rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Small states -- performance in
            public debt management
This paper analyzes the status of public
            debt management performance in 17 small states through the
            findings of the Debt Management Performance Assessment
            reports.  Empirical evidence indicates that the higher the
            quality of a country's policies and institutions, the
            better is its capacity to carry debt and withstand exogenous
            shocks. Borrowing for productive purposes can be an
            important element in boosting growth of gross domestic
            product but, conversely, excessive borrowing or poorly
            structured debt in terms of maturity, currency, or interest
            rate composition can quickly offset the positive impact,
            deter new foreign and domestic investment, compromise reform
            programs, depress growth of gross domestic product,
            exacerbate the challenge of meeting debt service
            obligations, and may induce or propagate economic crises.
            Arguments in favor of sound debt management are especially
            compelling for small states that must mitigate the
            particular risks to which their economies are exposed.
            Against this backdrop, the paper identifies aspects of debt
            management where small states do relatively well and those
            where they perform poorly, relative to other developing
            countries, and examines the underlying factors at play. It
            elaborates on some of the successful measures taken by small
            states to enhance debt management performance and considers
            how these may be applied more broadly in other small states.
            The paper offers a number of practical suggestions to
            strengthen debt management performance.
Preferential market access design:
            evidence and lessons from African apparel exports to the us
            and the EU
Least developed countries rely on
            preferential market access. Proof of sufficient
            transformation has to be provided to customs in importing
            countries by meeting Rules of Origin requirements to benefit
            from these preferences. These Rules of Origin have turned
            out to be complicated and burdensome for exporters in the
            least developed countries. Starting around 2001, under the
            United States Africa Growth Opportunity Act, 22 African
            countries exporting apparel to the United States can use
            fabric from any origin (single transformation) and still
            meet the criterion for preferential access (the so-called
            Special Rule), while the European Union continued to require
            yarn to be woven into fabric and then made into apparel in
            the same country (double transformation). This paper uses
            panel estimates over 1996-2004 to exploit this
            quasi-experimental change in the design of preferences. The
            paper estimates that this simplification contributed to an
            increase in export volume of about 168 percent for the top
            seven beneficiaries or approximately four times as much as
            the 44 percent growth effect from the initial preference
            access under the Africa Growth Opportunity Act without the
            single transformation. This change in design also mattered
            for diversity in apparel exports, as the number of export
            varieties grew more rapidly under the Africa Growth
            Opportunity Act special regime.
Equilibrium credit : the reference
            point for macroprudential supervisors
Equilibrium credit is an important
            concept because it helps identify excessive credit
            provision. This paper proposes a two-stage approach to
            determine equilibrium credit. It uses two stages to study
            changes in the demand for credit due to varying levels of
            economic, financial and institutional development of a
            country. Using a panel of high and middle-income countries
            over the period 1980-2010, this paper provides empirical
            evidence that the credit-to-GDP ratio is inappropriate to
            measure equilibrium credit. The reason for this is that such
            an approach ignores heterogeneity in the parameters that
            determine equilibrium credit across countries due to
            different stages of economic development. The main drivers
            of this heterogeneity are financial depth, access to
            financial services, use of capital markets, efficiency and
            funding of domestic banks, central bank independence, the
            degree of supervisory integration, and experience of a
            financial crisis. Countries in Europe and Central Asia show
            a slower adjustment of credit to its long-run equilibrium
            compared with other regions of the world.
How reliable and consistent are
            subjective measures of welfare in Europe and Central Asia
            evidence from the second life in transition survey
This paper analyzes the reliability and
            consistency of subjective well-being measures. Using the
            Life in Transition Survey, which was administered in 34
            countries of Europe and Central Asia in 2006 and 2010, the
            paper evaluates subjective well-being measures (satisfaction
            with life and subjective relative income position) against
            objective measures of welfare based on consumption and
            assets. It uses the different formulations of life
            satisfaction in the survey to test robustness to alternative
            framing and scaling. It also explores within-household
            differences in subjective well-being assessments. The
            analysis finds that subjective relative income is weakly
            correlated with household relative welfare position as
            measured by consumption or assets. Life satisfaction, by
            contrast, is highly correlated with objective and subjective
            measures of household welfare. It generally reflects
            cross-country differences in average consumption, assets, or
            per capita gross domestic product, although Central Asian
            countries report much higher life satisfaction levels than
            their incomes would suggest. Two alternative measures of
            life satisfaction are highly correlated and the
            correspondence between verbal and numeric scales is strong
            within a country or groupings of similar countries. Within
            households, subjective assessments of relative income are
            roughly consistent but measurement error is correlated with
            individual characteristics (gender and age of respondents),
            which could cause systematic biases in the analysis.
Impact evaluation of a large-scale
            rural sanitation project in Indonesia
Lack of sanitation and poor hygiene
            behavior cause a tremendous disease burden among the poor.
