rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Political cycles in a developing
            economy - effect of elections in Indian States
The author studies the effect of state
            legislative assembly elections, on the policies of state
            governments in 14 major states of India, from 1960 to 1996.
            She identifies the effect of the timing of elections using
            an instrument for the electoral cycle that distinguishes
            between constitutionally scheduled elections, and midterm
            polls. She contrasts two levers of policy manipulation -
            fiscal policy and public service delivery - to distinguish
            between alternative models of political cycles. The
            predictions of three models are tested: 1) Populist cycles
            to woo uninformed and myopic voters. 2) Signaling models
            with asymmetric information. 3) A moral hazard model with
            high discounting by political agents. The empirical results
            for fiscal policy show that election years have a negative
            effect on some commodity taxes, a positive effect on
            investment spending, but no effect on deficits, primarily
            because consumption spending is reduced. With regard to
            public service delivery, elections have a positive and large
            effect on road construction by state public works
            departments. Strikingly, the fiscal effects are much smaller
            than the effect on roads. The author argues that the pattern
            of evidence is inconsistent with the predictions of models
            of voter myopia, and asymmetric information. She explores an
            alternative moral hazard model in which the cycle is
            generated by high political discounting, and career concerns
            persuade politicians to exert greater effort in election
            years on the management of public works.
Trends in private sector development
            in World Bank education projects
Emerging trends in education show the
            private sector to be playing an increasingly important role
            in financing and providing educational services in many
            countries. Private sector development has not arisen
            primarily through public policy design, but has of course
            been affected by the design, and limitations of public
            policy. The author traces trends in private sector
            development in eleven of seventy World Bank education
            projects in 1995-97, asking two questions: What has been the
            rationale for Bank lending in education? And, in countries
            where there is both privately financed, and publicly
            financed, and provided education, how has the Bank
            encouraged the private sector to thrive? The eleven country
            samples reveal that the Bank's interest in private
            sector development is basically in capacity-oriented
            privatization, to absorb excess demand for education. This
            is crucial to the Bank's general strategy for education
            lending: promoting access with equity, focusing on
            efficiency in resource allocation, promoting quality, and
            supporting capacity building. Absorbing excess demand tends
            to involve poorer families, usually much poorer than those
            that take advantage of other forms of privatized education.
            The Bank emphasizes capacity-oriented privatization,
            especially of teacher training for primary, and secondary
            schools, as well as institutional capacity building for
            tertiary, and vocational education. The underlying principle
            is that strengthening the private sector's role in
            non-compulsory education over time, will release public
            resources for the compulsory (primary) level. The private
            sector is emerging as a force governments, donors, and other
            technical assistance agencies cannot ignore. Often the term
            private sector encompasses households' out-of-pocket
            expenses, rather than describing for-profit, or
            not-for-profit (religious or otherwise) sectors. And lumpy
            investments, supporting both private, and public education,
            are the norm.
Forecasting the demand for
            privatized transport - What economic regulators should know,
            and why
Forecasting has long been a challenge,
            and will remain so for the foreseeable future. But the
            analytical instruments and data processing capabilities
            available through the latest technology, and software,
            should allow much better forecasting than transport
            ministries, or regulatory agencies typically observe.
            Privatization brings new needs for demand forecasting. More
            attention is paid to risk under privatization, than when
            investments are publicly financed. And regulators must be
            able to judge traffic studies done by operators, and to
            learn what strategic behavior influenced these studies. Many
            governments, and regulators avoid good demand, modeling out
            of lack of conviction that theory, and models can do better
            than the "old hands" of the sector. This is
            dangerous when privatization changes the nature of business.
            For projects amounting to investments of $ 100-200 million,
            a cost of $ 100,000-200,000 is not a reason to reject a
            reasonable modeling effort. And some private forecasting
            firms are willing to sell guarantees, or insurance with
            their forecasts, to cover significant gaps between
            forecasts, and reality.
Which firms do foreigners buy :
            evidence from the Republic of Korea
Using data on mergers and acquisitions
            involving Korean firms, the authors identify which sectors
            and firms attracted foreign investment after the
            liberalization of investment of activity at the end of 1997.
            They find that domestic acquisitions are similar to foreign
            acquisitions by sector (of both the target and the acquiring
            firm), but that international transactions are larger than
            Korean transactions. This suggests that consolidation is a
            two-stage process: Firms consolidate first domestically,
            then internationally. The authors also find that foreign
            investment is focused on high-value-added sectors, on larger
            and more profitable firms, on firms with low debt, and on
            firms that export a large share of output. Their results
            suggest that growth induces foreign investment.
Public officials and their
            institutional environment - an analytical model for
            assessing the impact of institutional change on public
            sector performance
To perform well, public officials must
            be confident enough about the future, to be able to see a
            relationship between their efforts, and an eventual outcome.
