rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
generate lower yields, but when fertilizer and other inputs are provided, there is no difference across genders. In contrast, one study (Tiruneh et al., 2001) finds that in Ethiopia, female-headed households are less likely to adopt improved varieties (in this case, wheat). Additionally, a number of studies in Kenya and Zambia document the lower adoption of improved maize among female-headed households (Kumar, 1994; Saito, Mekonnen, and Spurling, 1994; Ouma, De Groote, and Owuor, 2006).

In cases in which there is lower female adoption of improved varieties, the main factors seem to be overall production constraints rather than norms with respect to women’s use of new technologies. A number of studies in Kenya<sup>15</sup> argue that women’s lower adoption of technology is due to lower access to land, labor, and credit and lower levels of education, which are related to market failures in these areas. A solution may be to provide a more complete package of support. For example, the study by Gilbert, Sakala, and Benson (2002) shows that providing technology together with inputs and extension seems effective.

# **_Technology—Extension and Other Agricultural Information Outreach_**<sup>**_16_**</sup>

In terms of cross-country data, the 1988–89 FAO survey of 97 countries found that 5 percent of extension resources were devoted to women, and only 15 percent of extension personnel were female (FAO, 1993). The fact that these are the most recent comprehensive data provides some evidence regarding the small amount of attention this subject receives.

However, the situation has likely improved since that survey. In terms of access to extension, recent figures come from a set of 2010 World Bank and IFPRI surveys in three countries. These surveys found that in Ethiopia, 20 percent of women compared with 27 percent of men had been visited by an extension agent. In Ghana, the figure was much 26
gregate TFP (Banerjee and Duflo, 2005; Hsieh and Klenow, 2009; Restuccia and Rogerson, 2008). These studies have shown that the dispersion in distortions across firms and sectors generates factor misallocation, and more so in developing than in advanced economies. In the particular case of Mexico, Busso et al. (2012) show that if workers reallocate from the informal to the formal sector by eliminating wedges, TFP increases by approximately 50%. Other studies have aimed to understand the main causes of the large levels of resource misallocation in developing countries. Some of the primary explanations consist of regulations, markups, and the wedges caused by the informal sector. Similarly, other papers such as Fajgelbaum et al. (2019) and Hsieh and Moretti (2019) have shown that state taxes and housing restrictions generate spatial misallocation in the US.

Third, my work also contributes to a strand of the international economics literature that studies gains from trade through the allocative efficiency channel. This literature was recently reviewed by Atkin and Khandelwal (2019), who discuss the role of distortions on the aggregate gains from market integration. Most of these articles have explored the response of markups to trade liberalization episodes or changes in infrastructure (Arkolakis et al., 2019; Asturias et al., 2016; Edmond et al., 2015; Holmes et al., 2014; Hornbeck and Rotemberg, 2019). Similar to my paper, some studies have analyzed the effect of intersectoral distortion on welfare (Świ ̧ecki, 2017), and others the effect of trade on informality (Dix Carneiro et al., 2018; McCaig and Pavcnik, 2018; McMillan and McCaig, 2019). While this literature focuses on trade reforms that affect labor demand, my paper examines the impact of commuting and urban trade on aggregate productivity.

Other studies, such as Moreno-Monroy and Posada (2018) and Suárez et al. (2016), have also explored the relationship between commuting and informality. They argue that the high commuting cost to a formal job faced by a large part of the population increases informality rates in developing countries. My paper investigates this relationship by providing empirical evidence on the relationship between informality and transit infrastructure. Moreover, through a quantitative model, it measures the economic impact of infrastructure on allocative efficiency by analyzing factor reallocation to the formal sector.

The rest of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 introduces the setting of my study in Mexico City and describes the transit shock. Section 3 presents the reduced-form evidence of the effect of commuting on informality. Section 4 develops an urban quantitative model with multiple sectors and intersectoral distortions. Section 5 estimates the main parameters of the model. Section 6 quantifies and decomposes the welfare gains from transit improvements and run other counterfactuals. Section 7 concludes.

6
|Change in share of provincial male manufacturing<br>workers between 2002 and 1998|-0.038<br>(0.066)||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|Share of hours of female manufacturing workers in-1||-0.472<sup>***</sup><br>(0.022)|||
|Change in share of provincial female manufacturing<br>workers between 2002 and 1998||0.113<br>(0.086)|||
|Share of hours of male service worker in-1|||-0.426<sup>***</sup><br>(0.014)||
|Change in share of provincial male service workers|||0.035||
|between 2002 and 1998|||(0.049)||
|Share of hours of female service worker-1||||-0.389<sup>***</sup><br>(0.011)|
|Change in share of provincial female service workers||||-0.022|
|between 2002 and 1998||||(0.053)|
|Constant|-0.059<sup>***</sup>|-0.059<sup>***</sup>|-0.050<sup>***</sup>|-0.029|
||(0.009)|(0.010)|(0.018)|(0.027)|
|_N_|18957|18957|18957|18957|
|adj._R_<sup>2</sup>|0.227|0.212|0.203|0.181|

