rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Why is son preference declining in
            South Korea the role of development and public policy, and
            the implications for China and India
For years, South Korea presented the
            puzzling phenomenon of steeply rising sex ratios at birth
            despite rapid development, including in women's
            education and formal employment. This paper shows that son
            preference decreased in response to development, but its
            manifestation continued until the mid-1990s due to improved
            sex-selection technology. The paper analyzes unusually rich
            survey data, and finds that the impact of development worked
            largely through triggering normative changes across the
            whole society - rather than just through changes in
            individuals as their socio-economic circumstances changed.
            The findings show that nearly three-quarters of the decline
            in son preference between 1991 and 2003 is attributable to
            normative change, and the rest to increases in the
            proportions of urban and educated people.  South Korea is
            now the first Asian country to reverse the trend in rising
            sex ratios at birth. The paper discusses the cultural
            underpinnings of son preference in pre-industrial Korea, and
            how these were unraveled by industrialization and
            urbanization, while being buttressed by public policies
            upholding the patriarchal family system. Finally, the
            authors hypothesize that child sex ratios in China and India
            will decline well before they reach South Korean levels of
            development, since they have vigorous programs to accelerate
            normative change to reduce son preference.
Sustainability of healthcare
            financing in the Western Balkans : an overview of progress
            and challenges
This paper explores the major challenges
            to the sustainability of health sector financing in the
            countries of the Western Balkans - Albania, Bosnia and
            Herzegovina, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia,
            Montenegro, Serbia and the province of Kosovo. It focuses on
            how the incentives created by the different elements of the
            healthcare financing system affect the behavior of
            healthcare providers and individuals, and the resulting
            inefficiencies in revenue collection and expenditure
            containment.  The paper analyzes patterns of healthcare
            expenditure, finding that there is some evidence of cost
            containment, but that current expenditure levels - while
            similar to that in EU countries as a share of GDP - are low
            in per capita terms and the fiscal space to increase
            expenditures is extremely limited. It also examines the key
            drivers of current healthcare expenditure and the most
            significant barriers to revenue generation, identifying some
            key health reforms that countries in the sub-region could
            consider in order to enhance the efficiency and
            sustainability of their health systems. Data are drawn from
            international databases, country institutions, and household surveys.
The determinants of rising
            informality in Brazil : Evidence from gross worker flows
This paper studies gross worker flows to
            explain the rising informality in Brazilian metropolitan
            labor markets from 1983 to 2002.  This period covers two
            economic cycles, several stabilization plans, a far-reaching
            trade liberalization, and changes in labor legislation
            through the Constitutional reform of 1988. First, focusing
            on cyclical patterns, the authors confirm that for Brazil,
            the patterns of worker transitions between formality and
            informality correspond primarily to the job-to-job dynamics
            observed in the United States, and not to the traditional
            idea of the informal queuing for jobs in a segmented market.
            However, the analysis also confirms distinct cyclical
            patterns of job finding and separation rates that lead to
            the informal sector absorbing more labor during downturns.
            Second, focusing on secular movements in gross flows and the
            volatility of flows, the paper finds the rise in informality
            to be driven primarily by a reduction in job finding rates
            in the formal sector.  A small fraction of this is driven by
            trade liberalization, and the remainder seems driven by
            rising labor costs and reduced flexibility arising from
            Constitutional reform.
Public expenditure and growth
Given that public spending will have a
            positive impact on GDP if the benefits exceed the marginal
            cost of public funds, the present paper deals with measuring
            costs and benefits of public spending.  The paper discusses
            one cost seldom considered in the literature and in policy
            debates, namely, the volatility derived from additional
            public spending. The paper identifies a relationship between
            public spending volatility and consumption volatility, which
            implies a direct welfare loss to society. This loss is
            substantial in developing countries, estimated at 8 percent
            of consumption. If welfare losses due to volatility are this
            sizeable, then measuring the benefits of public spending is
            critical. Gauging benefits based on macro aggregate data
            requires three caveats: a) considering of the impact of the
            funding (taxation) required for the additional public
            spending; b) differentiating between investment and capital
            formation; c) allowing for heterogeneous response of output
            to different types of capital and differences in network
            development. It is essential to go beyond
            country-specificity to project-level evaluation of the
            benefits and costs of public projects.  From the micro
            viewpoint, the rate of return of a project must exceed the
            marginal cost of public funds, determined by tax levels and
            structure.  Credible evaluations require microeconomic
            evidence and careful specification of counterfactuals. On
            this, the impact evaluation literature and methods play a
            critical role. From individual project evaluation, the
            analyst must contemplate the general equilibrium impacts.
