rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Successful nutrition programs in
            Africa : what makes them work
Little of the literature on nutrition
            between 1960 and the 1980s included assessments of effective
            nutrition programs. In this important study, the author
            focuses on factors associated with successful nutrition
            programs in Africa. This report concentrates on summarizing
            the information received from a mail survey, telephone and
            personal interviews and in-depth case studies. Seven factors
            were mentioned repeatedly as important to the success of
            nutrition programs: (a) community participation; (b) program
            flexibility; (c) institutional structure; (d) recovery of
            recurrent costs; (e) multifaceted program activities; (f)
            well-trained and qualified staff; and (g) infrastructure.
            The author concludes that these findings are preliminary and
            require further validation.
What causes differences in
            achievement in Zimbabwe's secondary schools
The authors found that students who
            attended high-fee-paying (trust) schools, elite urban
            governments schools, and mission schools scored better in
            mathematics and English achievement than did students in the
            less-well-endowed government schools and those established
            by local councils.  Much of the variation in the student
            achievement was attributable to the schools the student
            attended.  Examination results were higher in schools with a
            high proportion of trained teachers, with a good supply of
            textbooks, and with a stable faculty (high teacher
            retention).  But once researcher control for these factors,
            contrary to expectations, some underendowed local council
            and government schools are more effective at boosting
            achievement than their counterparts with more resources.
            So, textbooks and teachers are important in raising
            achievement, but more research is needed into what
            characteristics differentiate high-achieving schools from
            low-achieving schools.
Should price reform proceed
            gradually or in a "big bang"
Should countries such as Poland or the
            USSR move toward more flexible prices gradually or in a
            "big bang?" Why is it that governments committed
            to eventual price flexibility so often seem to be unable to
            let go of "temporary" controls? Why, after price
            increases early in a program of price controls, does output
            often rise at the same time that shortages seem to increase?
            The author argues that intertemporal speculation, hoarding,
            and the political economy of price control help explain
            these puzzles. The interaction between shortages and the
            political vulnerability of reformist governments to early
            perceptions of failure is a strong argument against
            gradualism in the decontrol of prices.
Regulation and deregulation in
            industrial countries : some lessons for LDCs
The United States' experience with
            antitrust and with directive regulation in the rail,
            trucking, airline, and telephone sectors offers useful
            lessons for developing countries. The experience highlights
            the realities both of market failure and of the difficulties
            of implementing regulation to control it - and reveals that
            imperfect regulation may be no better than imperfect
            competition. Antitrust measures to regulate price fixing and
            to require approval for mergers above some threshold level
            of industrial concentration are straightforward to implement
            and have provided some gains in economic welfare. The
            regulation of price discrimination, restrictive vertical
            practices, and predatory pricing is administratively more
            difficult, and the potential gains are less clearly evident.
            In many situations, import competition can be an efficient
            alternative. Direct regulation of rail, trucking, airline,
            and telephone was frequently inefficient, the regulatory
            apparatus often lost sight of its original objectives, and
            the regulators were captured by the regulated. For rail and
            trucking regulation, the regulatory outcome probably was
            worse than it would have been under laissez-faire.
The determination of wages in
            socialist economies : some microfoundations
The authors address the issue of how
            wages are determined in socialist economies.  They
            distinguish between different types of economic regimes, in
            terms of how much decentralization is permitted and how
            extensive are market-based features or rules.  Wages are
            commonly assumed to be exogenously given in socialist
            systems, regardless of regime.  They show that this
            assumption is not warranted, given the use of
            incentive-based systems in these economies.  Both the
            classical planned economy and the partially reformed regime
            face the problem of motivating workers in the absence of
            monitoring and of such conventional penalties as
            unemployment.  The authors show that in cooperative settings
            the outcome can be lower productivity than desired and that
            in noncooperative settings the outcome can be higher wages
            than warranted.  They interpret the partially reformed
            socialist economy as an attmept to refine the motivational
            structure by introducing a manager between the planner and
            the workers.  They also present a preliminary treatment of
            an economic regime such as the one that existed in Poland
            after January 1990, where market-based rules almost fully
            predominate.  Their objective is to provide coherent
            foundations for wage equations that can be tested
            empirically.  The authors show wages to be strongly
            associated with prices and rather less strongly associated
            with productivity.
