rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Who is benefiting from fertilizer
            subsidies in Indonesia
Using the Agricultural Census 2003 and
            the Rice Household Survey 2008 for Indonesia, this paper
            analyzes the distribution of benefits from fertilizer
            subsidies and their impact on rice production. The findings
            suggest that most farmers benefit from fertilizer subsidies;
            however, the 40 percent largest farmers capture up to 60
            percent of the subsidy. The regressive nature of the
            fertilizer subsidies is in line with research carried out in
            other countries, the result of larger farms using a larger
            volume of fertilizer. This paper confirms that fertilizer
            used in adequate quantities has a positive and significant
            impact on rice yields, but it also provides evidence that
            over-using fertilizer has an adverse impact on yields (an
            inverted U-curve relationship).
Stakeholder dialogue as an
            institutional strategy for sustainable development in China
            : the case of community environmental roundtables
Stakeholder dialogue, as an alternative
            institutional strategy for environmentally and socially
            sustainable development, has received little attention from
            researchers and practitioners in developing countries such
            as China, even though the dialogue strategy can potentially
            lead public governance to a more efficient level. This paper
            first discusses the potential of stakeholder dialogue as an
            institutional tool for promoting sustainable development in
            China, and then presents a pilot program of stakeholder
            dialogue recently developed in China -- the community
            environmental roundtables. Community leaders organize
            roundtable dialogues where representatives from government
            agencies, companies and the local residents exchange their
            views toward certain environmental issues they are facing
            and discuss possible ways to resolve the issues. Informal
            agreements are reached during the dialogues and implemented
            after them. This community roundtable dialogue strategy has
            been piloted in dozens of Chinese municipalities, addressing
            various environmental issues. A survey of dialogue
            participants shows that significant impacts have been
            generated on environmental protection, community management,
            as well as social and institutional development at the
            community level. Mutual understanding and trust among the
            government, companies, and local citizens are enhanced,
            environmental and social conflicts are reduced, and the
            public performance of various parties has been improved.
            This approach is expected to help solve other conflicts and
            public governance issues in China as well. The potential
            challenges of institutionalizing such a program in China are
            also discussed in the paper.
Financial development and survival
            of African agri-food exports
This paper investigates the link between
            export survival of agri-food products and financial
            development. It tests the hypothesis that financial
            development differentially affects the survival of exports
            across products based on their need of external finance. The
            authors test whether exports of products that are relatively
            more reliant on external capital survive longer when
            initiated in more financially developed countries. The
            results suggest that agri-food products that require more
            external finance indeed sustain longer in foreign markets if
            the exporting country is more financially developed.
Tastes, castes, and culture : the
            influence of society on preferences
Economists have traditionally treated
            preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to
            be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people
            face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained
            exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible
            alternatives. Here the authors argue that the opposition to
            explaining behavioural changes in terms of preference
            changes is ill-founded, that the psychological properties of
            preferences render them susceptible to direct social
            influences, and that the impact of "society" on
            preferences is likely to have important economic and social consequences.
Learning versus stealing : how
            Important are market-share -- reallocations to India's
            productivity growth
Recent trade theory emphasizes the role
            of market-share reallocations across firms
            ("stealing") in driving productivity growth, while
            the older literature focused on average productivity
            improvements ("learning"). The authors use
            comprehensive, firm-level data from India's organized
            manufacturing sector to show that market-share reallocations
            did play an important role in aggregate productivity gains
            immediately following the start of India's trade
            reforms in 1991. However, aggregate productivity gains
            during the overall period from 1985 to 2004 were driven
            largely by improvements in average productivity, which can
            be attributed to India's trade liberalization and FDI reforms.
More than you can handle :
            decentralization and spending ability of Peruvian municipalities
In the past three decades, emerging
            countries have gone through extensive decentralization
            reforms. Yet, there are no studies assessing quantitatively
            the relative importance of various factors known to affect
            the success of decentralization. This paper builds on a
            comprehensive dataset the authors constructed for Peru,
            which merges municipal fiscal accounts with information
            about municipalities' characteristics such as
            population, poverty, education, and local politics. The
            paper then analyzes the leading factors affecting the
            ability of municipalities to execute the allocated budget
            using complementary methodologies, from least squares to
            quantile regression analyses. According to the existing
            literature and the Peruvian context, the analysis divides
            these factors into four categories: the budget size and
            allocation process; local capacity; local needs; and
            political economy constraints. Although all four factors
            affect decentralization, the largest determinant of spending
            ability is the adequacy of the budget with respect to local
            capacity. The results confirm the need for decentralization
            to be implemented gradually over time in parallel with
            strong capacity building efforts.
