rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Is formal lifelong learning a
            profitable investment for all of life How age, education
            level, and flexibility of provision affect rates of return
            to adult education in Colombia
Lifelong learning is increasingly being
            recognized as a primary factor for knowledge diffusion and
            productivity growth. However, little economic evidence
            exists on the economic value of lifelong learning for the
            individual, especially in developing countries. This paper
            contributes to remedy this shortfall. It investigates one
            aspect of lifelong learning: returns to formal education
            across ages. In the absence of long-term longitudinal data,
            the paper estimates rates of return for simulated re-entry
            into the education system. The estimations use the method of
            internal rate of return and are based on observed
            education-age-earnings profiles from the Colombian national
            household survey. It finds that rates of return to all
            levels of education are only slightly smaller for 35 year
            olds than for young people, thus confirming the
            profitability of investment in adult education. Tertiary
            education continues to attract a positive return until late
            in life, 45-50 years, whereas the economic value of
            re-entering primary and secondary education is positive up
            till the age of 40-45. So, formal lifelong learning seems to
            remain a profitable investment for at least half of life.
            But lack of part-time work, high tuition fees, and prolonged
            study time reduce the return. The findings suggest that
            adult formal education initiatives should focus on the 20 to
            40 year olds and be designed flexibly to allow learners to
            work part time.
American Depositary Receipts (ADR)
            holdings of U.S. based emerging market funds
For a foreign "issuer," the
            benefits of cross-listing in the United States are
            extensively documented in the literature. However it is not
            clear what motivates "investors" to hold American
            Depositary Receipts (ADRs) rather than the underlying stock
            of these issuers. The authors address the investors'
            choice to purchase local shares versus investing in ADRs.
            Specifically, they analyze the investment allocation
            decision of mutual fund managers to invest in emerging
            market firms that are listed in their domestic markets and
            have also issued ADRs in the United States. Although legal
            provisions (governance/investor protection) are typically
            assumed to affect ADRs and their underlying domestic shares
            equally, investors holding ADRs may have a higher level of
            legal protection as these securities are issued and traded
            in the United States. The authors' results are
            consistent with this "better legal protection"
            hypothesis as they find that funds prefer to hold ADRs
            rather than the underlying shares if the issuer is from a
            country with weak investor protection laws. Also,
            theoretical models of multiple trading exchanges predict
            that trading should tend to aggregate in the market with the
            lowest transaction costs. Similarly, the relative liquidity
            of an ADR compared to that of its underlying stock should
            also affect the funds' relative holding of the ADR
            versus the underlying stock. Consistent with this "ease
            of transaction" hypothesis the authors find that if an
            issuer is based in a country with a relatively small stock
            market, low level of trading volume, and high transaction
            costs, funds tend to hold a larger proportion of their
            investments in the ADR. Furthermore, funds hold a larger
            fraction of their investment in the ADR if the ADR trading
            volume is high relative to its domestic security trading
            volume. The results also suggest that ADR listings of local
            firms might not negatively affect local markets if the
            investment climate is good.
How substitutable is natural capital
One of the recurring themes in the
            sustainability literature has been the legitimacy of using
            an economic framework to account for natural resources. This
            paper examines the potential for substituting between
            different inputs in the generation of income, where the
            inputs include natural resources such as land and energy
            resources. A nested constant elasticity of substitution
            (CES) production function is used to allow flexibility in
            the estimated elasticities of substitution. Also, with this
            specification, natural resources and other inputs are
            combined in different levels of the function, thus allowing
            for different levels of substitutability. Institutional and
            economic indicators are also incorporated in the production
            function estimated. Results show that the elasticities
            derived from functions involving land resources were
            generally around one or greater, implying a fairly high
            degree of substitutability. Furthermore, changes in trade
            openness and private sector investment have a statistically
            significant and direct relationship with income generation.
            No statistically significant relationship between income and
            any of the institutional indicators was found.