Lending for learning : twenty years
            of World Bank support for basic education
The author traces the development of the
            World Bank's lending policies for education and draws
            lessons and recommendations from the Bank's experience.
            The Bank's lending for primary education has supported
            four main objectives : expanding educational opportunities,
            improving instructional quality, increasing efficiency, and
            strengthening management in the sector. In nonformal
            education, Bank lending has supported the goals of
            developing practical skills, promoting basic literacy, and
            building income generating skills.  The author argues that
            Bank support to education has been most successful when it
            provides for in-depth analysis of subsectoral issues,
            concentrates on a few objectives, sustains its committment
            to these objectives over a long period, and delegates to the
            borrowing country the responsibility for sectoral analysis,
            policy formulation, and project development and
            implementation.  From his review of Bank experience in
            supporting basic education, the author makes five principal
            recommendations for designing education projects : 1)
            support the locally determined processes that drive
            educational development; 2) invest in the most
            cost-effective inputs; 3) test carefully how an investment
            package works in a particular setting and monitor outcomes
            constantly; 4) strengthen the institutional capacity for
            national and regional strategic planning and management; and
            5) design projects to allow a flexible response to a wide
            variety of local needs and unplanned events.
Brazilian frozen concentrated orange
            juice : the folly of unfair trade cases
Brazil dominates the international
            market for frozen concentrated orange juice. By the mid
            1980s, Brazil accounted for about 80 percent of world
            exports of the product. Brazilian producers supplied more
            than 94 percent of U.S. imports of the product in the 1980s
            and accounted for 50 percent of sales in the U.S. market.
            The dynamism of the Brazilian industry is attributable to
            Brazil's comparative advantage and to the series of
            climate shocks to Florida's orange groves. In Brazil,
            the industry is largely in the hands of four large firms,
            who sell 80 percent of their products to a few large U.S.
            firms, at significant price rebates. Florida orange growers,
            beset by import competition and climate shocks, turned to
            unfair trade laws for protection in the early 1980s, relying
            on them increasingly as a substitute for safeguard actions.
            Because of Brazil's interventionist trade policies, the
            prevailing U.S. belief was that any Brazilian industry was
            guilty of unfair trade practices until proven innocent.
            Unfair trade actions have had a particularly negative impact
            on their supposed beneficiary, the U.S. citrus industry. The
            antidumping cases were used to protect orange growers at the
            expense of U.S. juice processors. Their effect has been to
            strengthen the oligopoly-oligopsony relationship between
            Brazilian producers and their U.S. partners, further
            hindering the competition prospects in the world market for
            frozen concentrated orange juice.
The terms-of-trade effects from the
            elimination of state trading in Soviet - Hungarian trade
Economists have debated whether the
            Soviet Union subsidized trade with its Eastern European
            partners in the Council of Mutual Economic Assistance
            (CMEA). Effective January 1, 1991, former CMEA members
            implemented their "switchover" decision to convert
            to world market prices denominated in convertible currency.
            The switchover dramatically reduced the role of "state
            trading" by permitting direct enterprise to enterprise
            transactions denominated and settled in convertible
            currency. The authors made an intensive study of the trading
            relationship between Hungary and the Soviet Union as a case
            study on the terms-of-trade issue. A detailed empirical
            investigation of prices in Soviet-Hungarian trade before and
            after the switchover provides some indication of the
            terms-of-trade loss that Hungary is likely to suffer as a
            result of the switchover of its trading relationship with
            the Soviet Union. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the
            authors find that the majority of Hungarian firms exporting
            to the Soviet Union have been disfavored by the combination
            of the payments mechanism, exchange rate, tax and subsidy
            policies. The experience of early 1991 suggests a
            significant decline is likely to occur in Soviet imports
            from Hungary during the remainder of the year. A variety of
            problems account for the decline, many of them specific to
            internal conditions in the Soviet Union.
