rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
National drought insurance for Malawi
Malawi has experienced several
            catastrophic droughts over the past few decades. The impact
            of these shocks has been far reaching, and the resulting
            macroeconomic instability has been a major constraint to
            growth and poverty reduction in Malawi. This paper describes
            a weather risk management tool that has been developed to
            help the government manage the financial impact of
            drought-related national maize production shortfalls. The
            instrument is an index-based weather derivative contract
            designed to transfer the financial risk of severe and
            catastrophic national drought that adversely impacts the
            government's budget to the international risk markets.
            Because rainfall and maize yields are highly correlated,
            changes in rainfall -- its timing, cumulative amount, and
            distribution -- can act as an accurate proxy for maize
            losses. An index has been constructed using rainfall data
            from 23 weather stations throughout Malawi and uses daily
            rainfall as an input to predict maize yields and therefore
            production throughout the country. The index picks up the
            well documented historical drought events in 2005, 1995,
            1994, and 1992 and a weather derivative contract based on
            such an index would have triggered timely cash payouts to
            the government in those years. This innovative risk
            management instrument was pioneered in 2008/2009 by the
            Government of Malawi, with the assistance of the World Bank,
            and was a first for a sovereign entity in Africa. Several
            piloting seasons will be necessary to understand the scope
            and limitations of such contracts, and their role in the
            government's strategy, contingency planning, and
            operational drought response framework.
At the frontier of practical
            political economy : operationalizing an agent-based
            stakeholder model in the World Bank's East Asia and
            Pacific Region
Reform programs sometimes falter because
            they are politically infeasible. Policy change inevitably
            creates winners and losers, so those with vested interests
            strike bargains to determine how far and how quickly reform
            should advance. Understanding these micro political dynamics
            of reform can mean the difference between a successful
            intervention that gains political traction and a
            well-intentioned gambit that falls short of achieving its
            developmental objectives. Donors like the World Bank have
            been searching for ways to take these political factors more
            fully into account as they design programs to support
            country reforms. This initiative sought to introduce a
            rigorous and operationally usable political analysis tool
            that could be systematically integrated into the World
            Bank's country programming cycle. The East Asia and
            Pacific region carried out a multi-country pilot of the
            Agent-Based Stakeholder Model. This innovative analytical
            approach entails a quantitative simulation of the complex
            bargaining dynamics surrounding reform. The model
            anticipates stakeholder coalition formation and gauges the
            political feasibility of alternative proposed interventions.
            This paper provides a review of the Agent-Based Stakeholder
            Model pilot experience, exploring what sets this model apart
            from more traditional approaches, how it works, and how it
            fits into the Bank's operational cycle at various
            stages. An overview of the Mongolia, Philippines, and
            Timor-Leste country cases is followed by an examination of
            policy-related insights and lessons learned. Finally, the
            paper builds on this East Asian pilot experience, offering
            ideas on a potential way forward for organizations like the
            World Bank to deepen and extend their political analysis
            capabilities. The paper argues that the Agent-Based
            Stakeholder Model, utilized thoughtfully, offers a powerful
            addition to the practical political economy toolkit.
Infrastructure and economic growth
            in Egypt
In the past half a century, Egypt has
            experienced remarkable progress in the provision of
            infrastructure in all areas, including transportation,
            telecommunication, power generation, and water and
            sanitation. Judging from an international perspective, Egypt
            has achieved an infrastructure status that closely
            corresponds to what could be expected given its national
            income level. The present infrastructure status is the
            result of decades of purposeful investment. In the past 15
            years, however, a worrisome trend has emerged:
            Infrastructure investment has suffered a substantial
            decline, which may be at odds with the countrys goals of
            raising economic growth. Improving infrastructure in Egypt
            would require a combination of larger infrastructure
            expenditures and more efficient investment. The analysis
            provided in this paper suggests that an increase in
            infrastructure expenditures from 5 to 6 percent of gross
            domestic product would raise the annual per capita growth
            rate of gross domestic product by about 0.5 percentage
            points in a decades time and 1 percentage point by the
            third decade. If the increase in infrastructure investment
            did not imply a heavier government burden (for instance, by
            cutting down on inefficient expenditures), the corresponding
            increase in growth of per capita gross domestic product
            would be substantially larger, in fact twice as large by the
            end of the first decade. This highlights the importance of
            considering renewed infrastructure investment in the larger
            context of public sector reform.
