rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Education : past, present and future
            global challenges
Progress in educational development in
            the world since 1900 has been slow and uneven between
            countries. Providing basic education for all children in
            developing countries has been and remains an unmet challenge
            of governments and international organizations alike. This
            is in sharp contrast to recent findings in the economics
            literature on the catalytic role of human capital for
            economic growth and social development in general. Using a
            newly constructed matched data set on education and national
            accounts in the 1950 to 2010 period, this paper estimates
            the loss of income and equity associated with not having a
            faster rate of human capital accumulation, using alternative
            methodologies and specific country examples. Such loss is
            projected backward (1900-1950) and forward (2010-2050) using
            plausible assumptions regarding what countries could have
            done in the past or may do in the future to accelerate human
            capital formation. The findings suggest that the welfare
            loss in terms of per capita income conservatively ranges
            from about 7 to 10 percent. Improved educational attainment
            is also shown to have an effect in reducing income inequality.
Water and sanitation to reduce child
            mortality : the impact and cost of water and sanitation infrastructure
Using household survey data, this paper
            estimates the mortality impact of improved water and
            sanitation access in order to evaluate the potential
            contribution of water and sanitation investment toward
            achieving the child mortality targets defined in Millennium
            Development Goal 4. The authors find that the average
            mortality reduction achievable by investment in water and
            sanitation infrastructure is 25 deaths per 1,000 children
            born across countries, a difference that accounts for about
            40 percent of the gap between current child mortality rates
            and the 2015 target set in the Millennium Development Goals.
            According to the estimates, full household coverage with
            water and sanitation infrastructure could lead to a total
            reduction of 2.2 million child deaths per year in the
            developing world. Combining this analysis with cost data for
            water and sanitation infrastructure, the authors estimate
            that the average cost per life-year saved ranges between 65
            and 80 percent of developing countries' annual gross
            domestic product per capita. The results suggest that
            investment in water and sanitation is a highly
            cost-effective policy option, even when only the mortality
            benefits are taken into consideration. Taking into account
            the additional expected benefits, such as reduced morbidity,
            time spending, and environmental hazards, would further
            increase the benefit-cost ratio.
Bank ownership and performance in
            the Middle East and North Africa region
Although both domestic and foreign
            private banks have gained ground in MENA in recent years,
            state banks continue to play an important role in many
            countries. Using a MENA bank-level panel dataset for the
            period 2001-08, the paper contributes to the empirical
            literature by documenting recent ownership trends and
            assessing the role of ownership and bank performance in MENA
            while accounting for key bank characteristics such as size
            and balance sheet composition. The paper analyzes headline
            performance indicators as well as their key drivers and
            finds that state banks exhibit significantly weaker
            performance, despite their larger size. This result is
            mainly driven by a larger holding of government securities,
            higher costs due to larger staffing numbers, and larger loan
            loss provisions reflecting weaker asset quality. The results
            reflect both operational inefficiencies and policy mandates.
            The paper also provides a detailed performance analysis of
            foreign and listed banks. Foreign banks are fairly new in
            MENA, yet perform on par with domestic banks despite their
            smaller size and higher investment costs. Listed banks
            exhibit superior performance driven by higher interest
            margins even in the face of higher costs associated with
            listing. Taken together, the results do not reject the
            development role for state banks, but do show that their
            intervention comes at a cost. As such, there is scope to
            reduce the share of state banks in some countries and to
            clarify the mandates, improve the governance, and strengthen
            the operational efficiency of most state banks in MENA.
The poverty impacts of climate
            change : a review of the evidence
Climate change is believed to represent
            a serious challenge to poverty reduction efforts around the
            globe. This paper conducts an up-to-date review of three
            main strands of the literature analyzing the poverty impacts
            of climate change : (i) economy-wide growth models
            incorporating climate change impacts to work out consistent
            scenarios for how climate change might affect the path of
            poverty over the next decades; (ii) studies focusing on the
            poverty impacts of climate change in the agricultural
            sector; and (iii) studies exploring how past climate
            variability impacts poverty. The analysis finds that the
            majority of the estimates of the poverty impacts tend to
            ignore the effect of aggregate economic growth on poverty
            and household welfare. The empirical evidence available to
            date suggests that climate change will slow the pace of
            global poverty reduction, but the expected poverty impact
            will be relatively modest and far from reversing the major
            decline in poverty that is expected to occur over the next
            40 years as a result of continued economic growth. The
            studies focusing on the sector-specific channels of impacts
            of climate change suggest that the estimated impacts of
            climate change on agricultural yields are generally a poor
            predictor of the poverty impacts of climate change at the
            national level due to heterogeneity in the ability of
            households to adapt. It also appears that the impacts of
            climate change are generally regressive, that is, they fall
            more heavily on the poor than the rich.