The impact of emigration on source
            country wages : evidence from the Republic of Moldova
Thousands of Moldovans emigrated for
            work abroad over the last few years following nearly a
            decade of economic stagnation in their home country. At
            about 30 percent of the labor force, Moldova's emigrant
            population is in relative terms among the largest in the
            world. This study uses a unique household survey to examine
            the impact of emigration on wages in Moldova. The authors
            find a positive and significant impact of emigration on
            wages and the result is robust to the use of alternative
            samples and specifications. The size of the emigration
            coefficient varies depending on the sample and model
            specification, but the baseline result suggests that, on
            average, a 10 percent increase in the emigration rate is
            associated with 3.2 percent increase in wages. At the same
            time, there is evidence of significant differences across
            economic sectors in the estimated effect of emigration on
            wages. The authors speculate and provide some evidence that
            offsetting changes in labor demand, as revealed by
            information on employment growth by sector, may help explain
            some of the heterogeneity.
Valuing water quality improvement in
            China : a case study of lake Puzhehei in Yunnan province
While polluted surface water is
            encountered across most of China, few economic valuation
            studies have been conducted on water quality changes.
            Limited information about the economic values associated
            with those potential water quality improvements or
            deteriorations is a disadvantage for making proper choices
            in water pollution control and clean-up activities. This
            paper reports an economic valuation study conducted in
            Yunnan, China, which aims to estimate the total value of a
            real investment project to improve the water quality of Lake
            Puzhehei by one grade level. Located in Qiubei County, which
            is far from large cities, the lake has been experiencing
            fast water quality deterioration in the past years. A
            conservative estimation strategy shows that on average a
            household located in Qiubei County is willing to pay about
            30 yuan per month continuously for 5 years for water quality
            improvement, equivalent roughly to 3 percent of household
            income. The elasticity of willingness-to-pay with respect to
            income is estimated to be 0.21. The economic rate of return
            of the proposed project is estimated to be 18 percent,
            indicating a strong demand and high efficiency of investment
            in water quality improvement in China. This study also
            demonstrates that previous knowledge about water quality
            changes and the project may have a significant positive
            impact on people's valuation, and that the interviewer
            effect on valuation can be negative.
Gross capital flows : dynamics and crises
This paper analyzes the joint behavior
            of international capital flows by foreign and domestic
            agents -- gross capital flows -- over the business cycle and
            during financial crises. The authors show that gross capital
            flows are very large and volatile, especially relative to
            net capital flows. When foreigners invest in a country,
            domestic agents tend to invest abroad, and vice versa. Gross
            capital flows are also pro-cyclical, with foreigners
            investing more in the country and domestic agents investing
            more abroad during expansions. During crises, especially
            during severe ones, there is retrenchment, that is, a
            reduction in both capital inflows by foreigners and capital
            outflows by domestic agents. This evidence sheds light on
            the nature of shocks driving capital flows and helps
            discriminate among existing theories. The findings seem
            consistent with shocks that affect foreign and domestic
            agents asymmetrically, such as sovereign risk and asymmetric information.
Macroprudential regulation of credit
            booms and busts : the experience of the National Bank of the
            Republic of Macedonia
This paper provides an overview of the
            macroprudential measures undertaken by the National Bank of
            the Republic of Macedonia to prevent further deterioration
            of the systemic risk and to promote resilience of the
            banking system. The measures were generally aimed at
            addressing the time dimension of the systemic risk and were
            intended to protect the banking system against the increase
            of credit risk arising from the credit boom. The paper also
            outlines the future challenges facing financial regulation
            and supervision, as well as the most important quantitative
            and qualitative impacts of the utilized macroprudential measures.
Credit growth and financial
            stability in the Czech Republic
The Czech Republic had experienced a
            credit boom similar to those in other converging economies
            in the pre-crisis years. Nevertheless, the consequences of
            this credit boom were limited as was the impact of the
            global crisis on domestic financial institutions. This paper
            describes the developments in the Czech banking sector and
            explains how the tough macroeconomic environment in the
            Czech Republic acted as a strong tool of macroprudential
            policy. It concludes that although it is difficult to tame
            credit booms in small converging economies, a concerted set
            of microprudential and macroprudential measures, including
            monetary and fiscal ones, may ensure some success.
Financial-stability challenges in
            European emerging-market countries
This paper examines the
            financial-stability challenges that will most likely be
            faced by European emerging-market countries in adapting to
            the post-crises environment, including the new
            financial-stability architecture and the other remaining
            weaknesses revealed by the global and European crises. The
            paper first reviews the pre-crisis financial-stability
            architectures in Europe and across the globe and then
            identifies the key weaknesses revealed by the global crisis.
            It then describes the micro and macro-prudential components
            of the new European System of Financial Supervision and some
            of its design limitations (and only briefly mentions reforms
            designed to deal with sovereign debt problems). The paper
            then identifies ten key areas where there are remaining
            challenges of implementation and additional reforms: six
            areas pertaining to all countries in Europe as well as the
            other major financial centers and four areas more germane to
            emerging-market countries in Europe. In discussing these ten
            areas, the paper tries to differentiate the relative
            challenges faced by categories of emerging-market countries,
            and their possible links to the excessive build-up of
            vulnerabilities in the pre-crisis period as a potential
            source of lessons for policy going forward.
