rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
# **1 Introduction**

This study estimates the monetary benefits and costs of public schooling in Ghana. We conduct this analysis for the quantity of schooling, or years of schooling completed, and for the gain in the quality of schooling (in terms of measured achievement) produced by specific education interventions. Our motivation is twofold: to understand the extent to which public spending on schooling provides good value for money; and to provide benefit-cost ratios that can be compared to similar estimates for other public spending in the style of the Copenhagen Consensus. Regarding the latter, our work is complementary to the recent Ghana Priorities project conducted by the National Development Planning Commission in partnership with the Copenhagen Consensus Center.<sup>1</sup> Our estimates of monetary costs of schooling are reasonably comprehensive, covering both public expenditure data drawn from government administrative sources and data on the complementary private expenditures needed to access public schooling drawn from the 2016/17 Ghana Living Standards Survey, the latest available round of the national household sample survey administered by Ghana’s statistical agency (GSS 2019). Our estimates of the benefits of public schooling are more limited, however, something that should be kept in mind when interpreting our results. In particular, we only measure the benefits to students of estimated future labor earnings increases generated by additional years of schooling. This ignores other benefits of public schooling. For example, Adu Boahen and Yamauchi (2018) find that elimination of fees for primary schooling in 1995 led to reduced teenage fertility and higher age at first marriage in Ghana. Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer (2021) find that tuition-free secondary schooling in Ghana reduced fertility as well. Other authors have posited that public schooling helps to form better citizens, though this is more difficult to measure.<sup>2</sup> There are many studies on the impact of public schooling in Ghana and around the world.<sup>3</sup> Our initial intention was to limit ourselves to studies that generate well-identified estimates of the impacts of schooling. Doing so for quality improvements limits us to two studies that examine a remedial education approach known as “teaching at the right level,”<sup>4</sup> one study on

> 1 See https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/ghana-priorities (accessed January 24, 2022).

> 2 Duflo, Dupas, and Kremer (2021) find no evidence that tuition-free secondary schooling increased voting in either presidential or district assembly elections, though this is a narrow conception of “better citizens.”

> 3 Evans and Mendez Acosta (2021) provide a recent review for Africa, including many studies on Ghana.

> 4 See https://www.teachingattherightlevel.org/ (accessed January 24, 2022).

2
correlation with factional instability variable in the Duke database (question A.7) with _rlc_avg_ is -.42 for the 48 countries that are common to our database and the Duke database over this period. Programmatic parties should also rely less on charismatic leaders to mobilize voters. The Duke variable indicating whether parties are led by charismatic leaders (E1) is significantly negatively correlated with _rlc_avg_ (-0.28).

Parties can be programmatic on other margins, such as nationalism or religion. As Kitschelt (1993) observes, when parties have highly ideological members, the incentives of members to free-ride on the party program are lower. To the extent that nationalist and religious parties have more ideologically-motivated members, therefore, it is easier for them to curb free-riding, even without investing in organizational arrangements to prevent it. However, the public policies for which a well-performing public sector is useful may also be less salient to such parties. It is therefore ambiguous whether these parties would exhibit weaker incentives to support public administration reforms than the “economically” programmatic parties on which we focus. There are few such parties in our sample; in the main analysis below, they are included in the non-programmatic category. However, our results are robust to moving nationalist parties from the non-programmatic to the programmatic category.

# **Control variables**

The analysis takes into account a number of country and loan characteristics that might exert a spurious influence on the relationship between World Bank project ratings and the presence of programmatic parties. All of the variables used here are summarized in Table 1. Poorer countries are less able to accumulate the human capital needed to run an efficient public sector and to implement public sector reforms successfully. Countries with 24
we thus run separate productivity regressions for each type (Table 8). We use the most stringent specification, based on the last column of Table 7, which includes the full set of controls. Again, we only report the TFP regressions, but the results based on labor productivity are very similar.

