rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Exploring Accessibility to
            Employment Opportunities in African Cities : A First Benchmark
This paper presents an analysis of
            transit accessibility to employment for 11 African cities.
            The use of identical methodologies and similar data sets
            allows for the creation of the first benchmark to compare
            accessibility across urban areas in Africa through different
            metrics and visuals. The study shows how the spatial pattern
            of land use and transport systems perform in connecting
            people to employment opportunities in these various
            settings. This first comparable benchmark is achieved by
            overcoming two significant data hurdles that are common in
            many developing country cities and in Africa in particular:
            (i) the scarcity of information on the distribution of
            employment and (ii) the lack of information on transit
            routes and travel times. These data gaps are filled through
            a novel methodology to estimate the distribution of
            employment in urban areas (Employment Opportunity Areas) as
            well as a comprehensive mapping of informal transit
            networks. The analysis developed here can be replicated in
            different cities in the future. The computation of these
            baseline accessibility studies also opens up the possibility
            to assess the impacts of future transport investments and/or
            land use changes, through the use of counterfactual
            scenarios, which could assist decision makers in these
            cities. Finally, this analysis can serve as a demonstration
            that the computation of accessibility metrics is achievable,
            including in data scarce environments, and should be
            considered as a progress indicator for Sustainable
            Development Goal 11.2, which focuses on safe and affordable
            transport for all, including public transport.
A Novel Approach to the Automatic
            Designation of Predefined Census Enumeration Areas and
            Population Sampling Frames : A Case Study in Somalia
Enumeration areas are the operational
            geographic units for the collection, dissemination, and
            analysis of census data and are often used as a national
            sampling frame for various types of surveys. Traditionally,
            enumeration areas are created by manually digitizing small
            geographic units on high-resolution satellite imagery or
            physically walking the boundaries of units, both of which
            are highly time, cost, and labor intensive. In addition,
            creating enumeration areas requires considering the size of
            the population and area within each unit. This is an
            optimization problem that can best be solved by a computer.
            This paper, for the first time, produces an automatic
            designation of predefined census enumeration areas based on
            high-resolution gridded population and settlement data sets
            and using publicly available natural and administrative
            boundaries. This automated approach is compared with
            manually digitized enumeration areas that were created in
            urban areas in Mogadishu and Hargeisa for the United Nations
            Population Estimation Survey for Somalia in 2014. The
            automatically generated enumeration areas are consistent
            with standard enumeration areas, including having
            identifiable boundaries to field teams on the ground, and
            appropriate sizing and population for coverage by an
            enumerator. Furthermore, the automated urban enumeration
            areas have no gaps. The paper extends this work to rural
            Somalia, for which no records exist of previous enumeration
            area demarcations.  This work shows the time, labor, and
            cost-saving value of automated enumeration area delineation
            and points to the potential for broadly available tools that
            are suitable for low-income and data-poor settings but
            applicable to potentially wider contexts.
Reducing Hunger with Payments for
            Ecosystem Services (PES) : Experimental Evidence from
            Burkina Faso
Does financial compensation for
            providing environmental conservation, improve the food
            security of the rural poor in the drylands of Sub-Saharan
            Africa? This paper explores this question using data from a
            randomized controlled trial of a large scale reforestation
            implemented by the Government of Burkina Faso. Members of
            communities located around selected protected forests were
            invited to plant indigenous tree species on degraded areas,
            and to take care of their maintenance. The financial
            compensation they would receive depended on the number of
            trees still alive a year later. The vast majority of the
            community members participating in the project were farmers,
            and the timing of the payments coincided with the lean
            season, when most farmers were at risk of food insecurity.
            Compared with the control group, the project's
            participants' households reported 12 percent higher
            food consumption expenditures, and a reduction in moderate
            and severe food insecurity by 35 percent to 60 percent. The
            transfers received were spent mostly on cereals, meat, and
            pulses, with no evidence of increased consumption of
            temptation goods.
