rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Earnings mobility and measurement
            error : a pseudo-panel approach
The degree of mobility in incomes is
            often seen as an important measure of the equality of
            opportunity in a society and of the flexibility and freedom
            of its labor market. But estimation of mobility using panel
            data is biased by the presence of measurement error and
            non-random attrition from the panel. This paper shows that
            dynamic pseudo-panel methods can be used to consistently
            estimate measures of absolute and conditional mobility in
            the presence of non-classical measurement errors. These
            methods are applied to data on earnings from a Mexican
            quarterly rotating panel. Absolute mobility in earnings is
            found to be very low in Mexico, suggesting that the high
            level of inequality found in the cross-section will persist
            over time. However, the paper finds conditional mobility to
            be high, so that households are able to recover quickly from
            earnings shocks. These findings suggest a role for policies
            which address underlying inequalities in earnings opportunities.
The poverty impacts of the Doha
            Round in Cameroon : the role of tax policy
The authors aim to assess the possible
            impacts of the Doha Round of negotiations on poverty in
            Cameroon. During the recent period of economic recovery,
            Cameroon enjoyed a sharp decline in poverty, with the
            headcount index falling from 53.3 percent of inhabitants in
            1996 to 40.2 percent in 2001, mostly due to economic growth
            rather than redistribution. Will the current trade
            negotiations under the Doha Round reinforce or curb this
            trend? They apply a computable general equilibrium (CGE)
            microsimulation model that involves 10,992 households in
            order to address this question. The authors find the Doha
            Round to be poverty-reducing for Cameroon. For the whole
            country, the estimate of the net number of people who are
            lifted out of poverty is 22,000 following this scenario.
            Further investigations indicate that more ambitious world
            trade liberalization leads to greater poverty alleviation at
            the national level, while Cameroon's domestic trade
            liberalization has adverse poverty and inequality
            impacts-despite giving rise to higher aggregate welfare.
            Under the Doha scenario, the cuts in Cameroon's tariffs
            are very small (the average tariff rate moves from 11.79
            percent in the base run to merely 11.66 percent) so that
            world trade liberalization effects on prices more than
            offset the adverse own liberalization effects in this
            scenario. If the rest of the world and Cameroon full trade
            liberalizations are combined, the adverse impacts of own
            liberalization outweigh the favorable outcomes of the world
            trade liberalization. The results suggest furthermore that
            the choice of tax replacement instrument can have an
            important bias in poverty impacts: poverty gets worse in the
            country case study when using an imperfect value-added tax
            instead of a neutral replacement tax to compensate lost
            tariff revenue, and gets even worse when using a consumption
            tax. Key reasons here are the supplementary distortions
            which are nil in case of a neutral tax and greatest in the
            case of a consumption tax. In addition, accompanying
            measures should be considered to avoid poverty increases in
            the framework of Economic Partnership Agreements currently
            in negotiation between African, Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP)
            countries and the European Union, which propose a drastic
            dismantlement of ACP tariffs over the next few years.
The poverty impacts of the Doha
            Round in Cameroon : the role of tax policy
WPS3746

# **The Poverty Impacts of the Doha Round in Cameroon:**

# **The Role of Tax Policy**

Christian Arnault Emini* John Cockburn** Bernard Decaluwé** Chapter 12 in _Poverty and the WTO: Impacts of the Doha Development Agenda_ , Thomas W.

Hertel and L. Alan Winters (eds.) forthcoming from the World Bank, Washington, DC.

## World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3746, October 2005

_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 view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at http://econ.worldbank.org._ The authors are grateful to Veronique Robichaud for her technical assistance, and to Nabil Annabi, Thomas Hertel, Patrick Osakwe and the participants at the Conference on “Putting Development Back into the Doha Agenda” held in The Hague, December 2-4, 2004, for their valuable comments.