The "resource curse" in
            MENA political transitions, resource wealth, economic
            shocks, and conflict risk
The recent political upheavals in the
            Middle East and North Africa region have exposed growing
            concerns about conflict risk, political stability, and
            reform prospects across its societies. Given the prevalence
            of oil and gas resource endowments in the region, which a
            voluminous literature suggests can be associated with
            adverse development consequences, this paper examines the
            interplay between their associated rents and political
            economy trajectories. The contribution of the paper is
            threefold: first, to examine the quantitative evidence of
            violent conflict in the region since 1960; second, to
            provide a nuanced review of the regional case study
            literature on the relationship between resource endowments,
            political stability, and conflict risk; and third, to assess
            how prospective political transitions have implications for
            the World Bank Group's work in the region on public
            sector management and private sector development. The
            authors find that resources and regimes have intersected to
            provide stability and limited violent conflict in the
            region, but that these development patterns have yielded a
            set of policy choices and development patterns that are
            proving increasingly brittle and unsustainable. A major
            institutional challenge for reforms will be to consolidate a
            requisite degree of inter-temporal credibility and stability
            in these regimes, while expanding inclusiveness in
            state-society relations.
The impact of recall periods on
            reported morbidity and health seeking behavior
Between 2000 and 2002, the authors
            followed 1621 individuals in Delhi, India using a
            combination of weekly and monthly-recall health
            questionnaires. In 2008, they augmented these data with
            another 8 weeks of surveys during which households were
            experimentally allocated to surveys with different recall
            periods in the second half of the survey. This paper shows
            that the length of the recall period had a large impact on
            reported morbidity, doctor visits, time spent sick, whether
            at least one day of work/school was lost due to sickness,
            and the reported use of self-medication. The effects are
            more pronounced among the poor than the rich. In one
            example, differential recall effects across income groups
            reverse the sign of the gradient between doctor visits and
            per-capita expenditures such that the poor use health care
            providers more than the rich in the weekly recall surveys
            but less in monthly recall surveys. The authors hypothesize
            that illnesses -- especially among the poor -- are no longer
            perceived as "extraordinary events" but have
            become part of "normal" life. They discuss the
            implications of these results for health survey methodology,
            and the economic interpretation of sickness in poor populations.
Political economy of the petroleum
            sector in Nigeria
The relatively slow pace of
            Nigeria's development has often been attributed to the
            phenomenon of the resource curse whereby the nature of the
            state as a "rentier" dilutes accountability for
            development and political actors are able to manipulate
            institutions to sustain poor governance. The impact of the
            political elite's resource-control and allocation of
            revenues on core democratic mechanisms is central to
            understand the obstacles to development and governance
            failure.  Given that problems of petroleum sector governance
            are extremely entrenched in Nigeria, the key question is
            whether and how it is possible to get out of a poor
            equilibrium after fifty years of oil production. This paper
            uses a political economy perspective to analyze the
            governance weaknesses along the petroleum sector value chain
            and attempts to establish the links between challenges in
            sector regulation and the following major political and
            economic attributes: (i) strong executive control on
            petroleum governance in a political environment of weak
            checks and balances; (ii) regulatory and operating roles
            bundled into one institution, thereby creating conflict of
            interest; and (iii) manipulation of elections and political
            appointments. The restoration of democratic government has
            helped improve transparency and management of oil revenue
            and reforms at the federal level and proposed reforms of the
            petroleum sector hold much promise. At the same time, the
            judiciary has started to restore confidence that it will
            serve as a check and balance on the executive and the
            electoral process. Yet, these reforms are fragile and need
            to be deepened and institutionalized. They must be addressed
            not as purely technocratic matters but as issues of
            political economy and vested interests that must, through
            regulation and reform, be aligned with the public interest
            and a vision of Nigerian development.
Distributional implications of
            climate change in India
Global warming is expected to heavily
            impact agriculture, the dominant source of livelihood for
            the world's poor. Yet, little is known about the
            distributional implications of climate change at the
            sub-national level. Using a simple comparative statics
            framework, this paper analyzes how changes in the prices of
            land, labor, and food induced by modest temperature
            increases over the next three decades will affect
            household-level welfare in India. The authors predict a
            substantial fall in agricultural productivity, even allowing
            for farmer adaptation. Yet, this decline will not translate
            into a sharp drop in consumption for the majority of rural
            households, who derive their income largely from wage
            employment. Overall, the welfare costs of climate change
            fall disproportionately on the poor. This is true in urban
            as well as in rural areas, but, in the latter sector only
            after accounting for the effects of rising world cereal
            prices. Adaptation appears to primarily benefit the
            non-poor, since they own the lion's share of
            agricultural land. The results suggest that poverty in India
            will be roughly 3-4 percentage points higher after thirty
            years of rising temperatures than it would have been had
            this warming not occurred.