rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Product relatedness and firm exports
            in China
This paper proposes the first evaluation
            using micro-level data of the gains from the consistency of
            activities with a local comparative advantage. Using
            firm-level data from Chinese customs over the 2000-6 period,
            the study investigates the relationship between the export
            performance of firms and how their products relate to local
            comparative advantage. The key indicator measures the
            density of the links between a product and the local product
            space. Hence, it combines information on the intrinsic
            relatedness of a good with information on the local pattern
            of specialization. The results indicate that exports grow
            faster for goods that have denser links with those currently
            produced in the firm's locality. The density of links
            between products seems to yield export-enhancing spillovers.
            However, this positive effect of product relatedness on
            export performance is mainly limited to ordinary trade
            activities and domestic firms. It is also stronger for more
            productive firms, suggesting that spillover diffusion may be
            hindered by insufficient absorptive capacity.
Green industrial policies : when and how
Green industrial policies can be defined
            as industrial policies with an environmental goal -- or more
            precisely, as sector-targeted policies that affect the
            economic production structure with the aim of generating
            environmental benefits. This paper provides a framework to
            assess their desirability depending on the effectiveness and
            political acceptability of price instruments. The main
            messages are the following. (i) Greening growth processes to
            the extent and with the speed needed cannot be done without
            industrial policies, even if prices can be adjusted to
            reflect environmental objectives. (ii) "Sunrise"
            green industrial policies are needed because they support
            the development of critical new technologies and sectors,
            bring down costs, and allow for reduced emissions in the
            short term even in the absence of carbon pricing. (iii)
            "Sunset" green industrial policies and trade
            policies may be needed in conjunction with safety nets to
            make carbon pricing politically or socially acceptable. They
            can help mitigate the impact of a carbon price on
            competitiveness and unemployment and smooth the transition
            by helping industries adjust to the new conditions. (iv)
            Green or not, industrial policy requires carefully
            navigating the twin dangers of market and governance
            failure. The viability of supported technologies and sectors
            is difficult to assess through a market-test given their
            dependence on continued environmental policies or pricing --
            such as a carbon price. Particular attention must be paid to
            avoid potential unintended negative effects, such as rebound
            effects (especially if prices are inappropriate),
            misallocation of capital, or capture and rent-seeking behaviors.
Creating and using fiscal space for
            accelerated development in Liberia
This paper presents simulations for the
            period 2013-2030 of measures that permit increased spending
            on infrastructure and human development, the priority areas
            in Liberia's 2013-2017 "Agenda for
            Transformation" and for its national vision, Liberia
            Rising 2030. The simulations are carried out with a Liberian
            version of MAMS (Maquette for Millennium Development Goals
            Simulations), a Computable General Equilibrium model.
            According to the results, among the key sources of fiscal
            space, foreign grants generate the best outcomes followed by
            improved government allocative efficiency. Taxes tend to
            involve trade-offs since they reduce resources for private
            consumption and investment, both of which tend to contribute
            to stronger macro and Millennium Development Goals
            performance. Increased foreign borrowing is less attractive
            since, in order to make a substantial difference, it would
            quickly add to the foreign debt, making the economy more
            crisis-prone and less flexible. The preferred balance
            between different uses of fiscal space depends on payoffs
            from different government functions, typically unknown or
            only appearing with a lag. Under the parameters used in the
            simulations, determined in light of fragmentary evidence,
            the outcomes were marginally stronger under a balanced
            approach with scaling up of both infrastructure and human
            development services. Balanced expansion may also contribute
            to efficiency and be easier for political reasons. A final
            finding is that it is possible to consider fiscal space
            issues in isolation from the mining sector: simulations
            suggest that the marginal effects of creating additional
            fiscal space are very similar irrespective of the level of
            mining export prices.