Disinflation, fiscal sustainability,
            and labor market adjustment in Turkey
This paper analyzes the effects of
            monetary policy and fiscal adjustment on output and
            unemployment in Turkey. The model on which the analysis is
            based accounts for rural-urban migration, a large urban
            informal sector, flexible exchange rates, a dollarized
            banking system, and interactions between default risk on
            government liabilities, credibility, and inflation
            expectations. The short- and long-run effects of a rise in
            official interest rates and tax increases are analyzed. The
            results highlight the importance of accounting for the link
            between default risk and credibility in understanding the
            real and financial effects of macroeconomic adjustment.
Di Bao : a guaranteed minimum income
            in urban China
Concerns about incentives and targeting
            naturally arise when cash transfers are used to fight
            poverty. The authors address these concerns in the context
            of China's Di Bao program, which uses means-tested
            transfers to try to assure that no registered urban resident
            has an income below a stipulated poverty line. There is
            little sign in the data of poverty traps due to high benefit
            withdrawal rates. Targeting performance is excellent by
            various measures. Di Bao appears to be better targeted than
            any other program in the developing world. However, all but
            one measure of targeting performance is found to be
            uninformative, or even deceptive, about impacts on poverty.
            The authors find that the majority of the poor are not
            receiving help, even with a generous allowance for
            measurement errors. While on paper, Di Bao would eliminate
            urban poverty, it falls well short of that ideal in practice.
Releasing constraints to growth or
            pushing on a string the impact of credit, training, business
            associations, and taxes on the performance of Mexican micro-firms
The authors employ propensity score
            matching and a traditional control function approach to
            examine the impact of participation in various societal
            institutions on microfirm performance in Mexico. They find
            that firms that participate in credit markets, receive
            training, pay taxes, and belong to business associations
            exhibit significantly higher profits, even after controlling
            for the various factors that drive participation in those
            institutions. They also find that firms that borrow from
            formal or informal sources and those that pay taxes are
            significantly more likely to stay in business, but firms
            that received credit exhibit lower rates of income growth.
            Overall, the results suggest that even if the best
            performing micro-firms are more likely to be selected into
            participating in societal institutions, causality also runs
            in the opposite direction. In particular, increases in
            strictly or broadly defined formality have the potential for
            increasing profits and survival rates, and appear to bring
            micro-firms closer to their optimal sizes.
Network effects of the productivity
            of infrastructure in developing countries
Using panel data models, the author
            examines the threshold effects of the productivity of
            infrastructure investment in developing countries. He
            considers various specifications of an augmented production
            function that allow for endogenous thresholds. More
            precisely, these specifications are tested in a panel
            threshold regression model. The author's main robust
            result is the presence of strong threshold effects in the
            relationship between output and private and public inputs.
            Whatever the transition mechanism used, the testing
            procedures lead to strong rejection of the linearity of this
            relationship. In particular, the productivity of
            infrastructure investment generally exhibits some network
            effects. When the available stock of infrastructure is very
            low, investment in this sector has the same productivity as
            noninfrastructure investment. On the contrary, when a
            minimum network is available, the marginal productivity of
            infrastructure investment is generally largely greater than
            the productivity of other investment. Finally, when the main
            network is achieved, its marginal productivity becomes
            similar to the productivity of other investment.
Fiscal responsibility legislation
            and fiscal adjustment : the case of Brazilian local governments
This paper discusses trends in fiscal
            adjustment in Brazil since the 1990s, with particular
            emphasis on the strengthening of institutions for fiscal
            policymaking, and its effect on local government finances
            and their ability to invest in infrastructure building and
            upgrading. Although fiscal adjustment, which is ongoing, has
            taken a toll on the government's ability to finance
            much-needed infrastructure investment, it is not the only
            culprit. A lack of budget flexibility, against a backdrop of
            increasing downward rigidities in current spending, also
            constrains the government's ability to invest. The
            paper argues that regulatory uncertainty in many sectors,
            particularly water and sanitation, in which the
            municipalities play a leading role, has discouraged private
            sector investment and that the financing of infrastructure
            building and upgrading goes beyond the municipal level of
            government. Higher-level jurisdictions are responsible for
            financing investment in energy and transport infrastructure,
            for example.