Loan Help is positively associated with productivity for all three types of firms. The magnitude is largest for domestic private firms at 1.68, followed by foreign firms at 1.03, and SOEs at 0.73. This order is roughly consistent with the degree of financial constraints across those ownership types. Indeed, domestic private firms have less access to finance in China (Brandt and Li 2003; Huang, 2003, Bai et al. 2006; Li et al. 2008; Cull, Xu and Zhu 2009). Our results suggest that government’s help in matching up borrowers and lenders has been especially useful in easing the relatively severe financial constraints faced by some ownership types. Info Facilitation is also associated with productivity positively and significantly, but only for SOEs and foreign firms, and not for domestic private firms. An interpretation is that local governments are eager to provide information useful to the firms closest to them (i.e., SOEs), or to firms that the government is eager to lure to attract investment. Indeed, Huang (2003) provides evidence that local governments often provide preferential treatment for foreign firms for this purpose.

# **Development level and the effectiveness of government facilitation**

China is a large country with tremendous regional disparities in economic development. In 2002, the GDP per capita of the city of Dongguan in Guandong Province was more than 17 times that of Tianshui in Gansu Province. Survey evidence indicates that variation in the quality of regional governance is also quite large (Cull and Xu 2005; Long 2010; Wang, Xu and Zhu 2012). Some recent studies have suggested that countries at different stages of development face distinct binding constraints and thus should have different optimal policies (Kremer 1993; Hausman et al. 2005).<sup>11</sup> Substantial regional variation also affords us an opportunity to examine how the effectiveness of government facilitation differs across levels of development. Here, other confounding factors such as the legal system and culture are held constant. _A priori_ , firms in poor regions are likely more constrained in their development potential. Firms there tend to have less experience in long-distance, arms-length trade and less information about market demand, products that are likely to sell well, and the technology frontier. The local information

> 11 A summary of recent empirical support for this argument is found in  Xu (2011).

14
# **International Comparisons of Poverty in South Asia**

Tonmoy Islam<sup>1</sup> David Newhouse Monica Yanez-Pagans JEL: I32 Keywords: Poverty measurement, consumption aggregate, imputed rent, India, Bangladesh

> 1Tonmoy Islam (tislam@elon.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Elon University. David Newhouse (dnewhouse@worldbank.org) and Monica Yanez-Pagans (myanezpagans@worldbank.org) are Senior Economists at the World Bank Group.  The authors thank Nicola Amendola and Giovanni Vecchi for their support producing inputs for the preparation of this paper, Julian Diaz-Gutierrez and Yurani Arias-Granada for their excellent research assistance, and Benu Bidani and Martin Rama for their financial support through the South Asia Regional Data for Goals Program.
# **Policy Research Working Paper Series**

|**Title**|**Author**|**Date**|**Contact**<br>**for paper**|
|---|---|---|---|
|WPS2110 Life during Growth: International<br>Evidence on Quality of Life and<br>Per Capita Income|William Easterly|May 1999|K. Labrie<br>31001|
|WPS2111 Agricultural Land Reform in Postwar<br>Japan: Experiences and Issues|Toshihiko Kawagoe|May 1999|P. Kokila<br>33716|
|WPS2112 Industrial Policy after the East Asian<br>Crisis: From 'Outward Orientation'<br>To New Internal Capabilities?|Ashoka Mody|May 1999|S. Kpundeh<br>39591|
|WPS2113 Wage Determination and Gender<br>Discrimination in a Transition<br>Economy; The Case of Romania|Stefano Paternostro<br>David E. Sahn|May 1999|N. Nouviale<br>34514|
|WPS2114 Economic Reforms and Total Factor<br>Productivity Growth in Latin America<br>And the Caribbean (1950-95):<br>An Empirical Note|Pablo Fajnzylber<br>Daniel Lederman|May 1999|S. Holt<br>37859|
|WPS2115 Foreign Investment and Productivity<br>Growth in Czech Enterprises|Simeon Djankov<br>Bernard Hoekman|May 1999|R. Vo<br>33722|
|WPS2116 Does Child Labor Displace<br>Schooling? Evidence on Behavioral<br>Responses to an Enrollment Subsidy|Martin Ravallion<br>Quentin Wodon|May 1999|P. Sader<br>33901|
|WPS2117 On the Size and Number of Regional<br>Integration Arrangements: A Political<br>Economy Model|Soamiely Andriamanan<br>|jara May 1999|L. Tabada<br>36896|