_*CEREG (University of Yaoundé II, Cameroon) and CIRPEE (Université Laval, Quebec)._

> _** CIRPEE (Université Laval, Québec, Canada)_
The social impact of a WTO agreement
            in Indonesia
Indonesia experienced rapid growth and
            the expansion of the formal financial sector during the last
            quarter of the 20th century. Although this tendency was
            reversed by the shock of the financial crisis that spread
            throughout Asia in 1997 and 1998, macroeconomic stability
            has since then been restored, and poverty has been reduced
            to pre-crisis levels. Poverty reduction remains nevertheless
            a critical challenge for Indonesia with over 110 million
            people (53 percent of the population) living on less than $2
            a day. The objective of this study is to help identify ways
            in which the Doha Development Agenda might contribute to
            further poverty reduction in Indonesia. To provide a good
            technical basis for answering this question, the authors use
            an approach that combines a computable general equilibrium
            (CGE) model with a microsimulation model. This framework is
            designed to capture important channels through which
            macroeconomic shocks affect household incomes. It allows
            making recommendations on specific trade reform options as
            well as on complementary development policy reforms. The
            framework presented in this study generates detailed poverty
            outcomes of trade shocks. Given the magnitude of the shocks
            examined here and the structural features of the Indonesian
            economy, only the full liberalization scenario generates
            significant poverty changes. The authors examine their
            impact under alternative specifications of the functioning
            of labor markets. These alternative assumptions generate
            different results, all of which confirm that the impact of
            full liberalization on poverty would be beneficial, with
            wage and employment gains dominating the adverse food price
            changes that could hurt the poorest households. Two
            alternative tax replacement schemes are examined. While
            direct tax replacement appears to be more desirable in terms
            of efficiency gains and translates into higher poverty
            reduction, political and practical considerations could lead
            the Government of Indonesia to choose a replacement scheme
            through the adjustment of value-added tax rates across
            nonexempt sectors.
The impact of the strong euro on the
            real effective exchange rates of the two Francophone African
            CFA Zones
The author estimates the degree of
            misalignment of the CFA franc since the introduction of the
            euro in 1999. Using a relative purchasing power parity-based
            methodology, he develops a monthly panel time series dataset
            for both the Economic and Monetary Community of Central
            Africa (CEMAC) zone and the West African Economic and
            Monetary Union (UEMOA) zone to compute a trade-weighted real
            effective exchange rate indexed series from January 1999 to
            December 2004. The author's main finding is that the
            real effective exchange rate appreciated by close to 8
            percent in UEMOA and 7 percent in CEMAC, influenced by
            volatility in the euro-dollar bilateral exchange rate and
            conservative monetary policies in the two zones, resulting
            in a partial loss of competitiveness in export markets. The
            lower appreciation in Central Africa can be explained by
            lower inflation in CEMAC than in UEMOA and by the greater
            trade with higher inflation East Asian countries, partially
            offset by the peg to the dollar. However, the inclusion of
            "unrecorded trade" results in an appreciation of
            only 6 percent in the UEMOA zone and 6 percent in the CEMAC
            zone due to higher inflation in the two countries with
            unmonitored cross-border flows, Ghana and Nigeria. Using
            time series econometrics, an Engle-Granger two stage
            procedure for cointegration, and an error correction
            framework, a single equation modeling of the real exchange
            rate from 1970 to 2005 as a function of terms of trade,
            economic openness, aid inflows, and a dummy representing the
            1994 devaluation, the author finds little statistical
            evidence of a long-run equilibrium exchange rate that is a
            vector of economic fundamentals. The dummy explains most of
            the real exchange rate behavior in the two zones, while
            openness in UEMOA has contributed to an appreciation of the
            real effective exchange rate.
Spatial dynamics of labor markets in Brazil
There was substantial spatial variation
            in labor market outcomes in Brazil over the 1990s. In 2000,
            about one-fifth of workers lived in apparently economically
            stagnant municipios where real wages declined but employment
            increased faster than the national population growth rate.
            More than one-third lived in apparently dynamic municipios,
            experiencing both real wage growth and faster-than-average