Inequality of opportunity and
            economic development
Just as equality of opportunity becomes
            an increasingly prominent concept in normative economics,
            the authors argue that it is also a relevant concept for
            positive models of the links between distribution and
            aggregate efficiency. Persuasive microeconomic evidence
            suggests that inequalities in wealth, power, and status have
            efficiency costs. These variables capture different aspects
            of people's opportunity sets, for which observed income
            may be a poor proxy. One implication is that the
            cross-country literature on income inequality and growth may
            have been barking up the wrong tree, and that alternative
            measures of the relevant distributions are needed. The
            authors review some of the detailed microeconomic evidence,
            and then suggest three research areas where further work is needed.
Unpackaging demand for water service
            quality : evidence from conjoint surveys in Sri Lanka
In the early 2000s, the Government of
            Sri Lanka considered engaging private sector operators to
            manage water and sewerage services in two separate service
            areas: one in the town of Negombo (north of Colombo), and
            one stretching along the coastal strip (south from Colombo)
            from the towns of Kalutara to Galle. Since then, the
            government has abandoned the idea of setting up a
            public-private partnership in these two areas. This paper is
            part of a series of investigations to determine how these
            pilot private sector transactions (forming part of the
            overall water sector reform strategy) could be designed in
            such a manner that they would benefit the poor. The authors
            describe the results of a conjoint survey evaluating the
            factors that drive customer demand for alternative water
            supply and sanitation services in Sri Lanka. They show how
            conjoint surveys can be used to unpackage household demand
            for attributes of urban services and improve the design of
            infrastructure policies. They present conjoint surveys as a
            tool for field experiments and a source of valuable
            empirical data. In the study of three coastal towns in
            southwestern Sri Lanka the conjoint survey allows the
            authors to compare household preferences for four water
            supply attributes-price, quantity, safety, and reliability.
            They examine subpopulations of different income levels to
            determine if demand is heterogeneous. The case study
            suggests that households care about service quality (not
            just price). In general, the authors find that households
            have diverse preferences in terms of quantity, safety, and
            service options, but not with regard to hours of supply. In
            particular, they find that the poor have lower ability to
            trade off income for services, a finding that has
            significant equity implications in terms of allocating
            scarce public services and achieving universal water access.
The use of willingness to pay
            experiments : estimating demand for piped water connections
            in Sri Lanka
The authors show how willingness to pay
            surveys can be used to gauge household demand for improved
            network water and sanitation services. They do this by
            presenting a case-study from Sri Lanka, where they surveyed
            approximately 1,800 households in 2003. Using multivariate
            regression, they show that a complex combination of factors
            drives demand for service improvements. While poverty and
            costs are found to be key determinants of demand, the
            authors also find that location, self-provision, and
            perceptions matter as well, and that subsets of these
            factors matter differently for subsamples of the population.
            To evaluate the policy implications of the demand analysis,
            they use the model to estimate uptake rates of improved
            service under various scenarios-demand in subgroups, the
            institutional decision to rely on private sector provision,
            and various financial incentives targeted to the poor. The
            simulations show that in this particular environment in Sri
            Lanka, demand for piped water services is low, and that it
            is unlikely that under the present circumstances the goal of
            nearly universal piped water coverage is going to be
            achieved. Policy instruments, such as subsidization of
            connection fees, could be used to increase demand for piped
            water, but it is unclear whether the benefits of the use of
            such policies would outweigh the costs.
Lobbying and agricultural trade
            policy in the United States
The authors study whether political
            campaign contributions influence agricultural protection in
            the United States in the manner suggested by the political
            economy model of Grossman and Helpman (1994). This is the
            first attempt to test this model using agricultural data.
