rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Managing food price volatility in a
            large open country : the case of wheat in India
India has pursued an active food
            security policy for many years, using a combination of trade
            policy interventions, public distribution of food staples,
            and assistance to farmers through minimum support prices
            defended by public stocks. This policy has been quite
            successful in stabilizing staple food prices, but at a high
            cost, and with potential risks of unmanageable stock
            accumulation. Based on a rational expectations storage model
            representing the Indian wheat market and its relation to the
            rest of the world, this paper analyzes the cost and welfare
            implications of this policy and unpacks the contribution of
            its different elements. To analyze alternative policies,
            social welfare is assumed to include an objective of price
            stabilization and optimal policies corresponding to this
            objective are assessed. Considering fully optimal policies
            under commitment as well as optimal simple rules, it is
            shown that adopting simple rules can achieve most of the
            gains from fully optimal policies, with both potentially
            allowing for lower stockholding levels and costs.
Do resource-rich countries suffer
            from a lack of fiscal discipline
Fiscal indicators for resource-rich and
            resource-poor low- and middle-income countries are compared
            using annual data from 1996 to 2012. Resource richness is
            defined by export composition: fuel greater than a 25
            percent share and/or ores and metals greater than a 10
            percent share. Fuel exporters have a significantly better
            general government fiscal balance than the rest of the
            sample, and higher revenues and expenditures, which are
            approximately evenly split between extra consumption
            expenditure and extra capital expenditure. Only about a
            quarter of their extra revenue goes into extra consumption
            expenditure, and this proportion has been lower since 2005.
            Fuel exporters' expenditure reacts with a lag to oil
            price fluctuations. There are no significant differences
            between ores and metals exporters and resource-poor
            countries, or between new and old resource exporters, in
            aggregate expenditures and revenues. Ores and metals
            exporters spend more on investment and less on government
            consumption. Some individual country cases are briefly discussed.
Why are the elderly more averse to
            immigration when they are more likely to benefit evidence
            across countries
Using household surveys for 24 countries
            over a 10-year period, this paper investigates why the
            elderly are more averse to open immigration policies than
            their younger peers. The analysis finds that the negative
            correlation between age and pro-immigration attitudes is
            mostly explained by a cohort or generational change.  In
            fact, once controlling for year of birth, the correlation
            between age and pro-immigration attitudes is either positive
            or zero in most of the countries in the sample. Under
            certain assumptions, the estimates suggest that aging
            societies will tend to become less averse to open
            immigration regimes over time.
How much teachers know and how much
            it matters in class : analyzing three rounds of
            subject-specific test score data of Indonesian students and teachers
Improving the quality of education is
            one of today's main challenges for governments in the
            developing world. Based on a unique matched
            student-to-teacher panel data set on test scores this paper
            presents two empirical results for Indonesia. First, through
            detailed inspection of teacher-level responses to test
            questions, the paper concludes that subject matter knowledge
            of primary school teachers in Indonesia is low on average
            and that a 1.0, but also a 2.0 standard deviation increase
            in teachers' subject matter knowledge seem to be
            achievable medium-term goals for education policy making in
            Indonesia. Second, the paper presents the results of three
            types of value-added regressions, a (standard) level
            specification, a school fixed-effects specification, and a
            flexible student-teacher fixed-effects specification. The
            student-teacher fixed-effects approach estimates the
            parameters of a value-added model using test score variation
            within each student-teacher pair across three different
            subjects, mathematics, science and Indonesian language. The
            results suggest that a 1.0 (and 2.0) standard deviation
            increase in teachers' subject matter knowledge
            across-the-board can yield increases in student achievement
            by 0.25 (and 0.50) student-level standard deviations by the
            time students complete the six-year primary school cycle.
Idle youth in Mexico : trapped
            between the war on drugs and economic crisis
The present study combines data from
            Mexico's employment surveys (Encuesta Nacional de
            Empleo and Encuesta Nacional de Ocupación y Empleo) with the
            country's official statistics on murder rates to create
            a state-level panel data set covering the period 1995 to
            2013. Including most of the common controls identified by
            the literature, the results show that the rate of male youth
            ages 19 to 24 not studying and out of work (the so-called
            ninis), is not correlated with homicide rates during the
            period 1995 to 2006. However, there is evidence that a
            positive correlation between male ninis and murder rates
            arises between 2007 and 2013, a period during which murder
            rates in Mexico increased threefold. The association between
            ninis and homicide rates is stronger in states located along
            the border with the United States, a region particularly
            affected by organized crime and the international financial
            crisis of 2008-09.