_4_<sup>_JfS_</sup>
# **5 Conclusion**

Using damage indices from Skoufias _et al._ (2017) for floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and the 2004 tsunami, this paper combines these indices with district-level expenditure data to investigate how districts might redistribute their spending depending on the type of disaster that strikes. The analysis yields evidence that redistribution is taking place across economic sectors and by category, irrespective of the disaster type, with the direction and the size of the redistribution differing with the type and strength of disaster. For example, floods show a strong decrease in spending on General Administration both in the year of the disaster as well as in the spending of the following year. At the same time, there is a sizable increase in spending on infrastructure and health for the same period.

These results demonstrate how remotely sensed and freely available data can be used to analyze local economic data. Unless one has access to more complete data and local level damage data that allow better calibration of the damage indices, the methodology presented here can be used to get an overview of damages shortly after the incidence of an actual disaster. Moreover, with data available on the budget of last year, one can quickly assess which budget categories at the district-level might need extra funding.

Overall this is an area that has received little attention in the literature, and future research can shed more light on how local level authorities deal with disasters by comparing the results of this study in Indonesia with other emerging countries or middle income countries. Another potential avenue for future research could be assessing policy impact. More 31
# 1 Introduction

The debate about the extent and importance of real wage rigidities has been central in developed economies. Modern DSGE models, especially those used by central banks for policy evaluation, feature different forms of wage rigidity including nominal wage stickiness and partial indexation (e.g., Christiano, Eichenbaum and Evans, 2005; Smets and Wouters, 2007). The importance of real wage rigidities is indeed fundamental to understand the trade-off between unemployment and inflation in models of the newKeynesian tradition (Blanchard and Galí, 2007). Perhaps not surprisingly, this debate has been less important in developing countries, where other aspects of macroeconomic stabilization have been the focus of attention in the policy agenda. A natural reason for this dichotomy involves the differences in the inflation rates across the two groups of countries. High-inflation environments, which used to characterize the developing world, are associated with greater inflation volatility (Friedman, 1968). In this context, the volatility of real wages is likely to be high, too, diminishing the importance of downward wage rigidities for the macro-economy.

But developing countries have successfully brought down inflation during the past two decades. This is particularly true in Latin America, where the inflation rate declined from an average of 25 percent in the first half of the 1990s to 5 percent in 2005—2009. This process of macroeconomic stabilization most likely had a significant impact on the dynamics of wage adjustments in the region. One mechanism through which a lowinflation environment is likely to increase the degree of real wage rigidity is by increasing the likelihood that downward nominal rigidities become binding. If workers resist nominal wage cuts, firms operating in a low-inflation environment subject to a negative shock are hampered in adjusting real wages.<sup>1</sup> Moreover, macroeconomic stabilization may also

> 1 The literature has offered various rationales for downward wage rigidity. In the fair wage effort model, Akerlof (1980) argues that workers would perceive a wage cut as unfair, reducing their morale and effort. Hence, firms are reluctant to cut nominal wages. Manager interviews (Bewley, 1999) and surveys of wage setters (Cambell and Kamlani, 1997) in the United States provide support for this theory. In Europe effi ciency wage considerations are important (DuCaju et al. 2014), but institutional constraints, most notably unions and employment protection, play a fundamental role in understanding the resistance of workers to nominal (Holden and Wulfsberg, 2008) and real (Dickens et al. 2007) wage cuts. Evidence for middle-income countries is more limited, but Messina and Sanz-de-Galdeano (2014) for the cases of Brazil and Uruguay and Castellanos, Garcia-Verdu and Kaplan (2004) for Mexico, show that downward