Notes: - Standard errors in parentheses.<sup>*</sup> _p_ < 0.10,<sup>**</sup> _p_ < 0.05,<sup>***</sup> _p_ < 0.01

- Control variables are Household head (HH)’s ethnicity, HH age, HH gender, HH vocational education dummy, HH high school dummy, HH middle school dummy, HH primary school dummy, spouse vocational education dummy, spouse high school dummy, spouse middle school dummy, spouse primary school dummy, household size, and number of working age members. All of these household characteristics are reported in 2002. Standard errors are clustered at province level.

The result could be explained by the fact that the BTA most benefits female labor-intensive manufacturing sectors such as apparel, clothing and footwear. Female labor accounted for about 79 percent of total labor of those sectors in 2002. The finding has important welfare implications. On the one hand, females’ increasing economic empowerment in households could lead to improvement in children’s health and education (see Allendorf, 2007 and Menon et al, 2013 for example). On the other hand, female employment could take away mothers’ time from their children, which could have adverse effects on the children’s development. Nguyen et al (2017) find that in exposed provinces, families are 10 percent more likely to spend on health care of children aged 0-6, but school enrollment growth in these provinces is lower than the national average.

31
mechanism imposed on the payer of the tax. Some of the global tax proposals are regional, such as a proposed tax on currency transactions within the Euro area. Others are solidarity contributions of countries that voluntarily are implementing the tax, such as the Solidarity Levy on Airline Tickets. Recently, globally coordinated and nationally on a voluntary basis implemented taxes have been called “levies” or “solidarity levies” The 2 percent levy on carbon finance for the Adaptation Fund currently is an obligatory tax on the issuance of Certified Emissions Reduction under the Kyoto Protocol.

Global taxes deliver stable and predictable long-term funding to finance international development. Most global tax proposals are designed to raise additional financing and, at the same time, produce a “double dividend” by offsetting a global public bad.

Reading: Boadway 2005, Development Committee 2004, 2005, Frankman 1996, Mendez 1992, Technical Group on Innovative Financing Mechanisms 2004, Wachtel 2000, Zedillo and High-level Panel on Financing for Development 2001, Zee 2006 See also: Adaptation Fund Arms Trade Tax Aviation Tax Cap and Trade Carbon Tax Currency Tax Digital Solidarity Levy Solidarity Levy on Airline Taxes Solidarity Levies

# **Grant**

In development finance a grant is defined as a transfer made in cash, goods, or services for which no repayment is required.<sup>96</sup>

# **Green bonds**

Green bonds are six-year, Swedish kronor notes paying investors a 3.5 percent annual interest rate and raising funds at a spread of 0.25 percent over comparable-maturity Swedish government paper issued by IBRD. They enabled IBRD to raise funds at an attractive cost despite the challenging market environment. Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken (SEB) underwrote the issue and distributed mainly to Scandinavian institutional investors, who were attracted to the investment because the proceeds would be credited to a special account at IBRD that supports World Bank loan disbursements on qualifying climate change mitigation and adaptation projects. Green bonds are a form of socially responsible investing.

Further information: <u>http://treasury.worldbank.org/Services/Capital+Markets/News+for+Inv estors/GreenBond.html</u> See also: Sustainable Investing

> 96 OECD: http://stats.oecd.org/glossary/detail.asp?ID=1143.

72
In appendix Table A.3. we collate together estimates of firm death in developing countries from other literature. Figure A.1 then plots these alongside with our data and fitted quadratic. The firm death rates from other studies are all relatively close to the fitted quadratic, showing that results are generally consistent across a number of contexts. The one exception comes from the ten year death rates of Ghanaian manufacturing firms reported in Davies and Kerr (2015), which are much lower than our data would predict. Their death rates would look more similar if we assume that the more than 20 percent attrition comes from firms that die.

It may also be of interest to some readers to benchmark these death rates against those in the United States. The main source of firm dynamics data in the U.S. comes from data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and U.S. Census Bureau for firms with at least one paid employee. Among firms with 1 to 4 paid workers, the one year death rate over 1995 to 2016 averaged 19.7 percent. It was highest for younger firms, averaging 28.4 percent for firms aged 1 to 4 years, 20.8 percent for firms aged 5 to 9 years, and 16.6 percent for firms aged 10 or more years. Death rates were lower for firms with more workers, averaging 4.6 percent for firms with 5 to 9 workers and 4.0 percent for firms with 10 to 19 workers<sup>8</sup> . U.S. data also shows high exit rates from self-employment, with 28 percent of the incorporated self-employed exiting over a year (Schweitzer and Shane, 2016). This evidence suggests that firm death rates for small firms are higher in the U.S. than the averages seen in our sample.