Report on adjustment lending II :
            lessons for Eastern Europe
The Bank introduced adjustment lending
            in 1979 to help member countries restructure their economies
            to create conditions conducive to equitable growth while
            maintaining a sustainable balance of payments. A review of
            the experience of other nations with adjustment problems may
            provide useful knowledge for Eastern Europe as the region
            attempts to make the transition to market economies and to
            integrate with the world economy. Reforms such as those that
            Eastern Europe is initiating now have little precedent in
            recent economic history. Evidence from other countries
            indicates that output levels are likely to suffer in the
            early years of massive economic restructuring. Governments
            must be aware of these adjustment costs, which represent an
            investment in a better economic system. Recent experience in
            other countries suggests several constructive steps that
            Eastern European countries can take to ease their transition
            to market economies. These include : 1) placing a high
            priority on dealing with high open or repressed inflation
            and other manifestations of severe macroeconomic imbalances;
            2) removing restrictions on labor mobility and on the exit
            and entry of firms at the same pace as they liberalize
            trade; and 3) moving early to create markets for working
            capital financing - with appropriate mechanisms to assess
            credit risks - in order to encourage economic restructuring.
Can debt-reduction policies restore
            investment and economic growth in highly indebted countries
            A macroeconomic framework applied to Argentina
The author devised an analytical
            framework to examine the implications of debt-reduction
            operations for the economy of a typical middle-income,
            heavily indebted country. A major finding is that
            debt-reduction policies can succeed in restoring investment
            and, consequently, growth in debtor countries. Such policies
            combine a liquidity effect resulting from the reduction in
            debt service payments and an incentive effect resulting from
            debt relief. A simulation designed to analyze the effects of
            debt-reduction policies in Argentina showed that a 30
            percent reduction in debt had a 2.4 percent positive effect
            on the level of GDP in the first year and a 5.4 percent
            effect in the fifth year. The model identifies various
            channels through which a reduction in foreign debt
            influences investment. The analysis includes a calculation
            of the debt-reduction and liquidity combination that
            maximizes Argentina's GDP. The purpose was to determine
            the best use of a potential loan to the country from
            international financial institutions. The empirical results
            suggest the tentative conclusion that a Brady Initiative
            debt and debt service reduction operation could establish
            the basis for sustainable growth in Argentina, if combined
            with appropriate domestic policies.
Bank holding companies : a better
            structure for conducting universal banking
Banking systems in many countries have
            become increasingly unstable in recent years.  At the same
            time, market forces have pushed banks to expand into a
            variety of universal banking activities without impairing
            the stability of the banking system.  The basic bank holding
            company proposal contains three major elements : first, any
            bank that wants to operate as a universal bank must first
            form a holding company and then conduct all riskier
            activities in holding company units rather than directly in
            the bank.  The bank would continue to engage in traditional
            banking activities that involve the usual level of risk;
            second, the government would develop laws and regulations
            designed as safeguards to insulate the bank from any
            financial problems that might occur in holding company
            affiliates of the bank; and lastly bank regulatory
            authorities would impose little or no supervision on holding
            company units.  The use of the bank holding company device
            to conduct universal banking activities can promise
            important public benefits including : 1) a sounder
            commercial banking system; 2) less banking regulation; and
            3) greater competitive equality between banking and
            nonbanking units.
Trends in social indicators and
            social sector financing
Over the past three decades, per capita
            GDP has increased worldwide.  The authors examine whether
            this has resulted in better quality of life in developing
            countries.  This paper documents the evolution of social
            indicators (health, education, nutrition), private
            consumption, and government expenditure on the social
            sectors.  They conclude that developing countries made
            uneven progress in the quality of life in the period under
            study.  Key findings include:  (a) health indicators showed
            stable improvements in all regions, but Africa's rates
            were the slowest; (b) of all social indicators, education
            made the greatest gains, however, net enrollment ratios
            actually decreased in Africa in the 1980s; (c) while
            developing nations as a group enjoyed improved indices of
            undernutrition in 1965-85, the degree of undernutrition
            worsened in more than one-third of sub-Saharan African
            countries; (d) Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean
            also saw declines in average per capita private consumption
            during the 1980s; and (e) the share of total government
            expenditure on health remained stable in all regions, but
            that of education declined in Africa, South Asia, and Latin
            America and the Caribbean.  The authors also note that any
            effort to assess trends is severely hampered by lack of
            information.  The quality of existing data is not
            systematically trustworthy, and there are many gaps.
