rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
The republic of Congo's
            infrastructure : a continental perspective
Infrastructure contributed half a
            percentage point to the Republic of Congo's annual per
            capita GDP growth from 2001 to 2006. If the country's
            infrastructure were improved to the level seen in Mauritius,
            the regional leader, it could contribute more than 3
            percentage points to annual per capita growth. The Republic
            of Congo's existing infrastructure is concentrated in
            the developed south, reflecting the country's
            urbanization patterns. Links spread from there to the
            less-developed north, where there are vast areas of
            underexploited dense forest. The Republic of Congo's
            power sector offers the greatest potential for
            infrastructure-based economic growth, but major
            inefficiencies need to be addressed. Transit improvements
            would also make significant contributions to growth by
            improving connections to the north and to neighboring
            countries. Additional opportunities include rehabilitating
            the fixed-line telephone operator to spread Internet access.
            The country's water and sanitation infrastructure is in
            relatively good shape. Spending on infrastructure was $460
            million per year in the Republic of Congo during the
            mid-2000s. Based on these spending levels, if all
            inefficiencies were eliminated, the country would face an
            infrastructure funding gap of $270 million a year and would
            not meet infrastructure targets for 31 years. Spending rose
            to $550 million per year in 2008-09.  If the Republic of
            Congo could maintain these higher spending levels, the
            funding gap would essentially disappear. The nation could
            further reduce the funding gap by adopting lower-cost
            technologies to meet infrastructure targets.
Remittances and financial inclusion
            : evidence from El Salvador
This paper investigates the impact of
            remittances on financial inclusion. This is an important
            issue given recent studies showing that financial inclusion
            can have significant beneficial effects on households. Using
            household-level survey data for El Salvador, the authors
            examine the impact of remittances on households' use of
            savings and credit instruments from formal financial
            institutions. They find that although remittances have a
            positive impact on financial inclusion by promoting the use
            of deposit accounts, they do not have a significant and
            robust effect on the demand for and use of credit from
            formal institutions. If anything, by relaxing credit
            constraints, remittances might reduce the need for external
            financing from financial institutions, while at the same
            time increasing the demand for savings instruments.
Europe as a convergence engine --
            heterogeneity and investment opportunities in emerging Europe
This paper provides empirical evidence
            that countries in emerging Europe reaped the benefits of
            international financial integration over the past 12 years
            by attracting sizeable foreign capital inflows and
            accelerating medium-term growth. But the aggregate pattern
            masks substantial heterogeneity across countries; namely,
            new European Union member states and the European Union
            candidate countries are different from the European Union
            neighborhood. The growth benefits are supported from both a
            flow and a stock perspective in terms of the link between
            foreign savings and growth. While foreign savings might in
            part substitute for national savings, the analysis finds
            that the channel to high growth in these countries is,
            primarily, through making possible the pursuit of investment
            opportunities that would otherwise remain unfunded; in turn,
            this seems to be intimately linked to the opportunities
            created by European Union membership. Although this
            conclusion does not disappear if the outlier observations of
            the credit boom period that preceded the financial crisis
            are dropped from the sample, it does suggest that these
            excesses did not play as positive a role for growth.
Effects of the 2008-09 economic
            crisis on labor markets in Mexico
The 2008-09 economic crisis has had a
            long-lasting negative impact on the Mexican economy. This
            paper examines labor market dynamics in Mexico in light of
            the crisis. The labor market has been characterized in
            recent years by low relative unemployment, but high levels
            of informal jobs, low-growth, and almost stagnant real
            wages. In this context, the crisis destroyed a wide number
            of formal jobs, and even informal, increasing the
            unemployment rates to pre-crisis levels. Manufacturing was
            the sector that endured the largest job losses during the
            crisis and wages decreased for all sectors. The government
            of Mexico implemented a variety of programs to cope with the
            crises. However, these measures were too limited to
            counteract the large negative impact of the crisis on labor markets.