            employment growth. These areas absorbed more than half of
            net employment growth over the period. To elucidate this
            spatial variation, the authors estimate spatial labor supply
            and demand equations describing wage and employment changes
            of Brazilian municipios. They use Conley's spatial GMM
            technique to allow for instrumental variable estimation in
            the presence of spatially autocorrelated errors. The main
            findings include: (1) a very strong influence of initial
            workforce educational levels on subsequent wage growth
            (controlling for possibly confounding variables such as
            remoteness and climate); (2) evidence of positive spillover
            effects of own-municipio growth onto neighbors' wage
            and employment levels; (3) an exodus from farming areas; (4)
            relatively elastic response of wages to an increase in labor
            supply; and (5) evidence of a local multiplier effect from
            government transfers.
The mix of international banks'
            foreign claims : determinants and implications
The authors analyze the determinants and
            implications for financial stability of the mix of
            international banks' claims countries receive. In
            particular, they distinguish between local claims, extended
            by international banks through their affiliates in a host
            (or claim recipient) country, and cross-border claims,
            booked from outside the host country, typically from
            banks' headquarters in their home countries. Using data
            on U.S., Spanish, and Italian banks' foreign claims
            across countries, the authors find that the share of local
            foreign claims is primarily driven by the degree of
            "freedom" in the host banking sector and by
            business opportunities in the local market. Entry
            requirements, startup and informational costs associated
            with international banking also play a role, but their
            influence is less robust. Finally, they find that the mix of
            international bank claims has implications for financial
            stability, since foreign claim volatility is lower in
            countries that receive a larger share of local claims.
Telecommunications and the World
            Trade Organization : the case of Mexico
The U.S.-Mexico case (2002-04) was the
            first (and so far only) case of World Trade Organization
            (WTO) dispute resolution on telecommunications services and
            the first on services only. The findings of the Panel
            charged with settling the dispute contain interpretations of
            the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS),
            especially its Annex on Telecommunications and the Reference
            Paper that sets regulatory principles. Although these
            interpretations strictly apply only to the case examined,
            they have implications for other countries and sectors and
            beyond trade law. The following are some of the findings.
            Telecommunications services originated in one country and
            terminated in another country are cross-border services
            under the GATS irrespective of whether the same service
            provider is present in both countries. The accounting rate
            regime, whereby operators share revenue from international
            services provided jointly, is subject to the discipline of
            cost-based interconnection for countries that have adopted
            the Reference Paper. Uniform settlement rates and
            proportional return are anticompetitive practices under the
            Reference Paper even when they are mandated by law. The lack
            of implementing regulations does not excuse the country from
            meeting its commitments under the GATS. Mexico and the
            United States, although not in full agreement with the
            Panel, did not appeal. An agreed plan to address the
            underlying legal and regulatory issues was successfully
            implemented in July 2005.
Evaluating training programs for
            small and medium enterprises : lessons from Mexico
While there have been numerous impact
            evaluations of unemployed individuals participating in
            retraining programs or in programs to foster
            self-employment, impact evaluations of enterprises
            benefiting from training programs for small and medium
            enterprises (SMEs) are rare. The authors reevaluate the
            impact of the largest SME program in Mexico, the
            Comprehensive Quality and Modernization Program (CIMO). They
            show that compared to the control group, CIMO firms
            increased investments in worker training, had higher rates
            of capacity utilization, and were more likely to adopt
            quality practices. The evidence also suggests that these
            improved intermediate outcomes were associated with
            increased productivity growth among CIMO participants,
            impacts that were especially strong throughout the 1991-93
            period. However, the productivity impacts of CIMO are not
            apparent in the 1993-95 period.
Evaluating training programs for
            small and medium enterprises : lessons from Mexico
WPS3760