            Their expectations are shaped by their institutional
            environment. If the rules are not credible, or are unlikely
            to be enforced, of if they expect policies to be
            contradicted, or resources to flow unpredictably, results
            will be uncertain, so there is little point in working
            purposefully. The authors present an analytical framework,
            used to design a series of surveys of public officials'
            views of their institutional environment, and to analyze the
            information generated in fifteen countries. They describe
            how survey results help map public sector's strengths,
            and weaknesses, and offer an approach to identifying
            potential payoffs from reforms. The framework emphasizes how
            heterogeneous incentives, and institutional arrangements are
            within he public sector. It emphasizes how important it is
            for policymakers to base decisions on information (not
            generalizations) that suggests what is most likely to work,
            and where. In building on the premise that public
            officials' actions - and hence their
            organization's performance - depend on the
            institutional environment in which they find themselves,
            this framework avoids simplistic anti-government positions,
            bur doesn't defend poor performance. Some public
            officials perform poorly, and engage in rent seeking, but
            some selfless, and determined public officials, work hard
            under extremely difficult conditions. This framework offers
            an approach for understanding both bad performance, and
            good, and for presenting the results to policymakers in a
            format that leads to more informed choices, about public
            sector reform. Types of reforms discussed include
            strengthening the credibility of rules for evaluation, for
            record management, for training, and for recruitment;
            ensuring that staff support government policy; preventing
            political interference, or micro-management; assuring staff
            that they will be treated fairly; and, making government
            policies consistent.
The savings collapse during the
            transition in Eastern Europe
The authors assess the presence and
            extent of involuntary savings by comparing the predicted
            savings rates of market economies with those of the
            pre-transition economies. On balance, predicted savings
            rates fell short of actual savings rates, especially for the
            former Soviet Union and the Baltics -- providing some
            support for the notion of excessive pre-transition savings.
            Comparing the savings behavior of market economies and
            transition economies, they found substantial similarities,
            except for a negative link between savings and GDP growth.
            As the fastest-growing transition economies are at the
            bottom of the adjustment J-curve, the finding is consistent
            with consumption smoothing. Finally, they explored whether
            differences in the extent of economic liberalization
            affected savings rates in the cross-section of transition
            economies. They found that liberalization is associated with
            lower savings, with a one-year lag. To the extent that
            liberalization is perceived as an indicator of likely future
            growth, this behavior is consistent with smoothing in the
            face of a J-curve change in output.
Quantifying vulnerability to poverty
            - a proposed measure, applied to Indonesia
Vulnerability is an important aspect of
            households' experience of poverty. Many households,
            while not currently in poverty, recognize that they are
            vulnerable to events - a bad harvest, a lost job, an
            illness, and unexpected expense, an economic downturn - that
            could easily push them into poverty. Most operational
            measures define poverty as some function of the shortfall of
            current income, or consumption expenditures from a poverty
            line, and hence measure poverty only at a single point in
            time. The authors propose a simple expansion of those
            measures to quantify vulnerability to poverty. They define
            vulnerability as a probability, the risk that a household
            will experience at least one episode of poverty in the near
            future. A household is defined as vulnerable if it has 50-50
            odds, or worse of falling into poverty. Using those
            definitions, they calculate the "vulnerability of
            poverty line" (VPL) as the level of expenditures below
            which a household is vulnerable to poverty. The VPL allows
            the calculation of a "headcount vulnerability
            rate" (the proportion of households vulnerable to
            poverty), a direct analogue of the "headcount poverty
            rate". The authors implement this approach using two
            sets of panel data from Indonesia. First they show that if
            the poverty line is set so that the headcount poverty rate
            is twenty percent, the proportion of households vulnerable
            to poverty is roughly 30-50 percent. In addition to the
            twenty percent currently poor, an additional 10-30 percent
            of the population is at substantial risk of poverty. They
            illustrate the usefulness of this approach for targeting, by
            examining differences in vulnerability between households by
            gender, level of education, urban-rural residence,
            land-holding status, and sector of occupation of the head of household.
Global transmission of interest
            rates : monetary independence and the currency regime
The authors empirically study the
            sensitivity of local interest rates to international
            interest rates and how that sensitivity is affected by a
            country's choice of exchange rate regime. To establish
            the empirical regularities, they use a reduced-form
            empirical approach to compute both panel and single-country
            estimates of interest rate sensitivity for a large sample of
            developing and industrial economies between 1970 and 1999.
            When using the full sample, they find that: 1) Interest
            rates are typically lower in economies with fixed exchange
            rates than in those with flexible exchange rates. 2) More
            rigid currency regimes tend to exhibit higher transmission
            than more flexible regimes. In many cases in the 1990s,
            however, the authors cannot reject full transmission (a
            slope coefficient equal to 1), even for several countries
            with floating regimes. The data suggest an upward time trend
            in the degree to which domestic interest rates are sensitive
            to international capital movements and developing
            economies' increased financial integration with the
            rest of the world. As a result, country-specific estimates
            for the 1990s reveal few cases of less-than-full
            transmission of international interest rates to domestic
            rates, regardless of the currency regime. Country-specific
            results suggest that only large industrial countries can (or
            choose to) benefit from independent monetary policy. During
            the 1990s, interest rates in European countries were fully
            sensitive to German interest rates but insensitive to U.S.
            interest rates.