How integrated is SADC trends in
            intra-regional and extra-regional trade flows and policy
Do Southern African Development
            Community countries trade enough with each other and with
            the rest of the world? Although its share of world trade has
            fallen, appropriate benchmarking shows that, controlling for
            gross domestic product and other characteristics, Southern
            African Development Community countries have experienced an
            increase in openness that is comparable to other developing
            countries. Once market size and geography are taken into
            account, trade between Southern African Development
            Community countries is actually high. Southern African
            Development Community countries also trade more products
            with each other than they do with the rest of the world. In
            this sense, and contrary to stylized fears, the Southern
            African Development Community region is quite integrated.
            Although the Southern African Development Community has
            reduced its tariffs, the structure remains complex and could
            be lowered on intermediates. Other impediments make it
            costly and difficult to move goods, but are at levels that
            are comparable with countries at similar levels of
            development. Although this may be surprising, there is still
            scope for improvement and the disadvantageous geography of
            the Southern African Development Community makes it
            important for other trade impediments to be reduced.
Does it matter who you sign with
            comparing the impacts of north-south and south-south trade
            agreements on bilateral trade
Free trade agreements lead to a rise in
            bilateral trade regardless of whether the signatories are
            developed or developing countries. Furthermore, the
            percentage increase in bilateral trade is higher for
            South-South agreements than for North-South agreements. In
            this paper, the results are robust across a number of
            gravity model specifications in which the analysis controls
            for the endogeneity of free trade agreements (with bilateral
            fixed effects) and also takes account of multilateral
            resistance in both estimation (with country-time fixed
            effects) and comparative statics (analytically). The
            analytical model shows that multilateral resistance dampens
            the impact of free trade agreements on trade by less in
            South-South agreements than in North-South agreements, which
            accentuates the difference implied by the gravity model
            coefficients, and that this difference gets larger as the
            number of signatories rises. For example, allowing for lags
            and multilateral resistance, a four-country North-South
            agreement raises bilateral trade by 53 percent while the
            analogous South-South impact is 107 percent.
OECD imports : diversification of
            suppliers and quality search
This paper explores the evolution of
            OECD imports over time, measuring their concentration across
            origin countries at the product level. The authors find
            evidence of diversification followed, in the very last years
            of the sample period (post-2000), by a slight
            re-concentration. This re-concentration is entirely
            explained by the growing importance of Chinese products in
            OECD imports. They also find evidence of relatively more
            volatile concentration levels for goods with high quality
            heterogeneity, with temporary phases of re-concentration on
            goods with higher unit values. Both findings are consistent
            with a simple model of adverse selection and quality
            screening by OECD buyers predicting that diversification
            happens by "bouts" rather than continuously, with
            temporary re-concentration on higher-quality suppliers.
Measuring true sales and
            underreporting with matched firm-level survey and tax-office data
This paper uses firm-level survey data
            matched with official tax records to estimate the unobserved
            true sales of formal firms in Mongolia. Taking into account
            firm-level incentives to comply with taxes and a production
            function technology linking unobserved true sales with
            observable firm-level production characteristics, the
            authors derive a multiple-indicators, multiple-causes model
            predicting unobserved true sales. Comparing predicted true
            sales with sales reported to the tax office, the analysis
            finds that 38.6 percent of firm-level sales are
            underreported. It also finds evidence that firm-level survey
            data suffer from significant underreporting. Finally, the
            paper compares this approach with two alternative approaches
            to measuring underreporting by firms.
Market integration in China
Over the last three decades,
            China's product, labor, and capital markets have become
            gradually more integrated within its borders, although
            integration has been significantly slower for capital
            markets. There remains a significant urban-rural divide, and
            Chinese cities tend to be under-sized by international
            standards. China has also integrated globally, initially
            through the Special Economic Zones on the coast as launching
            grounds to connect with world markets, and subsequently
            through the accession to the World Trade Organization. For
            future policy considerations, this paper argues that its
            economic production needs to be spatially concentrated, and
            its social services need to be spread out to the interior to
            ensure harmonious development and domestic integration
            (through inclusive rural-urban transformations and effective
            territorial development).
How can we learn whether firm
            policies are working in africa challenges (and solutions)
            for experiments and structural models
Firm productivity is low in African
            countries, prompting governments to try a number of active
            policies to improve it. Yet despite the millions of dollars
            spent on these policies, we are far from a situation where
            we know whether many of them are yielding the desired
            payoffs. This paper establishes some basic facts about the
            number and heterogeneity of firms in different sub-Saharan
            African countries and discusses their implications for
            experimental and structural approaches towards trying to
            estimate firm policy impacts. It shows that the typical firm
            program such as a matching grant scheme or business training
            program involves only 100 to 300 firms, which are often very
            heterogeneous in terms of employment and sales levels. As a
            result, standard experimental designs will lack any power to
            detect reasonable sized treatment impacts, while structural
            models which assume common production technologies and few
            missing markets will be ill-suited to capture the key
            constraints firms face. Nevertheless, the author suggests a
            way forward which involves focusing on a more homogeneous
            sub-sample of firms and collecting a lot more data on them
            than is typically collected.
