52</sup> In contrast, the simple BBRs (either model), invest only 20 percent of the windfall, leading to a modest impact on growth after 2026.

The SSRs also generate a relatively small boost to public investment and longterm growth because the extra revenues are mostly classified as cyclical and so are saved. The SSR in the Default submodel generates the lowest growth path after 2026 as public investment remains constant and private investment increases only modestly vis-à-vis baseline. As above, the SSRs in the External-Balance submodel also generate a small amount of crowding-in of private investment (15 cents per dollar of fiscal surplus, see Panel F).

Over the long term, the differences in public and private investment accumulate to modest differences in the capital stock and GDP across the different fiscal rules. In the BBR-HRs (both submodel), GDP is about 8 percent above baseline by 2040,

> 51 For example, in 2026, oil revenues increased by just above 2 percent of baseline GDI: a 9% increase in oil production x 35% oil as share of total GDI in 2025 x 70% oil tax rate. 52 Recall that private investment increases in absolute terms because it is a fixed fraction of GDI, which increases relative to baseline after 2025 due to the discovery.

41
Policy ReseaRch WoRking PaPeR 4494

# **Abstract**

This paper contributes to the literature that explores the link between regulatory governance and sector performance. The paper develops an index of regulatory governance and estimates its impact on sector performance, showing that indeed regulation and its governance matter. The authors use two unique databases: (i) the World Bank Performance Database, which contains detailed annual data for 250 private and public electricity companies in Latin America and the Caribbean; and (ii) the Electricity Regulatory Governance Database, which contains data on several aspects of the governance of electricity agencies in the region. The authors run different models to explain the impacts of change in ownership and different characteristics of the regulatory agency on the performance of the utilities. The results suggest that the mere existence of a regulatory agency, regardless of the utilities’ ownership, has a significant impact on performance. Furthermore, after controlling for the existence of a regulatory agency, the ownership dummies are still significant and with the expected signs. The authors propose an experience measure in order to identify the gradual impact of the regulatory agency on utility performance. The results confirm this hypothesis. In addition, the paper explores two different measures of governance, an aggregate measure of regulatory governance, and an index based on principal components, including autonomy, transparency, and accountability. The findings show that the governance of regulatory agencies matters and has significant effects on performance.

This paper—a product of the Sustainable Development Department in the Latin America and the Caribbean Region—is part of a larger effort in the department to understand the determinants for performance in the infrastructure sectors. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The authors may be contacted at landres@worldbank.org, jguasch@worldbank.org, and slopezazumendi@worldbank.org.

_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 views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team
19 Car-related taxes play an important role in reducing over all VMT and CO2 emissions. Hirota et al., (2003) using data from 68 large cities, 49 OECD countries and 19 nonOECD countries in Asia show that for every 1% increase in ownership tax, VMT decreases by 0.22% and for every 1% increase in acquisition tax, VMT decreases by 0.45%. However, for a 1% increase in acquisition and ownership taxes, CO2 emissions decreased by 0.19% and 0.19% respectively. Although higher acquisition and ownership taxes discourage vehicle ownership, it might not if the acquisition and ownership taxes of used vehicles remain low. People may respond to higher taxes and fees by buying older, less fuel efficient models (Pritchard and DeBoer **,** 1995).

# 5. Emission Taxes<sup>4</sup>

An emission tax refers to a levy charged directly on effluents, or on a fuel in proportion to contents of emission causing elements of the fuel. For example, a NOx (Oxides of Nitrogen) tax is charged based on the amount of NOx released from a vehicle. A carbon tax, on the other hand, is levied for fuels in proportion to their carbon contents. Similarly, a sulfur tax is also levied for fuels based on their sulfur contents. In general, if the content of a fuel (e.g., carbon, sulfur) is primarily responsible for the emissions, the tax is based in proportion to that content. On the other hand, if the source of emissions is not only the content of the fuel, but also other factors, the emission charge is then directly applied to the emissions. For example, NOx is released not only due to the oxidation of nitrogen present in a fuel (i.e., fuel NOx), but also in the atmospheric nitrogen (i.e., thermal NOx).

Three types of emission taxes are normally found either proposed or introduced in order to reduce transport sector emissions. These are: (i) taxes on local air pollutants such as suspended particulate matters (SPM), volatile organic compounds (VOCs), (ii) taxes

> 4 Literature on emission taxes to reduce transport sector externalities is limited. There are two reasons behind this. First, in contrast to a stationary source, monitoring of emissions is expensive for mobile sources and hence the emission tax might not be the preferable instrument to reduce transport externalities. Secondly, emission taxes when applied to a fuel (e.g., carbon or sulfur taxes) might be interpreted as fuel taxes and included in the fuel tax category.