Financial channels, property rights,
            and poverty : a Sub-Saharan African perspective
Studies on the link between financial
            development and poverty have been inconclusive. Some claim
            that deeper financial sectors should improve the allocation
            of capital by allowing entrepreneurs greater access to
            finance, which should particularly favor the poor. Others
            argue that improvements in the financial system primarily
            benefit the rich and politically connected. The literature
            has also been ambiguous about the channels through which
            finance may be associated with lower poverty (deposits
            versus credit). Looking at a sample of 37 countries in
            Sub-Saharan Africa from 1992 through 2006, the paper
            suggests that financial deepening is associated with lower
            poverty through different channels depending on the strength
            of property rights. In the absence of well-defined and
            enforced property rights, wider access to saving and
            risk-sharing instruments is accompanied by a reduction in
            poverty. Only once property rights grow stronger is credit
            associated with lower poverty.
An exploration of the relationship
            between police presence, crime, and business in developing countries
Economic theory predicts that a rise in
            police presence will reduce criminal activity. However
            several studies in the literature have found mixed results.
            This study adds to the literature by exploring the
            relationship between the size of the police force and crime
            experienced by firms. Using survey data for about 12,000
            firms in a cross-section of 27 developing countries, the
            study finds that increasing the size of the police force is
            negatively associated with crime experienced by firms. The
            results are confirmed using a panel of firms for a subset of
            countries for which data are available. The study also finds
            that this negative relationship is stronger under certain
            macro-economic circumstances.
School dropout in Central America :
            an overview of trends, causes, consequences, and promising interventions
School dropout is a growing concern in
            Central America, and in Latin America as a whole, because of
            its consequences for economic productivity, the
            inclusiveness of growth, social cohesion, and increasing
            youth risks. This paper utilizes more than two decades of
            household survey data to construct a systematic overview of
            school dropout at the primary and secondary levels in
            Central America, including recent trends, causes and
            consequences, and evidence on what works to reduce dropout.
            Within each country, poverty, rurality, and indigenous group
            membership are the strongest correlates of dropout,
            reflecting several underlying factors that affect the
            marginal benefits and costs of staying in school. Global and
            regional evidence increasingly points to common policy
            priorities for reducing dropout across Central America,
            including addressing remaining gaps in access at the
            pre-primary and secondary levels, improving the quality of
            education at all levels, and strengthening the coverage,
            targeting, and coherence of existing programs aimed at
            improving education outcomes. However, additional rigorous
            evaluations, including cost data, are needed to identify the
            most effective specific approaches in each country.
Sifting through the Data : labor
            markets in Haiti through a turbulent decade (2001-2012)
In Latin America, labor markets have
            been the main channel through which growth has reduced
            poverty, with higher labor income accounting for 49 percent
            of the reduction in poverty in 2008–13. Understanding labor
            markets is critical to designing policies and programs aimed
            at reducing poverty. With close to 70 percent of the
            population under age 30 years, labor markets are bound to be
            central to defining Haiti's future. Yet, labor analysis
            in Haiti has been constrained by the dearth of data and the
            focus on measuring the impact of the 2010 earthquake. This
            present paper contributes to filling this gap by providing
            an overview of Haiti's labor markets and the
            determinants of labor income over a decade, focusing on
            growing urban areas. The paper also contributes to the
            research on Haiti in general, as well as labor markets in
            fragile countries such as Haiti, in particular through an
            unprecedented effort to harmonize three household surveys
            conducted between 2001 and 2012. Building on this exercise,
            the study provides new insights into the development of
            labor markets in a particularly turbulent decade for Haiti,
            one that was marked by the political crisis of 2004 and the
            earthquake of 2010. In spite of the earthquake, the analysis
            shows that Haiti’s labor markets are characterized by
            continuity over the period. Somewhat surprisingly, the
            defining features remain overall unchanged in spite of the
            shock, pointing to heavy forces shaping economic and labor dynamics.