            In general, the paper advocates for project evaluation as a
            central piece of any development platform. By increasing the
            efficiency of public spending, the government can
            permanently increase the rate of productivity growth and,
            hence, affect the growth rate of GDP.
Early identification of at-risk
            youth in Latin America : an application of cluster analysis
A new literature on the nature of and
            policies for youth in Latin America is emerging, but there
            is still very little known about who are the most vulnerable
            young people.  This paper aims to characterize the
            heterogeneity in the youth population and identify ex ante
            the youth that are at-risk and should be targeted with
            prevention programs.  Using non-parametric methodologies and
            specialized youth surveys from Mexico and Chile, the authors
            quantify and characterize the different sub-groups of youth,
            according to the amount of risk in their lives, and find
            that approximately 20 percent of 18 to 24 year old Chileans
            and 40 percent of the same age cohort in Mexico are
            suffering the consequences of a range of negative behaviors.
            Another 8 to 20 percent demonstrate factors in their lives
            that pre-dispose them to becoming at-risk youth - they are
            the candidates for prevention programs.  The analysis finds
            two observable variables that can be used to identify which
            children have a higher probability of becoming troubled
            youth:  poverty and residing in rural areas.  The analysis
            also finds that risky behaviors increase with age and differ
            by gender, thereby highlighting the need for program and
            policy differentiation along these two demographic dimensions.
Do regulation and institutional
            design matter for infrastructure sector performance
This paper evaluates the impact of
            economic regulation on infrastructure sector outcomes. It
            tests the impact of regulation from three different angles:
            aligning costs with tariffs and firm profitability; reducing
            opportunistic renegotiation; and measuring the effects on
            productivity, quality of service, coverage, and prices. The
            analysis uses an extensive data set of about 1,000
            infrastructure concessions granted in Latin America from the
            late 1980s to the early 2000s.  The analysis finds that as
            the theory indicates, regulation matters. The empirical work
            here reported shows that in three relevant economic
            aspects-aligning costs and tariffs; dissuading
            renegotiations; and improving productivity, quality of
            service, coverage, and tariffs-the structure, institutions,
            and procedures of regulation matter. Thus, significant
            efforts should continue to be made to improve the structure,
            quality, and institutionality of regulation. Regulation
            matters for protecting both consumers and investors, for
            aligning closely financial returns and the costs of capital,
            and for capturing higher levels of benefits from the
            provision of infrastructure services by the private sector.
Governance indicators : where are
            we, where should we be going
Scholars, policymakers, aid donors, and
            aid recipients acknowledge the importance of good governance
            for development.  This understanding has spurred an intense
            interest in more refined, nuanced, and policy-relevant
            indicators of governance.  In this paper we review progress
            to date in the area of measuring governance, using a simple
            framework of analysis focusing on two key questions: (i)
            what do we measure? and, (ii) whose views do we rely on?
            For the former question, we distinguish between indicators
            measuring formal laws or rules 'on the books', and
            indicators that measure the practical application or
            outcomes of these rules 'on the ground', calling
            attention to the strengths and weaknesses of both types of
            indicators as well as the complementarities between them.
            For the latter question, we distinguish between experts and
            survey respondents on whose views governance assessments are
            based, again highlighting their advantages, disadvantages,
            and complementarities.  We also review the merits of
            aggregate as opposed to individual governance indicators.