The inter-linkages between rapid
            growth in livestock production, climate change, and the
            impacts on water resources, land use, and deforestation
Livestock systems globally are changing
            rapidly in response to human population growth,
            urbanization, and growing incomes. This paper discusses the
            linkages between burgeoning demand for livestock products,
            growth in livestock production, and the impacts this may
            have on natural resources, and how these may both affect and
            be affected by climate change in the coming decades. Water
            and land scarcity will increasingly have the potential to
            constrain food production growth, with adverse impacts on
            food security and human well-being. Climate change will
            exacerbate many of these trends, with direct effects on
            agricultural yields, water availability, and production
            risk. In the transition to a carbon-constrained economy,
            livestock systems will have a key role to play in mitigating
            future emissions. At the same time, appropriate pricing of
            greenhouse gas emissions will modify livestock production
            costs and patterns. Health and ethical considerations can
            also be expected to play an increasing role in modifying
            consumption patterns of livestock products, particularly in
            more developed countries. Livestock systems are
            heterogeneous, and a highly differentiated approach needs to
            be taken to assessing impacts and options, particularly as
            they affect the resource-poor and those vulnerable to global
            change. Development of comprehensive frameworks that can be
            used for assessing impacts and analyzing trade-offs at both
            local and regional levels is needed for identifying and
            targeting production practices and policies that are locally
            appropriate and can contribute to environmental
            sustainability, poverty alleviation, and economic development.
The inter-linkages between rapid
            growth in livestock production, climate change, and the
            impacts on water resources, land use, and deforestation
WPS5178 Policy Research Working Paper 5178 Background Paper to the 2010 World Development Report The Inter-linkages between Rapid Growth in Livestock Production, Climate Change, and the Impacts on Water Resources, Land Use, and Deforestation _Philip K. Thornton Mario Herrero_ The World Bank Development Economics Office of the Senior Vice President and Chief Economist January 2010
What constrains Africa's exports
This paper examines the effects of
            transit, documentation, and ports and customs delays on
            Africas exports. The authors find that transit delays have
            the most economically and statically significant effect on
            exports.  A one-day reduction in inland travel times leads
            to a 7 percent increase in exports. Put another way, a
            one-day reduction in inland travel times translates to a 1.5
            percentage point decrease in all importing-country tariffs.
            By contrast, longer delays in the other areas have a far
            smaller impact on trade. The analysis controls for the
            possibility that greater trade leads to shorter delays in
            three ways. First, it examines the effect of trade times on
            exports of new products.  Second, it evaluates the effect of
            delays in a transit country on the exports of landlocked
            countries. Third, it examines whether delays affect
            time-sensitive goods relatively more.  The authors show that
            large transit delays are relatively more harmful because of
            high within-country variation.
Private education provision and
            public finance : the Netherlands
One of the key features of the Dutch
            education system is freedom of education -- freedom to
            establish schools and organize teaching.  Almost 70 percent
            of schools in the Netherlands are administered by private
            school boards, and all schools are government funded
            equally. This allows school choice. Using an instrument to
            identify school choice, it is shown that the Dutch system
            promotes academic performance. The instrumental variables
            results show that private school attendance is associated
            with higher test scores. Private school size effects in
            math, reading, and science achievement are 0.17, 0.28, and 0.18.
Mexico : impact evaluation of sme
            programs using panel firm data
Unlike social programs targeting
            individuals, few enterprise support programs have been
            rigorously evaluated, and existing evaluations have mostly
            been done in high-income countries such as the United States
            and Europe. Mexico spends a large share of government
            resources on small and medium enterprise programs each year.
            How effective these programs have been in achieving their
            objectives is unclear.  In Mexico, impact evaluations of
            small and medium enterprise programs are rare, and most are
            qualitative in nature. This is the first paper evaluating
            these programs in Mexico using firm-level panel data. The
            continuous and ten-year panel data -- from the 1994-2005
            period -- allow the authors to address selectivity bias and
            unobserved firm heterogeneity by applying a generalization
            of differences-in-differences models combined with
            propensity score matching methods. This study finds evidence
            that participation in small and medium enterprise programs
            is associated with improvements in key variables such as
            value added, gross production, and wages. Furthermore, the
            study finds evidence that some of the positive effects can
            take several years to realize. The results also call for
            streamlining and greater efficiency in Mexico's small
            and medium enterprise programs.
The determinants of wealth and
            gender inequity in cognitive skills in Latin America
Wealth and gender inequity in the
            accumulation of cognitive skills is measured as the
            association between subject competency and wealth and gender
            using the OECDs Programme for International Student
            Assessment. Wealth inequity is found to occur not through
            disparate household characteristics but rather through
            disparate school characteristics; little evidence is found
            of an association between wealth and competency within
            schools. Weak evidence is found of wealth mitigating gender
            differences through school characteristics. These findings
            suggest that wealth inequity in the accumulation of
            cognitive skills is almost exclusively associated with
            disparate school characteristics and that disparate school
            characteristics may play a role in accentuating gender inequity.
Assessing the impact of
            infrastructure quality on firm productivity in Africa :
            cross-country comparisons based on investment climate
            surveys from 1999 to 2005
This paper provides a systematic,
            empirical assessment of the impact of infrastructure quality
            on the total factor productivity (TFP) of African
            manufacturing firms. This measure is understood to include
            quality in the provision of customs clearance, energy,
            water, sanitation, transportation, telecommunications, and
            information and communications technology (ICT).
            Microeconometric techniques to investment climate surveys
            (ICSs) of 26 African countries are carried out in different
            years during the period 20026, making country-specific
            evaluations of the impact of investment climate (IC) quality
            on aggregate TFP, average TFP, and allocative efficiency.