Empirical analysis of corporate
            savings in Egypt
This paper presents empirical analysis
            of corporate savings in Egypt using two datasets: a survey
            of small and medium enterprises and data from accounting
            statements for the largest publicly traded firms. There are
            two main findings. First, larger firms invest more (they
            have more physical saving) and have greater access to
            finance than smaller firms. Second, despite the financial
            deepening, the use of credit products has been declining
            during the past decade. The study reaffirms the importance
            of improving access to financial services in Egypt and
            points out the need for more research.  In addition,
            policies aimed at reducing macroeconomic volatility are
            likely to result in increased investment and growth in Egypt.
Evaluating public per-student
            subsidies to low-cost private schools :
            regression-discontinuity evidence from Pakistan
This study estimates the causal effects
            of a public per-student subsidy program targeted at low-cost
            private schools in Pakistan on student enrollment and
            schooling inputs. Program entry is ultimately conditional on
            achieving a minimum stipulated student pass rate (cutoff) in
            a standardized academic test. This mechanism for treatment
            assignment allows the application of
            regression-discontinuity (RD) methods to estimate program
            impacts at the cutoff. Data on two rounds of entry test
            takers (phase 3 and phase 4) are used. Modeling the entry
            process of phase-4 test takers as a sharp RD design, the
            authors find evidence of large positive impacts on the
            number of students, teachers, classrooms, and blackboards.
            Modeling the entry process of phase-3 test takers as a
            partially-fuzzy RD design given treatment crossovers, they
            do not find evidence of significant program impacts on
            outcomes of interest. The latter finding is likely due to
            weak identification arising from a small jump in the
            probability of treatment at the cutoff.
Beyond baseline and follow-up : the
            case for more t in experiments
The vast majority of randomized
            experiments in economics rely on a single baseline and
            single follow-up survey. If multiple follow-ups are
            conducted, the reason is typically to examine the trajectory
            of impact effects, so that in effect only one follow-up
            round is being used to estimate each treatment effect of
            interest. While such a design is suitable for study of
            highly autocorrelated and relatively precisely measured
            outcomes in the health and education domains, this paper
            makes the case that it is unlikely to be optimal for
            measuring noisy and relatively less autocorrelated outcomes
            such as business profits, household incomes and
            expenditures, and episodic health outcomes. Taking multiple
            measurements of such outcomes at relatively short intervals
            allows the researcher to average out noise, increasing
            power. When the outcomes have low autocorrelation, it can
            make sense to do no baseline at all. Moreover, the author
            shows how for such outcomes, more power can be achieved with
            multiple follow-ups than allocating the same total sample
            size over a single follow-up and baseline. The analysis
            highlights the large gains in power from ANCOVA rather than
            difference-in-differences when autocorrelations are low and
            a baseline is taken. The paper discusses the issues involved
            in multiple measurements, and makes recommendations for the
            design of experiments and related non-experimental impact evaluations.
Employability and skill set of newly
            graduated engineers in India
Skill shortage remains one of the major
            constraints to continued growth of the Indian economy. This
            employer survey seeks to address this knowledge-gap by
            answering three questions: (i) Which skills do employers
            consider important when hiring new engineering graduates?
            (ii) How satisfied are employers with the skills of
            engineering graduates? and (iii) In which important skills
            are the engineers falling short? The results confirm a
            widespread dissatisfaction with the current graduates -- 64
            percent of employers hiring fresh engineering graduates are
            only somewhat satisfied with the quality of the new hires or
            worse. After classifying all skills by factor analysis, the
            authors find that employers perceive Soft Skills (Core
            Employability Skills and Communication Skills) to be very
            important. Skill gaps are particularly severe in the
            higher-order thinking skills ranked according to
            Bloom's taxonomy. In contrast, communication in English
            has the smallest skill gap, but remains one of the most
            demanded skills by the employers. Although employers across
            India asks for the same set of soft skills, their skill
            demands differ for Professional Skills across economic
            sectors, company sizes, and regions. These findings suggest
            that engineering education institutions should: (i) seek to
            improve the skill set of graduates; (ii) recognize the
            importance of Soft Skills, (iii) refocus the assessments,
            teaching-learning process, and curricula away from
            lower-order thinking skills, such as remembering and
            understanding, toward higher-order skills, such as analyzing
            and solving engineering problems, as well as creativity; and
            (iv) interact more with employers to understand the
            particular demand for skills in that region and sector.
Stimulating managerial capital in
            emerging markets : the impact of business and financial
            literacy for young entrepreneurs
Identifying the determinants of
            entrepreneurship is an important research and policy goal,
            especially in emerging market economies where lack of
            capital and supporting infrastructure often imposes
            stringent constraints on business growth. This paper studies
            the impact of a comprehensive business and financial
            literacy program on firm outcomes of young entrepreneurs in
            an emerging post-conflict economy, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
            The authors conduct a randomized control trial and find that
            while the training program did not influence business
            survival, it significantly improved business practices,
            investments, and loan terms for surviving businesses.
            Entrepreneurs with higher ex-ante financial literacy further
            exhibited some improvements in business performance and sales.