            This paper evaluates the impact of the Total Sanitation and
            Sanitation Marketing project in Indonesia, where about 11
            percent of children have diarrhea in any two-week period and
            more than 33,000 children die each year from diarrhea. The
            evaluation utilizes a randomized controlled trial but is
            unusual in that the program was evaluated when implemented
            at scale across the province of rural East Java in a way
            that was designed to strengthen the enabling environment and
            so be sustainable. One hundred and sixty communities across
            eight rural districts participated, and approximately 2,100
            households were interviewed before and after the
            intervention. The authors found that the project increased
            toilet construction by approximately 3 percentage points (a
            31 percent increase in the rate of toilet construction). The
            changes were primarily among non-poor households that did
            not have access to sanitation at baseline. Open defecation
            among these households decreased by 6 percentage points (or
            17 percent). Diarrhea prevalence was 30 percent lower in
            treatment communities than in control communities at endline
            (3.3 versus 4.6 percent). The analysis cannot rule out that
            the differences in drinking water and handwashing behavior
            drove the decline in diarrhea. Reductions in parasitic
            infestations and improvements in height and weight were
            found for the non-poor sample with no sanitation at baseline.
The unfairness of (poverty) targets
Adopted on September 8, 2000, the United
            Nations Millennium Declaration stated as its first goal that
            countries "...[further] resolve to halve, by the year
            2015, the proportion of the world's people whose income
            is less than one dollar a day and the proportion of people
            who suffer from hunger..." Each country committed to
            achieve the stated goal, regardless of their initial
            conditions in terms of poverty and inequality levels. This
            paper presents a framework to quantify how much initial
            conditions affect poverty reduction, given a level of
            "effort" (growth). The framework used in the
            analysis allows for the growth elasticity of poverty to vary
            according to changes in the income distribution along the
            dynamic path of growth and redistribution, unlike previous
            examples in the literature where this is assumed to be
            constant. While wealthier countries did perform better in
            reducing poverty in the last decade and a half (1995-2008),
            assuming equal initial conditions, the situation reverses:
            the paper finds a statistically significant negative
            relation between initial average income and poverty
            reduction performance, with the poorest countries in the
            sample going from the worst to the best performers in
            poverty reduction. The analysis also quantifies how much
            poorer countries would have scored better, had they had the
            same level of initial average income as wealthier countries.
            The results suggest a remarkable change in poverty reduction
            performance, in addition to the reversal of ranks from worst
            to best performers. The application of this framework goes
            beyond poverty targets and the Millennium Development Goals.
            Given the widespread use of targets to determine resource
            allocation in education, health, or decentralized social
            expenditures, it constitutes a helpful tool to measure
            policy performance toward all kinds of goals. The proposed
            framework can be useful to evaluate the importance of
            initial conditions on outcomes, for a wide array of policies.
Does a wife's bargaining power
            provide more micronutrients to females : evidence from rural Bangladesh
Using calories in a unitary framework,
            previous literature has claimed lack of gender inequality in
            intrahousehold food distribution. This paper finds that
            while there is lack of gender disparity in the calorie
            adequacy ratio, the disparity is prominent among children,
            adolescents, and adults for a number of critical nutrients.
            Pregnant and lactating women also receive much less of most
            of these nutrients compared with their requirements. A
            wife's bargaining power (proxied by assets at
            marriage), as opposed to her husband's, significantly
            and positively affects the nutrient allocations of children
            and adolescents and of adult females. The bargaining effects
            remain significant after controlling for unobserved
            household characteristics and the potential
            nutrition-health-labor market linkage. The findings, which
            have important policy implications for the growing problem
            of micronutrient malnutrition in the developing world, also
            imply that perhaps the nutrition-health-labor market linkage
            as a key explanation for intrahousehold food distribution
            has been overemphasized in the previous literature.
External shocks, fiscal policy and
            income distribution : alternative scenarios for Moldova
The economy of Moldova, which has one of
            the lowest levels of gross national income per capita in the
            World Bank Europe and Central Asia region, is strongly
            linked to the outside world, especially to the neighboring
            countries of the European Union and the Commonwealth of
            Independent States. This paper analyzes a set of scenarios
            for Moldova up to 2020, defined to shed light on issues
            related to an alternative future dominated by goods and
            services exports as opposed to today's reliance on
            worker remittances. The analysis is based on a Moldovan
            version of MAMS (Maquette for Millennium Development Goal
            Simulations), a CGE (Computable General Equilibrium) model
            for country strategy analysis. In sum, the impact of
            increased export demand and productivity growth is more
            positive when these shocks are directed to manufacturing, a
            sector more heavily linked to international trade, compared
            with agriculture. Increased productivity in transport and
            communications generates faster growth with widely diffused
            benefits, reaching households in a relatively equitable
            manner compared with foreign trade-induced growth. A
            comparison between adverse shocks in two areas, higher
            energy import prices, and lower remittances, designed to
            have similar effects on gross domestic product, suggests
            that a remittance shock leads to less of a poverty increase,
            related to the fact that remittance-receiving households are
            not highly vulnerable; among sectors, agriculture is most
            vulnerable due to heavy energy reliance. Finally,
            well-targeted transfer schemes may offer an effective tool
            for diffusing the benefits of economic growth to the whole
            population, perhaps also contributing to more general
            acceptance of structural change.