Does child sponsorship pay off in
            adulthood an international study of impacts on income and wealth
This research estimates the impact of
            international child sponsorship on adult income and wealth
            of formerly sponsored children using data on 10,144
            individuals in six countries. To identify causal effects, an
            age-eligibility rule followed from 1980 to 1992 is utilized
            that limited sponsorship to children twelve years old or
            younger when the program was introduced in a village,
            allowing comparisons of sponsored children with older
            siblings who were slightly too old to be sponsored.
            Estimations indicate that international child sponsorship
            increased monthly income by $13–17 over an untreated
            baseline of $75, principally from inducing higher future
            labor market participation. Results show evidence for
            positive impacts on dwelling quality in adulthood and modest
            evidence of impacts on ownership of consumer durables in
            adulthood, limited to increased ownership of mobile phones.
            Finally, results point to modest effects of child
            sponsorship on childbearing in adulthood.
Market integration and poverty :
            evidence from South Sudan
This paper examines the effects of
            market integration on household consumption using data on
            seven food and two energy markets across South Sudan. The
            analysis reveals that markets in South Sudan are highly
            segmented. Price differences for narrowly defined products,
            across cities exceed in some cases 100 percent. In addition,
            price volatility increased substantially following the
            imposition of the trade restrictions with Sudan. This
            increase tends to hurt disproportionately the poor, who
            cannot smooth purchasing decisions over time because of
            liquidity constraints. Transportation costs explain almost
            half of the variation in food prices across space, and
            improving the quality of roads has a large potential to
            reduce prices in the most expensive towns. On the basis of
            this price effect, the simulations suggest that bringing all
            road quality across states to that of primary roads can
            yield a reduction in poverty from the rate of 51.7 percent
            in 2009 to between 42.8 and 46.9 percent. These estimates
            have to be interpreted as conservative, as they do not take
            into account the second-order effects of road construction
            from increased trade that will result from better road connectivity.
Prices and welfare
What is the welfare effect of a price
            change? This simple question is one of the most relevant and
            controversial questions in microeconomic theory and its
            different answers can lead to severe heterogeneity in
            empirical results. This paper returns to this question with
            the objective of providing a general framework for the use
            of theoretical contributions in empirical works, with a
            particular focus on poor people and poor countries. Welfare
            measures (such as Equivalent Variation or Consumer's
            Surplus) and computational methods (such as Taylor's
            approximations or the Vartia method) are compared to test
            how these choices result in different welfare measurement
            under different price shock scenarios. As a rule of thumb
            and irrespective of parameter choices, welfare measures
            converge to approximately the same result for price changes
            below 10 percent. Above this threshold, these measures start
            to diverge significantly. Budget shares play an important
            role in explaining such divergence, whereas the choice of
            demand system has a minor role. Under standard utility
            assumptions, the Laspeyers and Paasche variations are always
            the outer bounds of welfare estimates and consumer surplus
            is always the median estimate. The paper also introduces a
            new simple welfare approximation, clarifies the relation
            between Taylor's approximations and the income and
            substitution effects, and provides an example for treating
            nonlinear pricing. Stata codes for all computations are
            provided in annex.
Losing the gains of the past : the
            welfare and distributional impacts of the twin crises in
            Iraq 2014
Iraq was plunged into two simultaneous
            crises in the second half of 2014, one driven by a sharp
            decline in oil prices, the other, by the war against the
            Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The severity and recurrent
            nature of these crises demand a fast understanding and
            quantification of their welfare impact, which is critical
            for policy makers. This paper employs an innovative
            extension of the micro-simulation methodology to provide an
            ex ante estimate and analysis of the complex and dynamic
            poverty and distributional impact of the twin crises. The
            results show an almost complete erosion of the welfare gains
            of the past, with poverty falling back to 2007 levels and a
            20 percent increase in the number of the poor. While the
            incidence of poverty is higher among internally displaced
            persons than the rest of the population (except in the
            Islamic State–affected governorates, where poverty is
            higher), internally displaced persons make up only a small
            proportion of Iraq's eight million poor in 2014. The
            rest comprise of households who already lived below the
            poverty line, or those who have fallen below the poverty
            line in the face of the massive economic disruptions the
            country is facing. The welfare impact of the crises varies
            widely across space, with the largest increases in poverty
            headcount rates in Kurdistan and the Islamic State–affected
            governorates. Yet, the poorest regions in the 2014 crisis
            scenario are the same as in 2012, the currently Islamic
            State–affected, and the South, with poverty rates of 40 and
            30 percent, respectively. Although the simulated results are
            not strictly comparable to ex post micro data estimates,
            because of survey coverage constraints, overall the results
            are very much in line, particularly in Kurdistan and the South.