Reducing Hunger with Payments for
            Ecosystem Services (PES) : Experimental Evidence from
            Burkina Faso
Policy Research Working Paper 8974 Reducing Hunger with Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) Experimental Evidence from Burkina Faso _Guigonan Serge Adjognon Daan van Soest Jonas Guthoff_ Development Economics Development Impact Evaluation Group August 2019
Wading Out the Storm: The Role of
            Poverty in Exposure, Vulnerability and Resilience to Floods
            in Dar Es Salaam
Dar es Salaam is frequently affected by
            severe flooding causing destruction and impeding daily life
            of its 4.5 million inhabitants. The focus of this paper is
            on the role of poverty in the impact of floods on
            households, focusing on both direct (damage to or loss of
            assets or property) and indirect (losses involving health,
            infrastructure, labor, and education) impacts using
            household survey data. Poorer households are more likely to
            be affected by floods; directly affected households are more
            likely female-headed and have more insecure tenure
            arrangements; and indirectly affected households tend to
            have access to poorer quality infrastructure. Focusing on
            the floods of April 2018, affected households suffered
            losses of 23 percent of annual income on average.
            Surprisingly, poorer households are not over-represented
            among the households that lost the most - even in relation
            to their income, possibly because 77 percent of total losses
            were due to asset losses, with richer households having more
            valuable assets. Although indirect losses were relatively
            small, they had significant well-being effects for the
            affected households. It is estimated that households’ losses
            due to the April 2018 flood reached more than US$100
            million, representing between 2-4 percent of the gross
            domestic product of Dar es Salaam. Furthermore, poorer
            households were less likely to recover from flood exposure.
            The report finds that access to finance play an important
            role in recovery for households.
Shortening Supply Chains :
            Experimental Evidence from Fruit and Vegetable Vendors in Bogota
Small trading activities are a prevalent
            form of self-employment in developing countries, but their
            integration into supply value chains is not efficient,
            especially when it comes to perishable produce. This study
            tests a novel approach to improve their efficiency by
            reducing the time and cost of sourcing produce by
            aggregating purchases through the use of an app and
            centralized distribution system. Fruit and vegetable vendors
            in Bogotá currently travel most days to a central market to
            purchase produce, incurring substantial time and monetary
            costs. A social enterprise attempted to shorten the supply
            chain between farmers and vendors by aggregating orders from
            many small stores, sourcing directly from farmers, and
            delivering them to the stores. The introduction of this new
            service was randomized at the market block level. Initial
            interest was high and offering the service reduced travel
            time for users by almost two hours a week, reduced travel
            costs, and increased work-life balance for store owners.
            Firms offered the service saved an average of 6 to 8 percent
            on purchase costs, and although some of this passed through
            into lower prices for consumers, there was incomplete
            pass-through, so that markups rose. However, stores reduced
            their sales of products that were not originally offered by
            this new service, and their total sales and profits appear
            to have fallen in the short run, with service usage falling
            over time. The results highlight the potential for new
            technologies to solve firm coordination problems, offer a
            window into the nature of competition among small retailers,
            and point to the challenges in achieving economies of scale
            when disrupting centralized markets for multi-product firms.
Performance and Challenges of the
            Income Protection System for Older People in Ecuador
The purpose of this work is to analyze
            the performance of the Ecuadorian pension system, its
            challenges, and available policy options. Therefore, the
            study analyzes coverage, financing sufficiency, and
            sustainability indicators that were created based on
            information from the Encuesta Nacional de Empleo, Desempleo
            y Subempleo (National Employment, Unemployment and
            Underemployment Survey) that was carried out over 2003-16.
            Likewise, actuarial simulations are made by using the World
            Bank pension reform options simulation toolkit. The findings
            show that, although in the latest 13 years there has been
            coverage extension, resulting from an increase in reported
            employment and an extension of noncontributory pensions,
            current coverage is still insufficient. In addition to the
            challenge posed to coverage extension, in the medium term,
            population aging would exert some pressure on financial
            sustainability that, within the current framework, would
            imply a deficit trend starting in the mid-2030s. However,
            some public policy areas, parametric as well as structural,
            have been identified that, together with an extension of
            noncontributory coverage, may provide a more supportive and
            sustainable scheme.