            We conclude with some simple principles to guide the
            refinement of existing governance indicators and the
            development of future indicators.  We emphasize the need to:
            transparently disclose and account for the margins of error
            in all indicators; draw from a diversity of indicators and
            exploit complementarities among them; submit all indicators
            to rigorous public and academic scrutiny; and, in light of
            the lessons of over a decade of existing indicators, to be
            realistic in the expectations of future indicators.
Assessing the governance of
            electricity regulatory agencies in the Latin American and
            the Caribbean region : a benchmarking analysis
This paper focuses on an evaluation and
            benchmarking of the governance of regulatory agencies in the
            electricity sector in Latin American Countries (LAC). Using
            a unique database, we develop an index of regulatory
            governance and rank all the agencies in the LAC countries.
            The index is an aggregate number of the evaluation of four
            key governance characteristics: autonomy, transparency,
            accountability, and regulatory tools, including not only
            formal aspects of regulation but also indicators related to
            actual implementation. Based on 18 different indexes, we
            analyze the positions of agencies with regard to different
            aspects of their regulatory governance, considering not only
            performance in each variable but also scores in the
            different components of each category. This evaluation
            allows for the identification of particular country
            shortcomings regarding governance, and indicates needed
            improvements. Although the region shows an overall good
            governance design of their regulatory agencies, the
            implementation of the independent regulator model still
            faces several challenges. This is particularly evident in
            political autonomy and in the informal aspects of
            governance, where the region shows the largest number of
            countries with the lowest scores. Trinidad and Tobago and
            Brazil show the best results and Ecuador, Honduras, and
            Chile the poorest performances. The rest of the countries
            vary according to the different indexes. We give each
            governance variable equal weights and positively test the
            robustness of our approach using Principal Component Analysis.
Assessing the governance of
            electricity regulatory agencies in the Latin American and
            the Caribbean region : a benchmarking analysis
WPS4380

# Policy ReseaRch WoRking PaPeR 4380

Assessing the Governance of Electricity Regulatory Agencies in the Latin American and Caribbean Region: A Benchmarking Analysis _Luis Andres José Luis Guasch Makhtar Diop Sebastián Lopez Azumendi_ The World Bank Latin America and the Caribbean Region Sustainable Development Department November 2007
The growing role of the euro in
            emerging market finance
More than eight years after the
            introduction of the euro, impacts on developing countries
            have been relatively modest.  Overall, the euro has become
            much more important in debt issuance than in official
            foreign exchange reserve holdings.  The former has benefited
            from the creation of a large set of investors for which the
            euro is the home currency, while demand for euro reserves
            has been held back by the dominance of the dollar as a
            vehicle and intervention currency, and the greater liquidity
            of the market for US treasury securities.  Fears of further
            dollar decline may fuel some shifts out of dollars into
            euros, however, with the potential for a period of financial instability.
Challenges to MDG achievement in low
            income countries : lessons from Ghana and Honduras
This paper summarizes the policy lessons
            from applications of the Maquette for MDG Simulations (MAMS)
            model to two low income countries: Ghana and Honduras.
            Results show that costs of MDGs achievement could reach
            10-13 percent of GDP by 2015, although, given the observed
            low productivity in the provision of social services,
            significant savings may be realized by improving efficiency.
            Sources of financing also matter: foreign aid inflows can
            reduce international competitiveness through real exchange
            appreciation, while domestic financing can crowd out the
            private sector and slow poverty reduction. Spending a large
            share of a fixed budget on growth-enhancing infrastructure
            may mean sacrificing some human development, even if higher
            growth is usually associated with lower costs of social
            services. The pursuit of MDGs increases demand for skills:
            while this encourages higher educational attainments, in the
            short term this could lead to increased income inequality
            and a lower poverty elasticity of growth.