Benchmarking container port
            technical efficiency in Latin America and the Caribbean : a
            stochastic frontier analysis
This paper presents a technical
            efficiency analysis of container ports in Latin America and
            the Caribbean using an input-oriented stochastic frontier
            model. A 10-year panel is employed with data on container
            throughput, port terminal area, length of berths, and number
            of cranes available in 67 ports. The model has three
            innovations with respect to the available literature: (i) it
            treats ship-to-shore gantry cranes and mobile cranes
            separately, in order to account for the higher productivity
            of the former; (ii) a binary variable is introduced for
            ports using ships' cranes, treated as an additional
            source of port productivity; and (iii) a binary variable is
            used for ports operating as transshipment hubs. The
            associated parameters are highly significant in the
            production function. The results show an improvement in the
            average technical efficiency of ports in the Latin America
            and the Caribbean region from 36 percent to 50 percent
            between 1999 and 2009; the best-performing port in 2009
            achieved a technical efficiency of 94 percent with respect
            to the frontier. The paper also studies possible
            determinants of port technical efficiency, such as
            ownership, corruption, terminal purpose, income per capita,
            and location. The results reveal positive, but weak,
            associations between technical efficiency with landlord
            ports and with lower corruption levels; stronger results are
            observed between technical efficiency with specialized
            container terminals and with average income.
Benchmarking container port
            technical efficiency in Latin America and the Caribbean : a
            stochastic frontier analysis
WPS6680 Policy Research Working Paper 6680 Benchmarking Container Port Technical Efficiency in Latin America and the Caribbean A Stochastic Frontier Analysis _Javier Morales Sarriera Gonzalo Araya Tomas Serebrisky Cecilia Briceño-Garmendía Jordan Schwartz_ The World Bank Latin America and the Caribbean Region Sustainable Development Department October 2013
Banking in Africa
This paper takes stock of the current
            state of banking systems across Sub-Saharan Africa and
            discusses recent developments including innovations that
            might help Africa leapfrog more traditional banking models.
            Using an array of different data, the paper documents that
            African banking systems are shallow but stable. African
            banks are well capitalized and over-liquid, but lend less to
            the private sector than banks in non-African developing
            countries. African enterprises and households are less
            likely to use financial services than their peers in other
            developing countries. The paper also describes a number of
            financial innovations across the continent that can help
            overcome different barriers to financial inclusion and have
            helped to expand the bankable and the banked population.
Can free provision reduce demand for
            public services evidence from Kenyan education
In 2003 Kenya abolished user fees in all
            government primary schools. Analysis of household survey
            data shows this policy contributed to a shift in demand away
            from free schools, where net enrollment stagnated after
            2003, toward fee-charging private schools, where both
            enrollment and fee levels grew rapidly after 2003. These
            shifts had mixed distributional consequences.  Enrollment by
            poorer households increased, but segregation between
            socio-economic groups also increased. The shift in demand
            toward private schooling was driven by more affluent
            households who (i) paid higher ex ante fees and thus
            experienced a larger reduction in school funding, and (ii)
            appear to have exited public schools partially in reaction
            to increased enrollment by poorer children.
The organization of political
            parties and the politics of bureaucratic reform
Bureaucratic reform is a priority of
            donor organizations, including the World Bank, but is
            notoriously difficult to implement. In many countries,
            politicians have little interest in the basic financial and
            personnel management systems that are essential to political
            oversight of bureaucratic performance. To explain this, this
            paper presents a new perspective on the political economy of
            bureaucracy. Politicians in some countries belong to parties
            that are organized to allow party members to act
            collectively to limit leader shirking. This is particularly
            the case with programmatic parties. Such politicians have
            stronger incentives to pursue public policies that require a
            well-functioning public administration. Novel evidence
            offers robust support for this argument. From a sample of
            439 World Bank public sector reform loans in 109 countries,
            the paper finds that public sector reforms are more likely
            to succeed in countries with programmatic political parties.