The Extent of Engagement in Global
            Value Chains by Firms in Rwanda
Using administrative data for an
            exhaustive sample of formally registered firms, reveals that
            the engagement of Rwandan firms in global value chains
            (GVCs) is remarkably limited. The paper documents several
            patterns of firm-level exports and compares firm
            characteristics between exporters and non-exporters. It also
            illustrates which firm-level characteristics are good
            predictors for a variety of extensive margins of export and
            import activities. The analysis includes firms from three
            goods-producing sectors, agriculture, mining, and
            manufacturing, but focuses mostly on manufacturing firms.
            The results indicate large differences between small and
            large exporters in terms of export market participation,
            type of products exported, and destinations served. GVC
            engagement has increased over the 2008-2016 sample period,
            especially for manufacturing firms, but this is a slow
            process with frequent set-backs.
Industrialization on a Knife's
            Edge : Productivity, Labor Costs and the Rise of
            Manufacturing in Ethiopia
The latest push for industrialization in
            Ethiopia has attracted much academic and public interest.
            This paper assesses Ethiopia's competitiveness and
            attractiveness as an investment destination by comparing
            domestic productivity and input costs to a sample of
            manufacturing exporting countries.  The paper documents
            that, in a comparison with Kenya, India or Vietnam, the
            labor cost advantage of Ethiopian firms is more than offset
            by low productivity. However, Ethiopia appears competitive
            when compared to Bangladesh. Capital, firm size, or sectoral
            composition do not explain the low productivity of the
            Ethiopian manufacturing sector. Ethiopian firms, however,
            have worse management, particularly in the area of labor
            management. The paper concludes by discussing the potential
            for labor interventions to increase productivity and create
            the condition for further industrialization.
Gender Differences in Time Use :
            Allocating Time between the Market and the Household
Important progress toward gender
            equality has been made in the past decades, but inequalities
            linked to gender norms, stereotypes, and the unequal
            distribution of housework and childcare responsibilities
            persist. Lifetime events such as marriage and parenthood
            bring substantial changes in time use among women and men.
            This paper updates and reinforces the findings of previous
            studies by analyzing gender differences in the allocation of
            time among market work and unpaid domestic work. Results
            from the analysis of time use patterns in 19 countries of
            different income levels and from various regions suggest
            that women specialize in unpaid domestic and care work and
            men specialize in market work. The paper employs propensity
            score matching to assess the marriage and parenthood
            "penalty" on time use patterns over the lifecycle.
            The findings indicate that women of prime working age are
            the most penalized on a host of measures, including labor
            market participation, unpaid domestic work, and leisure
            time. Men are not necessarily penalized for, and sometimes
            benefit from, marriage or parenthood.
Turkey : An Empirical Assessment of
            the Determinants of the Current Account Balance
Turkey has moved rapidly from a current
            account that was relatively in balance up to the turn of the
            millennia, to sustaining relatively large current account
            deficits over the past 15 years. Using annual data from 1986
            to 2017 and a jackknife model-averaging estimator, the paper
            estimates the relationship between the current account
            balance and a set of determinants that are broadly
            consistent with the cross-country literature. These
            determinants include private sector credit, public
            expenditure, real exchange rate changes, gross domestic
            product growth relative to the rest of the world, trade
            openness, international oil prices, foreign direct
            investment levels, past net foreign assets, inflation
            volatility, and global levels of uncertainty. The analysis
            then decomposes the predicted current account balance for
            five-year periods to illustrate the factors that have driven
            the current account over time. Over 2003-07, a large current
            account deficit became established in Turkey, driven by an
            expansion of credit to households and rapid gross domestic
            product growth, coupled with improved macroeconomic
            stability that supported higher spending and therefore
            imports. Since then, the negative effect of household credit
            has abated, but was replaced in 2008-17 by an expansion of
            credit to the corporate sector as a driver of the current
            account deficit. The current account balance in Turkey is
            also found to be less persistent than is typically found in
            the cross-country literature, implying that it adjusts more
            rapidly in response to shocks.