# **4.2 The Half-Life of Firms and Variability**

Using these fitted relationships, we can then estimate the half-life of firms that are observed to be in existence at a given point in time. From the quadratic fit, 50 percent of firms are predicted to die within 6.2 years, while from the linear fit, 50 percent are predicted to die within 5.7 years. By way of comparison, Klapper and Richmond (2011) find the median lifespan of formally registered firms in Côte d’Ivoire is five years.

Since the death rates are approximately linear over the first five years, we can annualize them to get a death rate per year. This enables examination of the variability in death rates across the different samples. The mean annualized death rate over the 58 survey-time intervals is 10.4 percent, with a standard deviation of 7.9 percent. The [10,90] range is [4.0%, 22.7%]. So there

> 8 Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics: <u>https://www.bls.gov/bdm/business-employment-dynamics-data-by-ageand-size.htm</u>

11
34 _Policy, Planning, and Research_ **_Working_** _Paper Series_ dies have contributed to lower prices for beef, sugar, and grains - which are important exports for several highly indebted countries. Industrial countries have also recently imposed stricter import quotas and pressured highly indebted countries to accept additional "voluntary" export restraints.

In general, highly indebted countries remain more protectionist than industrial nations. But growing protectionism in the industrial nations makes it more difficult for highly indebted countries to pay off their debts, and ultimately rebounds on creditor governments and banks.

This paper is a product of the International Trade Division, International Economics Department. Please contact Salome Torrijos, room S8-033, extension 33709.

# **100. Public Infrastructure and** Private Sector Profitability and **Productivity** In **Mexico**

# Anwar Shah

_Microeconomic analysis of Mexican industry shows additional investment in public infrastructure produces only a small increase in output. This suggests that the policy emphasis in Mexico should be on the better upkeep of existing infrastructure to ensure the continuity ofpublic services rather than on new capital investment._ This paper specifies a microeconometric model (a restricted equilibrium framework) to estimate the impact of investment in public infrastructure on private industrial profitability. Empirical results basedontimeseriesdatafor34industries characterize the Mexican industrial structure as having involuntary unemployment, deficient product demand, declining productivity growth, increasing returns to scale, and short-run excess capital capacity. Aggregate technological change over the period studied has been capital using and labor saving.

Both laborand capital areunderused in the short run. This disequilibrium has high efficiency costs that may be undermining Mexico's international competitiveness.

The long-run multiplier effect of public infrastructure on output as measured by the output elasticity of public infrastructure is positive but small. Since public infrastructure is also observed to have a small degree of complementarity withbothcapitalandlabor,betterupkeep of the existing infrastructure would help improve the functioning of labor and product markets in Mexico.

From the private sector's perspective, however, the long-run productivity of private capital is much higher than the productivity of public capital. Therefore, new capital investment in the public sector is not recommended at this time and should be undertaken only to rectify any identified constraints imposed by the inadequacy of infrastructure in the private employment of private factors.

This paper is a product of the Public Economics Division, Country Economics Department. Please contact Ann Bhalla, room N10-061, extension 60359.
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# VI.6. Food Subsidies

_Table 19. Determinants of Subsidies to Food Producers, 1992-94_

||**1992***<br>**(N=86)**|**1993**<br>**(N=84)**|**1994****<br>**(N=62)**|
|---|---|---|---|
|**Pre-transfer regional**|.012|.009|.011|
|**revenue**|(4.1)|(3.1)|(6.31)|
|**Federal transfers**|||.007<br>(2.79)|
|**Household incomes**|||-.003|
||||(-5.2)|
|**Unemployment level**|||-1.34<br>(-3.7)|
|**Constant**|21.5|6.64|11.77|
|**AdjustedR **<sup>**2**</sup>|.15|.11|.45|

*Excluding Koryaksky AO. **Excluding Gomyi Altay, Chukotsky AO, Yamalo-Nenetsky AO.

The food subsidies component of national economy expenditures in 1992-93 is the least explained by the regressions presented in this analysis. The only variable that proved to be significant in 1992 and 1993 was pre-transfer revenue, and the overall explanatory power of the regressions was low. There is some similarity between the two sets of regressions estimated for agricultural and food subsidies. This should not be treated as simple coincidence: in Russia, food price subsidies are disbursed directly to producers in food industry, not to the final consumers. As a result, the overall benefits associated with these subsidies are shared between two groups (households and industry) in an implicit, non-formalized way. Given the close existing links between farms and food processing plants, it seems that the same social and political variables which determine allocation of subsidies to agriculture and which were left beyond the scope of this study, might be also relevant in explaining allocation of food subsidies.