Infrastructure restructuring and
            regulation - building a base for sustainable growth
The link between economic growth, and
            better provision of infrastructure services may be unproven,
            but it is clear that reforms to make infrastructure services
            more competitive (where possible), and to provide strong,
            and independent economic regulation of natural monopolies,
            do create an environment more conducive to: 1) Private
            sector participation in infrastructure investments. 2)
            companies trying to cut costs, and pass the savings on to
            consumers. 3) Better provision of services (through faster
            rollout of infrastructure, for example, and through
            innovative solutions for delivering services to customers
            who are not connected to an existing network). It is
            important that policymakers make the right decisions when
            deciding how to restructure infrastructure. First, they
            should review the evidence on the impact various types of
            reform have had. The authors provide an overview of the
            evidence from - and lessons learned in - Latin America, one
            of the first regions to undertake wholesale reform of its
            infrastructure service provides. Among their conclusions: a)
            the reform of utility, and infrastructure industries is
            vital to economic growth. b) Apparently well-founded, but
            wrong decisions can damage growth prospects. C) Reform
            should combine changes in industry structure, ownership, and
            (through effective regulation) behavior. To minimize the
            risk of misconduct by infrastructure companies, the
            government should introduce: i) As much competition as
            possible (after evaluating all tradeoffs). ii) Rules to
            limit (or eliminate) vertical, and horizontal ownership,
            which makes it difficult to regulate company behavior. iii)
            Rules to ensure that regulators get all the information they
            need, and that it is timely, consistent, and accurate.
Give growth and macroeconomic
            stability in Russia a chance - harden budgets by eliminating nonpayments
The authors analyze the links between
            Russia's disappointing growth performance in the second
            half of the 1990s, its costly and unsuccessful
            stabilization, the macroeconomic meltdown of 1998, and the
            spectacular rise of non-payments. Non-payments flourished in
            an environment of fundamental inconsistency between a
            macroeconomic policy geared at sharp disinflation, and a
            microeconomic policy of bailing enterprises out through soft
            budget constraints. Heavy untargeted implicit subsidies
            flowing through the non-payments system (amounting to 10
            percent of GDP annually) have stifled growth, contributed to
            the August 1998 meltdown, through their impact on public
            debt, and have made at best a questionable contribution to
            equity. Dismantling this system must be a top priority,
            along with promoting enterprise restructuring and growth (by
            hardening budget constraints) and medium-term macroeconomic
            stability (by reducing the size of subsidies). Getting the
            government out of the non-payments system means settling all
            appropriately controlled budgetary expenditures on time, and
            in cash, and eschewing spending arrears, thereby setting an
            example for enterprises, and laying the groundwork for
            eliminating tax offsets at all levels of government, and
            insisting on cash tax payments. To stop energy-related
            subsidies, would require not only that the government pay
            its own energy bills on time, and in cash, but also that the
            energy monopolies be empowered to disconnect non-paying
            clients. This will enable the government to insist that the
            energy monopolies in turn pay their own taxes in full, and
            on time.
The political economy of
            privatization : an empirical analysis of bank privatization
            in Argentina
The authors study the political economy
            of bank privatization in Argentina.  The results of their
            study strongly support the hypothesis that political
            incentives affect the likelihood of privatization.  They
            find that: a) provinces whose governors belonged to the
            fiscally conservative Partido Justicialista were more likely
            to privatize; b) fiscal and economic crises increased the
            likelihood of privatization; and c) poorly performing banks
            were more likely to be privatized.  They tested the
            hypotheses for a specific industry in a specific country,
            making it possible to control for enterprise performance and
            institutional characteristics.  It seems reasonable to
            expect that similar results might hold in other industries
            and countries.
Total strangers or soul mates -
            antidumping and competition policies in Latin America and
            the Caribbean
As a result of trade reforms in the
            1980s and 1990s Latin American and Caribbean countries
            became more open than at any time since World War II.
            However, these countries have recently begun to use
            antidumping measures as the new protection weapon of choice,
            as other barriers to trade have been reduced. In fact, the
            fastest growing antidumping actions are within regional
            integration arrangements, where they are being applied by
            member countries against each other. The authors argue that
            antidumping is anticompetitive and that its usual
            justification as a counter to predatory behavior is not
            relevant in the region. It is imperative, they say, that
            antidumping be contained if not altogether eliminated. While
            they find that safeguards are less anticompetitive than
            antidumping, they believe that all exceptional protection
            measures, such as antidumping, countervailing, and
            safeguards, should be considered together with competition
            policies. In other words, they should become soul mates
            rather than remain total strangers. The authors do not find
            that fine-tuning antidumping policy is a good option.
            Rather, they believe that both trade and competition
            policymaking ought to be brought under a single entity, as
            in Peru. This would lead to a more competitive solution.