Innovations in globalized regulation
            : opportunities and challenges
This paper lays out a comparative
            framework for assessing the potential, limitations and
            challenges of a variety of emerging institutional
            innovations in globalized regulation. The framework
            highlights two dimensions of effectiveness -- the
            comprehensiveness of coverage, and the credibility of the
            regulatory regime. Performance in relation to these two
            dimensions is assessed for three distinctive approaches to
            globalized regulation: i) Government-centric approaches,
            including treaties, extra-territorial regulation and
            government networks -- seven examples are assessed in the
            paper. ii) Civil regulation, including both joint
            initiatives by private firms and civil society, and wholly
            private self-regulatory approaches -- with eight examples
            assessed. iii) Hybrid approaches, involving multiple
            governmental and non-governmental stakeholders -- with three
            examples assessed. Overall, the assessment points to an
            abundance of innovation -- but a seeming failure of the many
            innovations to deliver more than, at best, partial successes
            in meeting the credibility and comprehensiveness criteria
            for effectiveness. The paper concludes by suggesting ways in
            which the distinct elements of different approaches might be
            combined so that the whole can be more, rather than less,
            than the sum of its parts. The way forward is likely to be
            incremental and cumulative, bottom-up as well as top down --
            transcending a too neat, and ultimately unhelpful,
            bifurcation between civil society advocacy and technocratic rule-making.
Income distribution, product
            quality, and international trade
The authors develop a framework for
            studying trade in horizontally and vertically differentiated
            products. In their model, consumers with heterogeneous
            incomes and tastes purchase a homogeneous good and make a
            discrete choice of quality and variety of a differentiated
            product. The distribution of preferences generates a
            nested-logit demand structure such that the fraction of
            consumers who buy a higher-quality product rises with
            income. The model features a home-market effect that helps
            to explain why richer countries export higher-quality goods.
            It provides a tractable tool for studying the welfare
            consequences of trade and trade policy for different income
            groups in an economy.
East Africa's infrastructure :
            a regional perspective
Sound infrastructure is critical for
            growth in East Africa. During 1995-2005, improvements in
            infrastructure boosted growth by one percentage point per
            year, due largely to wider access to information and
            communication technologies (ICTs). Although power
            infrastructure sapped growth in other regions of Africa, it
            contributed 0.2 percentage points per year growth in East
            Africa. If East Africa's infrastructure could be
            improved to the level of the strongest performing country in
            Africa (Mauritius), regional growth performance would be
            boosted by some six percentage points, with power making the
            strongest contribution. East Africa's infrastructure
            ranks behind that of southern and western Africa across a
            range of indicators, though in terms of access to improved
            sources of water and sanitation and Internet density, it is
            comparable with or superior to the subcontinents leader,
            southern Africa. By contrast, density of fixed-line
            telephones, power generation capacity, and access to
            electricity remain extremely low, though utility performance
            is improving through regional power trades. The road network
            is relatively good, although with some lengths of
            poor-quality or unpaved roads. Surface transport is
            challenged by border crossings, port delays, slow travel,
            limited railways, and trade logistics, but the region has a
            relatively mature and competitive trucking industry. Air
            transport benefits from a strong hub-and-spoke structure but
            has made little progress toward market liberalization. Of
            the seven countries in the region, four are landlocked, two
            have populations of fewer than 10 million people, and two
            have an annual gross domestic product of less than $10
            billion. The difficult economic geography of East Africa
            makes a regional approach to infrastructure development
            necessary to achieve further improvement.
A review of solar energy : markets,
            economics and policies
Solar energy has experienced phenomenal
            growth in recent years due to both technological
            improvements resulting in cost reductions and government
            policies supportive of renewable energy development and
            utilization. This study analyzes the technical, economic and
            policy aspects of solar energy development and deployment.