Does Media Stimulate Reform Efforts
This paper investigates to what extent
            media impacts political decisions. A viable practical
            approach to test the relationship between mass media and
            political actions is through the use of the World Bank’s
            Doing Business data, specifically, by assessing local media
            coverage of Doing Business and implementation of business
            regulatory reforms. The tested hypothesis is that countries
            with higher media coverage of Doing Business tend to carry
            out more business regulatory reforms, assuming one- and
            two-year lags between media coverage and reform
            implementation. To achieve this objective, the study put
            together a comprehensive data set that encompasses
            country-specific local media coverage of the Doing Business
            report in 190 economies. The study finds that local media
            coverage of Doing Business has a significant influence on
            regulators’ actions. First, the analysis shows that the
            number of local media articles tends to increase the
            probability of whether a country does any reform. Second,
            countries with greater media coverage of Doing Business
            indicators tend to have higher numbers of implemented reforms.
Generating Gridded Agricultural
            Gross Domestic Product for Brazil : A Comparison of Methodologies
This paper examines two new methods to
            generate gridded agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
            and compares the results with a traditional method. In the
            case of Brazil, these two new methods of spatial
            disaggregation and cross-entropy outperform the prediction
            of agricultural GDP from the traditional method that
            distributes agricultural GDP using rural population. The
            paper finds that the best prediction method is spatial
            disaggregation using a regression approach for all the key
            crops and contributors to agricultural GDP. However, the
            issue of degrees of freedom is an important limiting factor,
            as the approach requires sufficient subnational data. The
            cross-entropy method with readily available spatially
            distributed crop, livestock, forest, and fish allocation far
            outperforms the traditional method, at least in the case of
            Brazil, and can operate with national- and/or
            subnational-level data.
Test Score Gap Robustness to Scaling
            : The Scale Transformation Command
Social scientists frequently rely on the
            cardinal comparability of test scores to assess achievement
            gaps between population subgroups and their evolution over
            time.  This approach has been criticized due to the ordinal
            nature of test scores and the sensibility of results to
            order-preserving transformations, which are theoretically
            plausible. Bond and Lang (2013) document the sensitivity of
            measured ability to scaling choices and develop a method to
            assess the robustness of changes in ability over time to
            scaling choices. This paper presents the scale
            transformation command, which expands the Bond and Lang
            method to more general cases and optimizes their algorithm
            to work with large data sets. The program assesses the
            robustness of an achievement gap between two subgroups to
            any arbitrary choice of scale by finding bounds for the
            original gap estimation. Additionally, the program finds
            scale transformations that are very likely and unlikely to
            benchmark against the results obtained. Finally, the program
            also allows the user to measure how much gap growth
            coefficients change when including controls in their specifications.
Innovative Learning Environments :
            The Role of Energy--Efficient Investments in Russian
            Preschool Education Facilities (A Case Study of the
            Khanty-Mansyisk Region)
This paper discusses an example of an
            early childhood development facility intervention in the
            Khanty-Mansyisk region of the Russian Federation and its
            potential to produce efficiency gains in the region and the
            country overall. The government of the region is introducing
            changes to the built environment of its early childhood
            development centers. The proposed new design is based on the
            concept of the learning environment as a third teacher. The
            smaller footprint of the new buildings will increase the
            amount of active space per child, and the new design will
            include energy efficiency measures. The economic impact of
            these measures will reduce operating costs throughout the
            lifecycle of the building and provide strong evidence to
            education policy makers in the rest of the region and the
            country as a whole in favor of child-centered, healthy, and
            energy efficient early childhood development infrastructure.