1
|PCDPORK<br>**PCX**<br>PF<br>PTGC<br>PIGOF<br>POP<br>PPORK<br>PRDBEEF<br>PRDFG<br>PRDPORK|-<br>Per capita pork consumption (computed from PCDPORK, N, and POP)<br> -<br>Real border price of corn (computed from PAFC, EXR, and GNPD)<br> -<br>U.S. GNP price deflator for nonfarm total sales using 1982 dollars<br>from the Fair model<br>- Pig crop for 10-states, 1,000 head_(Livestock & Poultry: Outlook_<br>_C Situation Report,_Mar, May, Jul, Oct) Ql- December-February,<br>Q2 - March-May, Q3=June-August, Q4 - September-November<br> =Pigs on feed (computed from PIGC) PMEAT- Weighted price of meat<br>(computed from PBEEF, PPORK, and PBR<br> =U.S. noninstitutional population over 16 years in millions from<br>the Fair model<br> =Average retail price pork in cents per pound_(Livestock & Poultry:_<br>_Outlook & Situation Report)_Q1-<br>January-March, Q2-<br>April-June,<br>Q3=July-September, Q4=October-December<br> =Commercial production of beef, million nounds_(Livestock&_<br>_Poultry: Outlook & Situation Report,_Supply & Util. Table)<br>PRDBR=Total production of young chicken, million pounds<br>_(Livestock & Poultry: Outlook & Situation Report)_<br> =U.S. production of feed grains (corn, sorghum, oats, barley),<br>million metric tons<br>(Feed: Outlook and Situation Report) PRDFGA<br>=Annual moving average feed grain production (computed from<br>PRDFGT) PRDFGT-<br>Annualized feed grain production in the fourth<br>quarter (computed from Q4 and PRDFG)<br> -<br>Commercial production of pork, million pounds_(Livestock_&<br>_Poultry: Outlook_&_Situation Report)_|
|---|---|
|PRDSH<br>PRDSH<br>PSX<br>Ql<br>Q2<br>Q3<br>Q4|<br> -<br>U.S. production of soybeans, million metric tons<br> =U.S. production of soybeans (computed from KPRISBE, XSB, and CRUSH)<br> =Real border price of soybeans (computed from PAFS, EXR, and GNPD)<br> -<br>Quarterly dummy variable for first quarter<br> =Quarterly dummy variable for second quarter<br>- Quarterly dummy variable for third quarter<br> =Quarterly dummy variable for fourth quarter|
|<br>RELFORC|<br> =Release price for the farmer owned reserve corn in dollars per<br>bushel<br>(Feed: Outlook & Situation Report) RELOTH - Ratio of<br>price of other goods to consumer income (computed from RPF and<br>RPYD)|
|RELPBEEF|= Ratio of beef price to consumer income (computed from RPBEEF and<br>RPYD)|
|RELPBR|=Ratio of broiler price to consumer income (computed from RPBR and<br>RPYD)|
|RELPPORK<br>RPAFC<br>RPAFCMT|=Ratio of pork price to ccnsumer income (computed from RPPORK and<br>RPYD)<br> =Real U.S. corn price (computed from PAFC and GNPD) RPAFCBR-<br>Corn-broiler price ratio (computed from PAFC and PBR)<br>- Ratio of corn price to the price of meat (computed from PAFC and<br>PMEAT)|
|RPAFS<br>RPAFSMT|-<br>Real U.S. soybean price (computed from PAFS and GNPD)<br> -<br>Ratio of soybean price to th,'e<br>price of meat (computed from PAFS<br>and PMEAT)|
|RPBEEF<br>RPBR<br>RPCPB|<br> =Real price of beef (computed from PBEEF and GNPD)<br> -<br>Real price of broilers (computed from PBR and GNPD)<br> -<br>Ratio of corn price to the price of beef (computed from PAFC and<br>PBEEF)|

14
2 revenue generation through taxation of the crude oil and petroleum products sectors.