            For each country the impact is evaluated based on 10
            different productivity measures. Results are robust once
            controlled for observable fixed effects (red tape,
            corruption and crime, finance, innovation and labor skills,
            etc.) obtained from the ICSs. African countries are ranked
            according to several indices: per capita income, ease of
            doing business, firm perceptions of growth bottlenecks, and
            the concept of demeaned productivity (Olley and Pakes 1996).
            The countries are divided into two blocks:
            high-income-growth and low-income-growth. Infrastructure
            quality has a low impact on TFP in countries of the first
            block and a high (negative) impact in countries of the
            second. There is significant heterogeneity in the individual
            infrastructure elements affecting countries from both
            blocks. Poor-quality electricity provision affects mainly
            poor countries, whereas problems dealing with customs while
            importing or exporting affects mainly faster-growing
            countries. Losses from transport interruptions affect mainly
            slower-growing countries. Water outages affect mainly
            slower-growing countries. There is also some heterogeneity
            among countries in the infrastructure determinants of the
            allocative efficiency of African firms.
Corruption and confidence in public
            institutions : evidence from a global survey
Well-functioning institutions matter for
            economic development. In order to operate effectively,
            public institutions must also inspire confidence in those
            they serve. The authors use data from the Gallup World Poll,
            a unique and very large global household survey, to document
            a quantitatively large and statistically significant
            negative correlation between corruption and confidence in
            public institutions. This suggests an important channel
            through which corruption can inhibit development by eroding
            confidence in public institutions. This correlation is
            robust to the inclusion of a large set of controls for
            country and respondent-level characteristics, and they show
            how it can plausibly be interpreted as reflecting at least
            in part a causal effect from corruption to confidence. The
            authors also show that individuals with low confidence in
            institutions exhibit low levels of political participation,
            show increased tolerance for violent means to achieve
            political ends, and have a greater desire to "vote with
            their feet" through emigration.
The economics of renewable energy
            expansion in rural Sub-Saharan Africa
Accelerating development in Sub-Saharan
            Africa will require massive expansion of access to
            electricity -- currently reaching only about one-third of
            households. This paper explores how essential economic
            development might be reconciled with the need to keep carbon
            emissions in check. The authors develop a geographically
            explicit framework and use spatial modeling and cost
            estimates from recent engineering studies to determine where
            stand-alone renewable energy generation is a cost effective
            alternative to centralized grid supply. The results suggest
            that decentralized renewable energy will likely play an
            important role in expanding rural energy access. But it will
            be the lowest cost option for a minority of households in
            Africa, even when likely cost reductions over the next 20
            years are considered. Decentralized renewables are
            competitive mostly in remote and rural areas, while grid
            connected supply dominates denser areas where the majority
            of households reside. These findings underscore the need to
            de-carbonize the fuel mix for centralized power generation
            as it expands in Africa.
Trade in 'virtual carbon'
            : empirical results and implications for policy
The fact that developing countries do
            not have carbon emission caps under the Kyoto Protocol has
            led to the current interest in high-income countries in
            border taxes on the "virtual" carbon content of
            imports. The authors use Global Trade Analysis Project data
            and input-output analysis to estimate the flows of virtual
            carbon implicit in domestic production technologies and the
            pattern of international trade. The results present striking
            evidence on the wide variation in the carbon-intensiveness
            of trade across countries, with major developing countries
            being large net exporters of virtual carbon. The analysis
            suggests that tax rates of $50 per ton of virtual carbon
            could lead to very substantial effective tariff rates on the
            exports of the most carbon-intensive developing nations.
Export restraints on russian natural
            gas and raw timber : what are the economic impacts : Export
            restraints on Russian natural gas and raw timber : what are
            the economic impacts
Export restraints by the Russian
            Federation on natural gas and timber have been the source of
            major controversy between the European Union and the Russian
            Federation.  The analysis of this paper suggests that the
            export restraints in natural gas very substantially benefit
            Russia. On the other hand, in raw timber the analysis
            suggests that a substantial reduction of Russian export
            taxes would increase Russian welfare. The paper explains
            that Gazprom has failed to invest adequately, resulting in
            little development of new gas supplies. The result has been
            progressively increasing use by Gazprom of Central Asian gas
            supplies, at progressively higher prices for Russia. The
            increased prices of gas for Russian consumers have shown
            that it is crucial for Russia to allow new entrants and to
            introduce competition in the Russian domestic market.
            Without export restraints, however, competition among
            multiple gas suppliers from Russia would erode or eliminate
            the monopoly profits of the Russian Federation on gas
            exports. Thus, with a more competitive domestic market, the
            Russian government would be expected to grant exclusive
            exporting rights to a single entity (as it presently does
            with Gazprom) or impose export taxes. Thus, Europe should
            not expect to achieve cheaper Russian gas as a result of
            structural reforms within the Russian gas market. A more
            promising avenue for European energy diversification is new
            pipeline construction to open up new sources of supply
            independent of Russia (especially the Nabucco pipeline), and
            liquefied natural gas purchases.