More growth or fewer collapses a new
            look at long run growth in Sub-Saharan Africa
Low and highly volatile growth define
            Africa's growth experience. But there is no evidence
            that growth volatility is associated to long term economic
            performance.  This result may be misleading if it suggests
            that volatility is not important for economic and social
            progress. In this paper we use a variant of the method
            developed by Hausmann, Pritchett, and Rodrik (2005) to
            identify both growth acceleration and deceleration episodes
            in Africa between 1975 and 2005.  The authors find that
            Africa has had numerous growth acceleration episodes in the
            last 30 years, but also nearly a comparable number of growth
            collapses, offsetting most of the benefits of growth.  Had
            Africa avoided its growth collapses, it would have grown 1.7
            percent a year instead of 0.7 percent, and its GDP per
            capita would have been more than 30 percent higher in 2005.
            The authors also find that growth accelerations and
            decelerations have an asymmetric impact on human development
            outcomes.  Finally, our results suggest that it is easier to
            identify the likely institutional and policy origins of
            growth decelerations than of growth accelerations.
Psychological health before, during,
            and after an economic crisis : results from Indonesia, 1993
            - 2000
The 1997 Indonesian financial crisis
            resulted in severe economic dislocation and political
            upheaval, and the detrimental consequences for economic
            welfare, physical health, and child education have been
            previously established in numerous studies. We also find the
            crisis adversely impacted population psychological
            well-being. We document substantial increases in several
            different dimensions of psychological distress among male
            and female adults across the entire age distribution over
            the crisis period. In addition, the imprint of the crisis
            can be seen in the differential impacts of the crisis on low
            education groups, the rural landless, and residents in those
            provinces that were hit hardest by the crisis. Elevated
            levels of psychological distress persist even after
            indicators of economic well-being such as household
            consumption had returned to pre-crisis levels suggesting
            long-term deleterious effects of the crisis on the
            psychological well-being of the Indonesian population.
Fear of appreciation
In recent years the term "fear of
            floating" has been used to describe exchange rate
            regimes that, while officially flexible, in practice
            intervene heavily to avoid sudden or large depreciations.
            However, the data reveals that in most cases (and
            increasingly so in the 2000s) intervention has been aimed at
            limiting appreciations rather than depreciations, often
            motivated by the neo-mercantilist view of a depreciated real
            exchange rate as protection for domestic industries. As a
            first step to address the broader question of whether this
            view delivers on its promise, the authors examine whether
            this "fear of appreciation" has a positive impact
            on growth performance in developing economies. The authors
            show that depreciated exchange rates appear to induce higher
            growth, but that the effect, rather than through import
            substitution or export booms as argued by the mercantilist
            view, works largely through the deepening of domestic
            savings and capital accumulation.
Practical guidelines for effective
            bank resolution
This study adopts a practical approach
            in developing a set of guidelines on designing a bank
            resolution framework and implementing efficient bank
            resolution methods in Latin America. It identifies six
            pillars that are useful for establishing a bank resolution
            framework. The study aims to guide policymakers choose from
            a set of bank resolution methods, by outlining their
            advantages and disadvantages and establishing efficiency
            requirements. The focus is on the good-bank/bad-bank
            approach, which is a type of purchase and assumption
            mechanism that has increasingly become part of the newer
            legal frameworks in Latin America. The good-bank/bad-bank
            approach is an effective bank resolution method because it
            can be very successful in meeting certain efficiency
            criteria, including the minimization of contagion costs and
            preservation of business.
Product standards, harmonization,
            and trade : evidence from the extensive margin
The author uses a new database of EU
            product standards in the textiles, clothing, and footwear
            sectors to present the first empirical evidence that
            international standards harmonization is associated with
            increased partner country export variety. A 10 percentage
            point increase in the proportion of internationally
            harmonized standards is associated with a 0.2 percent
            increase in partner country export variety, whereas a 10
            percent increase in the total number of standards is
            associated with a nearly 6 percent decrease in product
            variety. Although small, the harmonization elasticity is
            statistically significant, and proves highly robust to
            sample changes and instrumental variables estimation using
            instruments motivated by political economy considerations.
            Moreover, it is found to be around 50 percent higher for low
            income countries, which suggests that they may be
            particularly constrained in adapting products to meet
            multiple standards. Numerical simulations show that these
            findings are consistent with a heterogeneous firms model of
            trade in which harmonization is beneficial at the extensive
            margin provided that any increases in compliance costs are
            not too large.