            While the cost of solar energy has declined rapidly in the
            recent past, it still remains much higher than the cost of
            conventional energy technologies. Like other renewable
            energy technologies, solar energy benefits from fiscal and
            regulatory incentives and mandates, including tax credits
            and exemptions, feed-in-tariff, preferential interest rates,
            renewable portfolio standards and voluntary green power
            programs in many countries. Potential expansion of carbon
            credit markets also would provide additional incentives to
            solar energy deployment; however, the scale of incentives
            provided by the existing carbon market instruments, such as
            the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol, is
            limited. Despite the huge technical potential, development
            and large-scale, market-driven deployment of solar energy
            technologies world-wide still has to overcome a number of
            technical and financial barriers. Unless these barriers are
            overcome, maintaining and increasing electricity supplies
            from solar energy will require continuation of potentially
            costly policy supports.
Tall claims : mortality selection
            and the height of children
Data from three rounds of nationally
            representative health surveys in India are used to assess
            the impact of selective mortality on childrens
            anthropometrics. The nutritional status of the child
            population was simulated under the counterfactual scenario
            that all children who died in the first three years of life
            were alive at the time of measurement. The simulations
            demonstrate that the difference in anthropometrics due to
            selective mortality would be large only if there were very
            large differences in anthropometrics between the children
            who died and those who survived. Differences of this size
            are not substantiated by the research on the degree of
            association between mortality and malnutrition. The study
            shows that although mortality risk is higher among
            malnourished children, selective mortality has only a minor
            impact on the measured nutritional status of children or on
            that status distinguished by gender.
African cotton markets at crossroads
            : will the price spike turn into a new kick-start
After years of diplomatic efforts and
            legal procedures to obtain the elimination of rich
            countries' cotton subsidies, policy prospects for
            African cotton producers remain bleak. However, the world
            price for cotton has doubled in a year and has hit an
            all-time high. This paper examines these developments and
            investigates their potential consequences for African
            smallholder farmers. It emphasizes the importance of price
            transmission to domestic markets; assesses the impact of the
            reforms undertaken in Sub-Saharan African cotton sectors on
            producers' supply responsiveness; and outlines what
            remains to be done to ensure that farmers can benefit from a
            favorable global environment. The paper concludes that
            improving the functioning of domestic markets remains the
            priority in the short run. The current high price season
            will reveal the costs and benefits of different types of
            sector regulation systems and the capacity of policy-makers
            and sector stakeholders to deliver on promises. It also
            offers a last-minute opportunity to rich countries to keep
            their word in the context of the Doha Development Round.
Distributional effects of the Panama
            Canal expansion
This paper uses a dynamic macro-micro
            framework to evaluate the potential distributional effects
            of the expansion of the Panama Canal. The results show that
            large macroeconomic effects are only likely during the
            operations phase (2014 and onward), and income gains are
            likely to be concentrated at the top of the income
            distribution. The additional foreign exchange inflows during
            the construction and operations phases result in the loss of
            competitiveness of non-Canal sectors (Dutch disease) and in
            higher domestic prices, which hurt the poorest consumers. In
            addition, the construction and operation activities increase
            demand for more educated non-farm formal workers. Although
            these changes encourage additional labor movement out of
            agriculture and from the informal to the formal sector, much
            of the impact is manifested in growing wage disparities and
            widening income inequality. Using the additional revenues of
            the Canal expansion in a targeted cash transfer program such
            as "Red de Oportunidades", the Government of
            Panama could offset the adverse distributional effects and
            eradicate extreme poverty.
Livelihoods and the allocation of
            emergency assistance after the Haiti earthquake
In this paper, a unique post-earthquake
            survey designed to provide a rapid assessment of food
            insecurity in Haiti is used in order to see how adequately
            emergency assistance programs have been allocated. When
            modelling the impact of various covariates upon assistance
            allocation, the location of households emerges as the main
            criterion. This helps to explain why, five months after the
            quake, government and agencies still seemed unable to
            provide an efficient allocation of emergency assistance.
            What is more, those who benefited less from assistance
            appeared to be on the one hand families headed by women and
            on the other hand households with disabled members: this
            obviously runs counter to an "optimal" targeting
            that would make the most vulnerable ones eligible for
            assistance in priority. Furthermore, the fact that
            associations may favour assistance allocation is an
            interesting result that should be considered further. It is
            also found that asset losses had no significant impact on
            the food consumption score, whereas household pre-earthquake
            wealth did. This result demonstrates that the impact of the
            shock has been buffered when households had previously
            enforced coping strategies, regardless of the effects of
            emergency assistance programs.