Market facilitation by local
            government and firm efficiency : evidence from China
This paper uses data from a large survey
            of Chinese firms to investigate whether local government
            efforts to facilitate market development improve firm
            efficiency. Both government provision of information about
            products, markets, and innovation and government assistance
            in arranging loans are positively associated with firm
            efficiency. Those private firms with weak access to and
            knowledge of financial, input, and product markets benefit
            most from such assistance. These patterns are robust across
            multiple estimation approaches. Case studies of specific
            types of market facilitation by local governments are
            provided. The evidence is consistent with the notion that
            government facilitation can help some firms overcome market
            failures in the early stages of development. The paper
            argues that changing fiscal dynamics that forced local
            governments to become increasingly self-reliant in
            generating revenue and a government promotion system based
            on local economic performance compelled these efforts at
            market facilitation.
Unilateral facilitation does not
            raise international labor migration from the Philippines
Significant income gains from migrating
            from poorer to richer countries have motivated unilateral
            (source-country) policies facilitating labor emigration.
            However, their effectiveness is unknown. The authors
            conducted a large-scale randomized experiment in the
            Philippines testing the impact of unilaterally facilitating
            international labor migration. The most intensive treatment
            doubled the rate of job offers but had no identifiable
            effect on international labor migration. Even the highest
            overseas job-search rate that was induced (22 percent) falls
            far short of the share initially expressing interest in
            migrating (34 percent). The paper concludes that unilateral
            migration facilitation will at most induce a trickle, not a
            flood, of additional emigration.
Trade facilitation and country size
It is argued that compared with large
            countries, small countries rely more on trade and therefore
            they are more likely to adopt liberal trading policies. The
            present paper extends this idea beyond the conventional
            trade openness measures by analyzing the relationship
            between country size and the number of documents required to
            export and import, a measure of trade facilitation. Three
            important results follow. First, trade facilitation does
            improve as country size becomes smaller; that is, small
            countries perform better than large countries in terms of
            trade facilitation. Second, the relationship between country
            size and trade facilitation is nonlinear, much stronger for
            the relatively small than the large countries. Third,
            contrary to what existing studies might suggest, the
            relationship between country size and trade facilitation
            does not appear to be driven by the fact that small
            countries trade more as a proportion of their gross domestic
            product than the large countries.
Coping with urban fiscal stress
            around the world
The economic recession, the end of
            stimulus funding and central government cutbacks, rising
            social costs and aging, and the need for infrastructure
            upgrading for urbanization are putting enormous fiscal
            stress on cities. The financing capacity of municipalities
            is greatly affected because of the decline in the tax base,
            expenditure pressures, and growing and more expensive debt.
            Today's urban fiscal crisis is similar to that
            experienced in the 1970s, but the growing urbanization in
            the world and massive increase in municipal access to
            financial markets create a new context. This paper surveys
            three important topics related to the urban fiscal crisis in
            developed and developing countries: How do cities finance
            themselves? When they have access to financial markets,
            should city managers use loans, own revenues or
            private-public partnerships to pay for municipal
            expenditures? And what are the remedies to municipal fiscal
            crises in case of insolvency?
Incentives and teacher effort :
            further evidence from a developing country
Few would contest that teachers are a
            very important determinant of whether students learn in
            school and how to improve teacher performance has been the
            focus of much policy debate in rich and poor countries. This
            paper examines how incentives, both pecuniary and
            non-pecuniary, correlate with teacher effort. Using school
            survey data from Lao PDR, we estimate new measures of
            teacher effort including the number of hours that teachers
            spend preparing for classes and teacher provision of private
            tutoring classes outside of class hours. Estimation results
            indicate that higher teacher effort is associated with
            non-pecuniary incentives such as greater teacher autonomy
            over teaching materials, and monitoring mechanism such as
            the existence of an active parent-teacher association and
            ability of school principals to dismiss teachers.
            Methodologically, this paper provides a detailed derivation
            of a simultaneous OLS-probit model with school random
            effects that can jointly estimate teacher work hours and
            tutoring provision.
Strengthening economic rights and
            women's occupational choice : the impact of reforming
            Ethiopia's family law
This paper evaluates the impact of
            strengthening legal rights on the types of economic
            opportunities that are pursued.  Ethiopia changed its family
            law, requiring both spouses' consent in the
            administration of marital property, removing the ability of
            a spouse to deny permission for the other to work outside
            the home, and raising women's minimum age of marriage.