Poverty, inequality, and the local
            natural resource curse
The extent to which local communities
            benefit from commodity booms has been subject to wide but
            inconclusive investigations. This paper draws from a new
            district-level database to investigate the local impact on
            socioeconomic outcomes of mining activity in Peru, which
            grew almost twentyfold in the last two decades. The authors
            find evidence that producing districts have better average
            living standards than otherwise similar districts: larger
            household consumption, lower poverty rate, and higher
            literacy. However, the positive impacts from mining decrease
            significantly with administrative and geographic distance
            from the mine, while district-level consumption inequality
            increases in all districts belonging to a producing
            province. The inequalizing impact of mining activity, both
            across and within districts, may explain part of the current
            social discontent with mining activities in the country,
            even despite its enormous revenues.
The income lever and the allocation
            of aid
The paper develops a concept and a
            measure of the monetary capacity of a country to reduce its
            own poverty and shows how these tools can be used to guide
            budget allocations or the allocation of aid. The authors
            call this concept the income lever. Making use of tax and
            distributive theory, the paper shows how different
            redistributive criteria correspond to the different
            normative criteria of the income lever. It then constructs
            various income lever indexes based on these criteria and
            uses such indexes to rank countries according to their own
            capacity to reduce poverty. As shown in the empirical
            application, this methodology can provide an equitable tool
            to rank countries or regions when it comes to budget or aid
            allocations, whether it is the allocation of social funds
            within the European Union (North-North transfers) or the
            allocation of aid from rich to poor countries (North-South
            transfers). The findings indicate that the allocation of
            social funds in the European Union follows closely the rank
            that results from the income lever indexes proposed while
            the allocation of aid to Sub-Saharan African countries does not.
Does gender inequality hinder
            development and economic growth evidence and policy implications
Does the existing evidence support
            policies that foster growth by reducing gender inequality?
            The authors argue that the evidence based on differences
            across countries is of limited use for policy design because
            it does not identify the causal link from inequality to
            growth. This, however does not imply that
            inequality-reducing policies are ineffective. In other
            words, the lack of evidence of a causal link is not in
            itself evidence that the causal link does not exist.
            Detailed micro studies that shed light on the mechanisms
            through which gender inequality affects development and
            growth are needed to inform the design of effective policies.
What does variation in survey design
            reveal about the nature of measurement errors in household consumption
This paper uses data from eight
            different consumption questionnaires randomly assigned to
            4,000 households in Tanzania to obtain evidence on the
            nature of measurement errors in estimates of household
            consumption. While there are no validation data, the design
            of one questionnaire and the resources put into its
            implementation make it likely to be substantially more
            accurate than the others. Comparing regressions using data
            from this benchmark design with results from the other
            questionnaires shows that errors have a negative correlation
            with the true value of consumption, creating a non-classical
            measurement error problem for which conventional statistical
            corrections may be ineffective.
Gender and agriculture :
            inefficiencies, segregation, and low productivity traps
Women make essential contributions to
            agriculture in developing countries, where they constitute
            approximately 43 percent of the agricultural labor force.
            However, female farmers typically have lower output per unit
            of land and are much less likely to be active in commercial
            farming than their male counterparts. These gender
            differences in land productivity and participation between
            male and female farmers are due to gender differences in
            access to inputs, resources, and services. In this paper,
            the authors review the evidence on productivity differences
            and access to resources. They discuss some of the reasons
            for these differences, such as differences in property
            rights, education, control over resources (e.g., land),
            access to inputs and services (e.g., fertilizer, extension,
            and credit), and social norms. Although women are less
            active in commercial farming and are largely excluded from
            contract farming, they often provide the bulk of wage labor
            in the nontraditional export sector. In general, gender gaps
            do not appear to fall systematically with growth, and they
            appear to rise with GDP per capita and with greater access
            to resources and inputs. Active policies that support
            women's access and participation, not just greater
            overall access, are essential if these gaps are to be
            closed. The gains in terms of greater productivity of land
            and overall production are likely to be large.
Government connections and financial
            constraints : evidence from a large representative sample of
            Chinese firms
This paper examines the role of
            firms' government connections, defined by government
            intervention in the appointments of Chief Executive Officers
            and the status of state ownership, in determining the
            severity of financial constraints faced by Chinese firms. In
            line with the previous literature, the paper demonstrates
            that investment by non-state firms is highly sensitive to
            internal cash flows, while no such sensitivity is found for
            government-owned enterprises. Even within the subset of
            non-state firms, government connections are associated with
            substantially less severe financial constraints (less
            reliance on internal cash flows to fund investment). The
            paper also finds that large non-state firms with weak
            government connections are especially financially
            constrained, due perhaps to the formidable hold that their
            state rivals have on financial resources after the
            "grabbing-the-big-and-letting-go-the-small"
            privatization program in China. Firms with
            government-appointed Chief Executive Officers also have
            significantly lower investment intensities, due perhaps to
            their lower-powered incentives. The empirical results
            suggest that government connections play an important role
            in explaining Chinese firms' investment behavior and
            financing conditions, and provide further evidence on the
            nature of the misallocation of credit by China's
            dominant state-owned banks.