The labor supply and retirement
            behavior of China's older workers and elderly in
            comparative perspective
This paper highlights the employment
            patterns of China's over-45 population and, for
            perspective, places them in the context of work and
            retirement patterns in Indonesia, Korea, the United States,
            and the United Kingdom. As is common in many developing
            countries, China can be characterized as having two
            retirement systems: a formal system, under which urban
            employees receive generous pensions and face mandatory
            retirement by age 60, and an informal system, under which
            rural residents and individuals in the informal sector rely
            on family support in old age and have much longer working
            lives. Gender differences in age of exit from work are shown
            to be much greater in urban China than in rural areas, and
            also greater than observed in Korea and Indonesia.
            Descriptive evidence is presented suggesting that pension
            eligible workers are far more likely to cease productive
            activity at a relatively young age. A strong relationship
            between health status and labor supply in rural areas is
            observed, indicating the potential role that improvements in
            access to health care may play in extending working lives
            and also providing some basis for a common perception that
            older rural residents tend to work as long as they are
            physically capable. The paper concludes with a discussion of
            measures that may facilitate longer working lives as
            China's population ages.
Financial development : structure
            and dynamics
This paper analyzes the bright and dark
            sides of the financial development process through the
            lenses of the four fundamental frictions to which agents are
            exposed -- information asymmetry, enforcement, collective
            action, and collective cognition. Financial development is
            shaped by the efforts of market participants to grind down
            or circumvent these frictions, a process further spurred by
            financial innovation and scale and network effects. The
            analysis leads to broad predictions regarding the sequencing
            and convexity of the dynamic paths for a battery of
            financial development indicators. The method used also
            yields a robust way to benchmark the financial development
            paths followed by individual countries or regions. The paper
            explores the reasons for path deviations and gaps relative
            to the benchmark. Demand-related effects (past output
            growth), financial crashes, and supply-related effects (the
            quality of the enabling environment) all play an important
            role. Informational frictions are easier to overcome than
            contractual frictions, not least because of the
            transferability of financial innovation across borders.
Enrichment with growth
This essay first sets out the
            "business model" problems entailed by corruption
            and their effects as well as implications for economic
            growth. Key issues are the need for secrecy and co-operation
            with partners in crime. Dealing with these leads to behavior
            which is ostensibly bizarre and undermines economic
            efficiency, but is in fact a rational way of managing
            corrupt practices. However, different economic policies can
            be pursued that are compatible with corruption. Some are
            more pro-growth than others. Pro-growth corrupt policies
            hold the promise of enriching the corrupt elite more in
            absolute terms even though the share of national wealth
            diverted may be smaller. The most effective pro-growth
            polices that help enrich an elite resemble fairly orthodox
            economic policy prescriptions.  Eventually the abolition of
            corruption holds the greatest promise to enhance growth and
            with it the wealth of elites. The expectation of such growth
            may explain why more and more political elites pursue
            "sound" economic policy and may embrace
            anti-corruption efforts, while securing legal ways of
            enrichment for themselves. Country examples illustrate
            policy approaches with different combinations of enrichment
            and growth properties.
Employment growth patterns in South
            Asia : some evidence from interim enterprise survey data
This paper analyzes firm growth patterns
            in South Asia, using establishment level data from an
            Interim Enterprise Survey. The survey was conducted by the
            World Bank in 2009 and 2010 and covers seven countries in
            the region. The first finding suggests that size in the base
            year gains importance for employment growth and firm age is
            statistically insignificant for growth. This contradicts the
            thought that young and small firms are the bearers of
            growth. Second, establishments in larger localities expanded
            faster, confirming the observation of urban centers as
            growth poles. Third, establishments in areas of severe
            conflict performed worse than establishments in other areas.
            Interestingly, the distribution of growth rates shows that
            both firm growth and fast-growing firms exist in conflict regions.