Previous quantitative studies have mostly been partial equilibrium exercises. Most made the unrealistic assumption that the demand for gasoline is perfectly inelastic in the short-run, and very inelastic in the long-run. Typically, the tax consequences were dealt with by adopting the rule of thumb that one billion dollars of revenue will be generated for the US government for each one cent per gallon tax on gasoline and diesel fuel. Given that a tax on gasoline has strong economy-wide linkages, it is useful to obtain estimak.es based in a general equilibrium context where interactive effects are accounted for. 5/ It is only recently that two general equilibrium studies by Boyd and Uri (1988a, 1988b) address the issue of taxation and the fiscal deficit. They have analyzed the welfare and revenue implications of a $5 per barrel import tariff on crude oil, and a 15 cents per gallon excise tax on gasoline. Boyd and Uri (1988b) find that the rule of thumb of one billion dollars of revenue for every cent of gasoline tax is an overestimate by about 50 percent, that is, the government can be expected to realize about one-half of a billion dollars per one cent tax on gasoline. In addition, they estimate that US welfare falls by about twice the amount of the gain in US Treasury revenues from a gasoline tax.

The purpose of this paper is to reexamine the welfare, fiscal, and employment implications of: (1) a 252 import tax on imported crude oil; and (2) a 15? excise tax on petroleum products. The estimates are derived from a 12 sector computable general equilibrium (CGE) model for the US economy calibrated to 1984. Our estimates are derived under the assumption
39 market that the rate wJil<sup>be sustained.Theshort Argentinean</sup> "Martinez de Hoz" episode<sup>of 1979-80 clearly shows what happens</sup> when this is not done.

# V. Conclusion

Can one conclude with some<sup>simple policy recommendations?</sup> I would suggest four propositions<sup>which, because of their</sup> simplicity, may seem rather<sup>trite.</sup> First, in general the real targets<sup>approach to exchange rate</sup> policy is the right one. The<sup>exchange rate should follow rather</sup> than lead, taking into account<sup>the various shocks or changes in</sup> other variables discussed<sup>in Part II of this paper-</sup> notably fiscal policy, trade policy,<sup>and terms of trade changes.</sup> Secondly, exchange rate policy<sup>should be associated with</sup> appropriate non-inflationary<sup>monetary policy. Normally there has</sup> to be a direct commitment<sup>to the anti-inflation objective if</sup> inflation is to be avoided.<sup>In the absence of such a commitment,</sup> with monetary policies being<sup>inflationary, exchange rate policy</sup> must still be aimed at<sup>the real target-</sup> ie the real exchange rate - unless there is reason to<sup>believe that it would actually</sup> affect the commitment itself<sup>to a significant extent.</sup> Thirdly, because of capital<sup>mobility delayed exchange rate</sup> adjustments must be avoided:<sup>if the rate needs to change it</sup> should be done quickly.
N=number of children eligible for follow up (not withdrawn or deceased) **a** Number and percentage with outcome

> **b** Risk ratios presented for binary outcomes (anemia & _P. falciparum_ prevalence) and are obtained from GEE analysis accounting for school-level clustering.

> **c** Age-sex specific anemia was defined using age and sex corrected WHO thresholds of hemoglobin concentration: <110g/l in children under 5 years; <115g/l in children 5 to 11 years; <120g/l in females 12 years and over and males 12 to 14.99 years old; and <130g/l in males ≥ 15 years. All female adolescents are assumed to not be pregnant

> **d** Not including baseline _P.falciparum_ prevalence

**Unadjusted** : All children with outcome measures, not adjusted for any baseline or study design characteristics.

**Adjusted** : for baseline age, sex, school mean exam score and literacy group (to account for stratification) and baseline measure of the outcome, where available

47
# **The Nollywood Nudge: An Entertaining Approach to Saving**

Aidan Coville, _World Bank_ Vincenzo Di Maro, _World Bank_ Felipe Alexander Dunsch, _World Bank_ Siegfried Zottel, _World Bank_ _Keywords:_ Savings; Impact Evaluation; Placebo design, Financial education, Edutainment. _JEL codes: C93, D14, D03, L82_
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