            Thus both access to resources and the removal of
            restrictions on employment served to strengthen women's
            bargaining position within the household and their ability
            to pursue economic opportunities. Although this reform now
            applies nationally, it was initially rolled out in the two
            chartered cities and three of Ethiopia's nine regions.
            Using nationally representative household surveys from just
            prior to the reform and five years later allows for a
            difference-in-difference estimation of the reform's
            impact.  The analysis finds that women were relatively more
            likely to work in occupations that require work outside the
            home, employ more educated workers, and in paid and
            full-time jobs where the reform had been enacted,
            controlling for time and location effects.  As the relative
            increase in women's participation in these activities
            was 15-24 percent higher in areas where the reform was
            carried out, the magnitude of the impact is significant too.
Attracting foreign direct investment
            : what can South Asia's lack of success teach other
            developing countries
Like many other developing countries,
            South Asian nations have been experiencing increased foreign
            direct investment inflows over the past decade as developing
            countries get a larger share of cross-border investments
            that were once sent to developed countries. Nonetheless,
            South Asia's inflows of foreign direct investment
            remain the lowest relative to gross domestic product among
            developing country regions. Why are South Asia's
            foreign direct investment inflows so low and what lessons
            can be drawn for developing countries as a whole?  The
            analysis in this paper uses a novel empirical model that
            accounts for possible trends in convergence in the ratio of
            foreign direct investment to gross domestic product between
            countries and cross-sectional data for 78 countries from
            2000 to 2011. The sample contains 52 developing countries.
            The analysis finds that two key factors are at work -- high
            overall regulatory restrictions on foreign direct investment
            and specific restrictions placed on doing business with
            other countries. These factors include overall trade
            restrictiveness, which reduces the benefits to cross-border
            investments, and weak institutions to protect foreign
            investors and facilitate investment. Nonetheless, the
            potential for faster growth in intra- and inter-regional
            foreign direct investment flows is significant. The main
            factors leading to this conclusion are South Asia's
            current low levels of foreign direct investment, the many
            unexploited opportunities for embodied knowledge transfer,
            and supply-chain linkages.  The overall lessons for
            developing countries are that liberalizing policy
            constraints in both trade and foreign investment, keeping
            corporate tax rates modest, and improving governance and
            transparency could help to substantially improve foreign
            direct investment flows.
Functional literacy, heterogeneity
            and the returns to schooling : multi-country evidence
Little is known about which of the
            skills that make up workers' human capital contribute
            to higher earnings. Past empirical evidence suggest that
            most of the return to schooling is generated by effects or
            correlates unrelated to the skills measured by the available
            tests. This paper uses the International Adult Literacy and
            the Adult Literacy and Life Skills surveys to obtain
            multi-country estimates of the components of the return to
            schooling. The results reveal considerable heterogeneity and
            a dichotomy between two groups of countries. For a subgroup
            of educationally advanced countries, nearly half of the
            return to schooling can be attributed to labor
            marker-relevant functional literacy skills associated with
            schooling, while for a subgroup of less educationally
            advanced countries, such skills account for just over 20
            percent of the return to schooling, while the return to
            schooling mostly reflects the signaling value of schooling.
Framework for the reform of
            education systems and planning for quality
In 2000, the goal that, by 2015, all
            children will have access to, and complete, free and
            compulsory primary education of good quality, was set.
            Despite the progress in terms of student enrollment and
            completion, the quality of learning produced in developing
            countries remains poor. Existing models of education
            production are inadequate for informing education reform for
            the purpose of improving school quality, as measured by
            student learning. Thus, a broader and more integrated
            approach of policy making is put forward. Building on theory
            and empirical evidence on what works, the paper puts forward
            a framework for improving the quality of education. The
            framework includes six factors: (1) assessment; (2)
            autonomy; (3) accountability; (4) attention to teachers; (5)
            attention to early childhood development; and (6) attention
            to culture. Going forward, there is a need to develop a
            system of international quality benchmarks drawing on a
            larger body of evidence. Most importantly, more empirical
            evidence from impact evaluations is needed.