# **Evaluating Training Programs for Small and Medium Enterprises**

## **Lessons from Mexico**

**Hong Tan Gladys Lopez Acevedo**

### World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3760, November 2005

_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 view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at http://econ.worldbank.org._

**The World Bank World Bank Institute and Latin America and the Caribbean Region Poverty Sector Unit**
Is skill-biased technological change
            here yet Evidence from Indian manufacturing in the 1990
Most high and middle-income countries
            showed symptoms of skill-biased technological change in the
            1980s. India-a low income country-did not, perhaps because
            India's traditionally controlled economy may have
            limited the transfer of technologies from abroad. However
            the economy underwent a sharp reform and a manufacturing
            boom in the 1990s, raising the possibility that technology
            absorption may have accelerated during the past decade. The
            authors investigate the hypothesis that skill-biased
            technological change did in fact arrive in India in the
            1990s using panel data disaggregated by industry and state
            from the Annual Survey of Industry. These data confirm that
            while the 1980s were a period of falling skills demand, the
            1990s showed generally rising demand for skills, with
            variation across states. They find that increased output and
            capital-skill complementarity appear to be the best
            explanations of skill upgrading in the 1990s. Skill
            upgrading did not occur in the same set of industries in
            India as it did in other countries, suggesting that
            increased demand for skills in Indian manufacturing is not
            due to the international diffusion of recent vintages of
            skill-biased technologies.
Is skill-biased technological change
            here yet Evidence from Indian manufacturing in the 1990
# WPS3761

## **IS SKILL–BIASED TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE HERE YET? Evidence from Indian Manufacturing in the 1990s**<sup>**1**</sup>

Eli Berman Rohini Somanathan Hong W. Tan<sup>2</sup> World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3761, November 2005 _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 view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at http://econ.worldbank.org._ The World Bank World Bank Institute Finance and Private Sector Division 1
Poverty traps and nonlinear income
            dynamics with measurement error and individual heterogeneity
Theories of poverty traps stand in sharp
            contrast to the view that anybody can make it through hard
            work and thrift. However, empirical detection of poverty
            traps is complicated by the lack of long panels, measurement
            error, and attrition. This paper shows how dynamic
            pseudo-panel methods can overcome these difficulties,
            allowing estimation of non-linear income dynamics and
            testing for the presence of poverty traps. The paper
            explicitly allows for individual heterogeneity in income
            dynamics to account for the possibility that particular
            groups of individuals may face traps, even if the average
            individual does not. These methods are used to examine the
            evidence for a poverty trap in labor earnings, income, and
            expenditure in Mexico and are compared to panel data
            estimates from a short rotating panel. The results do find
            evidence of nonlinearities in household income dynamics and
            demonstrate large bias in the panel data estimates.
            Nevertheless, even after allowing for heterogeneity and
            accounting for measurement error, the paper finds no
            evidence of the existence of a poverty trap for any group in
            the sample.
Privatization : trends and recent developments
This paper takes stock of recent
            privatization trends, examines the extent to which
            government ownership is still prevalent in developing
            countries, and summarizes emerging issues for state
            enterprise reform going forward. Between 1990 and 2003, 120
            developing countries carried out nearly 8,000 privatization
            transactions and raised $410 billion in privatization
            revenues. Privatization activity peaked in 1997 and dropped
            off in the late 1990s and, while still at overall low
            levels, is slowly creeping back. While there are a large
            number of studies assessing the impact of privatization on
            enterprise performance and overall welfare, there are no
            systematic data on the extent to which privatization has
            changed the role of state enterprises in the economy.
            Anecdotal evidence suggests that the state's role has
            been substantially reduced in Eastern and Central Europe and
            in certain countries in Latin America. But available
            evidence also suggests that, despite a long track record of
            privatization, government ownership in state enterprises is
            still widely prevalent in some regions and countries, and in
            certain sectors in virtually all regions. The paper shows
            that the costs of not reforming state enterprises are high
            and that continued efforts need to be made to improve their
            performance by improving privatization policies and
            institutions; adopting more of a case-by-case approach for
            complex sectors and countries; and exposing state
            enterprises to market discipline through new private entry
            and exit of unviable firms and improvements in their
            corporate governance.