The development of the Colombian cut
            flower industry
The Colombian cut flower industry is one
            of the major development success stories of the last 20
            years, growing from small beginnings in 1966 to the
            world's second largest exporter of cut flowers in 1980.
            This rapid development has made the cut flower industry a
            major contributor to the Colombian economy. Cut flowers are
            now the nation's leading nontraditional export and
            fourth largest earner of foreign exchange after coffee,
            petroleum, and bananas. The industry has also become a major
            employer of low-skill, largely female labor drawn from the
            low-income areas surrounding Bogota. In 1989, the industry
            employed more than 70,000 workers and generated another
            50,000 jobs in such ancillary industries as packaging and
            transportation. Evolution of the Colombian cut flower
            industry illustrates how the market system enables a society
            to coordinate its economic activities in the most effective
            way. Historically, cut flower production moved from the
            eastern United States to the western and southern states and
            then to Colombia. In both cases, development of air
            transportation made markets accessible within hours from
            anywhere in the world. This freed growers to shift
            production to areas with favorable land and labor costs as
            well as good growing climate. The U.S. economy has also
            benefited from the employment opportunities created by the
            necessity to handle and care for the increased volume of
            flowers at the wholesale and retail level.
VERs under imperfect competition and
            foreign direct investment : a case study of the U.S. - Japan
            auto VER
In 1981, the United States (U.S.)
            induced the Japanese to agree to a voluntary export
            restraint (VER) on their export of autos to the U.S. The
            countries negotiated the VER against a backdrop of falling
            U.S. production and employment in the auto industry and
            several legislative attempts to curb Japanese imports. The
            Japanese agreed to limit their U.S. exports to 1.68 million
            vehicles a year for a three year period. The study found
            that U.S. auto dealers captured some of the rents from the
            VER and that increasing returns to scale in the U.S. auto
            industry imply that protection has an effect on scale
            efficiency. From 1984 to 1987, seven Japanese auto
            manufacturing firms established assembly plants in the U.S.
            The authors argue that the VER generated pure profits in the
            domestic auto industry which induced the Japanese producers
            to enter the U.S. domestic market through foreign direct
            investment. Their entry then largely eliminated the
            abnormally high profits. The study sequentially introduces
            into the model the important elements of the auto industry
            and the VER, thereby isolating the impact of each on the
            estimates of the welfare effects of the VER. The impact of
            foreign direct investment was to lower the costs of the VER
            because the greater entry into domestic auto manufacturing
            resulted in a lower quota rent premium for foreign autos.
Microeconomic distortions : static
            losses and their effect on the efficiency of investment
In the past decade the developing
            countries have tried much harder to achieve macroeconomic
            stability than they have to eliminate inefficiencies from
            microeconomic distortions. The author has pursued a
            relatively new line of inquiry in examining measurement of
            the social income losses induced by the reduction of the
            investment efficiency caused by trade distortions. Empirical
            findings of the study suggest a strong negative effect of
            trade distortions on the social efficiency of investment.
            The social income losses caused by the reduced investment
            efficiency are considerable. Countries that have a moderate
            investment ratio (about 20 percent of GDP) can experience
            social income losses in excess of 18 percent in 30 years, if
            tariffs are about 50 percent. This study confirms earlier
            findings about the relatively modest efficiency losses
            caused by the independent effects of specific distortions.
            The author also found a significant synergistic effect when
            trade and wage distortions coexist and lead to larger
            efficiency losses. The key issue is the combination of price
            distortions favoring capital-intensive activity with wage
            distortions that cause unemployment and underemployment.
            This pattern is pervasive in developing countries.