Capital flows and central banking :
            the Indian experience
Because of the steady liberalization of
            the capital account since the early 1990s and increased
            financial integration of the Indian economy, capital flows
            to India have moved in tandem with broad global trends. This
            paper looks at the extent to which India’s monetary policy
            has been affected by the ebbs and flows of the capital it
            receives. For ease of narration, the paper divides the
            post-liberalization period since the early 1990s into three
            phases--early 1990s to early 2000s, a period of increasing
            but still modest capital flows; early 2000s to 2007-08, a
            period of capital flow surge when inflows increased rapidly;
            and a period of sudden stops and volatility, starting in
            2008-09, when capital flows reversed in the post-Lehman
            Brothers collapse, and again during the tapering tantrum of
            2013. The paper shows that although ordinarily domestic
            policy imperatives, such as price stability and growth, have
            taken precedence over issues related to exchange rate or
            capital flows in policy rate setting, some accommodation in
            money supply is evident during the surge and stop episodes.
            The broad policy mix to handle large increases or reversals
            of capital flows has included reserve management, liquidity
            management, and capital flow measures.
Egypt : guiding reform of energy
            subsidies long-term
This paper examines the short- and
            long-run economic impact of Egypt's energy subsidy
            reform in July 2014 (without and without compensating
            transfers for the bottom 40 percent of the income
            distribution) and the decline in global energy prices, as
            well as the long-run impact of phasing out the energy
            subsidies over a 5 year period. The analysis uses a
            Computable General Equilibrium model with 56 productive
            sectors, including 11 energy subsectors. The short-run
            analysis employs a two-stage factor market adjustment, with
            wages first fixed and then flexible. The long-run analysis
            is run in a recursive dynamic mode, capturing the impact of
            improved productivity and increased investment resulting
            from more efficient allocation of resources and reduction in
            government deficits. In the short run, the 2014 reforms lead
            to slightly lower consumption while investment increases
            strongly and production shifts from highly subsidized
            energy-intensive sectors such as energy, water and
            sanitation, and transport to other sectors (notably
            construction). The impact on overall consumer prices is
            limited. In the longer run, real GDP growth increases by
            about one percentage point relative to the baseline before
            the 2014 reform.
Preschool education in Brazil : does
            public supply crowd out private enrollment
This paper examines whether an expansion
            in the supply of public preschool crowds out private
            enrollment. The paper uses rich data for municipalities in
            Brazil from 2000 to 2006, where federal transfers to local
            governments change discontinuously with given population
            thresholds. The results from a regression-discontinuity
            design reveal that larger federal transfers lead to a
            significant expansion of local public preschool services,
            but show no evidence of crowding out of private enrollment.
            This finding is consistent with a theory in which households
            differ in their willingness to pay for preschool services,
            and private suppliers optimally adjust prices in response to
            an expansion of lower-quality, free-of-charge public supply.
Access to pre-primary education and
            progression in primary School : evidence from rural Guatemala
Evidence on the impacts of a large-scale
            expansion in pre-primary education is limited and mostly
            circumscribed to high- and middle-income nations. This study
            estimates the effects of such an expansion on progression in
            primary school in rural communities in Guatemala, where the
            number of pre-primary schools increased from about 5,300 to
            11,500 between 1998 and 2005. Combining administrative and
            population census data in a difference-in-differences
            framework, the analysis finds that access to pre-primary
            education increased by 2.4 percentage points the proportion
            of students that progress adequately and attend sixth grade
            by age 12. These positive although limited effects suggest
            the need for complementary actions to produce substantial
            improvements in adequate progression.