It is likely that the incidence of food subsidies follows the scale of locally imposed food price control. The latter suggests that one of political determinants of food subsidies should be related to the personality of the regional governor. To impose an efficient regional price control in Russian circumstances requires a strong regional leader capable of suppressing the interests of local producers and traders to liberalize local markets. The efficient price control also needs a strong administrative machine to prevent both large violations of the price regime and exports of subsidized commodities outside of the region. This 'Vtrong leadership" factor explains, in our view, why even in some very reform-oriented regions with a strong governor (e.g. in Nizhny Novgorod), the phasing out of the price control has been quite slow (Lavrov, 1996b).

By 1994, when only 68 regions continued to provide some amount (often small) of funds to food producers in order to restrain increases in retail prices, in addition to pre-transfer revenue two other variables--unemployment and household incomes--proved to be significant, leading to a relatively high adjusted R<sup>2</sup> value compared to 1992 and 1993.
example, Cornelius et al., 2010; Passel and Cohn, 2009). On the contrary, there is evidence of declining migration flows from Mexico to the United States.<sup>4</sup> By the second quarter of 2010, the recovery was strong enough to absorb all the growth in the working-age population (which returned to a level comparable to pre-crisis years) and part of the inactive from the previous year. In fact, during the following four quarters, nearly 1.5 million people entered the labor force and 1.3 million jobs were created. Unemployment, however, continued growing, but at a rate similar to pre-crisis years.

As seen in table 3.1, 2009 and 2010 differ dramatically in their labor market performance. The former year shows large job destruction and expansion of unemployment whereas the latter includes massive job creation and a deceleration of joblessness. What are the characteristics of workers who constitute these substantial changes?

The distribution of employment by personal characteristics is shown in table 3.2. Interestingly, the distribution of job flows between males and females remained almost constant between 2009 and 2010. Women represent around 45 percent of the job flows and, given their smaller share in total employment, this implies that women were proportionately more affected during the fall, but also more favored during the recovery.

Regarding educational levels, there was a dual response to the crisis. Workers with primary education or less endured large job losses during the fall but few were employed during the recovery. Workers with secondary education (that is, at least nine years of schooling) endured relatively little job destruction in 2009 and were in the group with the largest job creation during 2010. Finally, workers with a high school education or better experienced similar job creation in both 2009 and 2010 (around 480,000 new jobs). It appears that the crisis first shed workers with lower qualifications and then hired workers with intermediate or better education. This result indicates an upgrading of the average schooling of new hires and that finding a job is becoming more difficult for people with low schooling. In contrast, the hiring of skilled workers does not seem to have been affected at all by the crisis.

Severe changes in employment concentrated at the extremes of the age distribution. Those aged less than 45 had job losses in the fall and job gains in the recovery of around 800,000 workers. Those aged over 55 lost employment in 2009 but then had an important job surge in 2010. Middle-aged workers (46 to 55) comprise the only group that kept growing throughout the crisis.

> 4 Evidence collected from the National National Population Council (CONAPO) Encuestas sobre Migraci ó n en la Fronteras Norte y Sur de M é xico (EMIF NORTE y EMIF SUR) and presented by the Mexican Ministry of Labor and Social Protection during the Sixth World Bank IZA Conference on Employment and Development, Mexico City, June 2, 2011.

13
Policy Research Working Paper 11079

# **Abstract**

This study examines the complex relationships between rainfall shocks, agricultural productivity, and rural economic activity in Rajasthan, India’s largest state. Using district-level agricultural data from 1990 to 2015, enterprise surveys from 2010 to 2016, and household consumption data from 2014 to 2016, the research analyzes three key relationships. First, positive rainfall shocks increase agricultural productivity by approximately 7 percent compared to negative shocks, with irrigation infrastructure significantly moderating this effect. Second, these weather-induced agricultural productivity changes have substantial spillover effects on rural non-farm enterprises, particularly those engaged in retail trade. Specifically, positive rainfall shocks in-crease enterprise revenues by 25.7 percent and value-addition by 30.3 percent, primarily through increased local demand for non-tradable goods. Third, rural household consumption responds positively to favorable rainfall conditions, with monthly per capita expenditures increasing by 6 percent during positive rainfall shocks. This increase is predominantly driven by higher spending on luxury goods rather than essential items, supporting the demand-side channel through which weather shocks affect non-farm enterprise performance. These findings highlight the strong interconnections between agricultural conditions and non-farm economic activity in rural areas, with important implications for policies aimed at building rural economic resilience in the context of increasing weather variability.

This paper is a product of the Agriculture and Food Global Department. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://www.worldbank.org/prwp. The authors may be contacted at fdarko@worldbank.org.

_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 views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team