            The authors test the model using a detailed cross-sectional
            data set of agricultural protection, subsidies, and
            political action committee (PAC) contributions in the late
            1990s. The model is qualitatively affirmed by the data. They
            make a novel attempt to solve a puzzle about the
            model's quantitative implications, also found in recent
            studies. This solution makes the simple model consistent
            with the complicated decisionmaking process in real world
            government. The results imply the underpinnings of a
            political economy equilibrium that will be hard to dislodge.
International benchmarking of
            Lesotho's infrastructure performance
The author provides a preliminary
            benchmarking of infrastructure performance in Lesotho in
            four major sectors--electricity, water and sanitation,
            information and communication technology, and road
            transportation--against the relevant group of comparator
            countries using a new World Bank international data base
            with objective and perception-based indicators of
            infrastructure performance from over 200 countries. The
            results of the benchmarking are revealing of several major,
            comparative deficiencies in infrastructure performance in
            Lesotho: (1) extremely low access to electricity and its
            affordability; (2) poor coverage, quality, and the cost of
            local (non-cellular) telephony; and (3) poor quality of
            roads. Infrastructure service delivery in electricity,
            telephony, and roads is well below what would be expected,
            on average, for a country in Lesotho's income group. In
            these sectors, Lesotho also compares unfavorably with many
            other geographical country groups. Unless addressed, such
            infrastructure shortfalls are likely to adversely affect the
            welfare of Lesotho's poor, and the cost competitiveness
            and growth prospects of a range of economic sectors (such as
            tourism and trade) that depend critically on a stable and
            competitive supply of basic infrastructure service. They
            could also affect the speed and quality of Lesotho's
            regional economic integration within the South Africa
            Customs Union (SACU) sub-region with attendant consequences
            for the long-term growth of regional trade and real output.
            By contrast, Lesotho's performance is solid in the
            access to improved water and sanitation, in the aggregate
            and in both rural and urban areas. Finally, this
            benchmarking, combined with more in-depth, sector analyses,
            could provide policymakers in Lesotho a useful guide to the
            areas of infrastructure performance requiring attention.
International benchmarking of
            Lesotho's infrastructure performance
WPS3825

# International Benchmarking of Lesotho’s Infrastructure Performance

## Željko Bogetić

Abstract: This note provides a preliminary benchmarking of infrastructure performance in Lesotho in four major sectors––electricity, water and sanitation, information and communication technology, and road transportation––against the relevant group of comparator countries using a new World Bank international data base with objective and perception-based indicators of infrastructure performance from over 200 countries. The results of the benchmarking are revealing of several major, comparative deficiencies in infrastructure performance in Lesotho: (i) extremely low access to electricity and its affordability; (ii) poor coverage, quality, and the cost of local (non-cellular) telephony; and (iii) poor quality of roads. Infrastructure service delivery in electricity, telephony, and roads is well below what would be expected, on average, for a country in Lesotho’s income group. In these sectors, Lesotho also compares unfavorably with many other geographical country groups. Unless addressed, such infrastructure shortfalls are likely to adversely affect the welfare of Lesotho’s poor, and the cost competitiveness and growth prospects of a range of economic sectors (e.g., tourism, trade) that depend critically on a stable and competitive supply of basic infrastructure service. They could also affect the speed and quality of Lesotho’s regional economic integration within the SACU sub-region with attendant consequences for the longterm growth of regional trade and real output. By contrast, Lesotho’s performance is solid in the access to improved water and sanitation, in the aggregate and in both rural and urban areas. Finally, this benchmarking, combined with more in-depth, sector analyses, could provide policymakers in Lesotho a useful guide to the areas of infrastructure performance requiring attention.

## JEL classification: H54, H, R, O, O57

World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3825, January 2006 _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 view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at http://econ.worldbank.org._ Authors: Bogetić is a lead economist at the World Bank, Africa Region (AFTP1), Washington D.C. (Email: zbogetic@worldbank.org). Atsede Aemro-Selassie provided excellent research assistance. Helpful comments from Jane Walker, Andrew Macoun and Gylfi Palsson are gratefully acknowledged.

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