rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Structural reforms and firms'
            productivity : evidence from developing countries
This paper assesses the effects of
            selected structural reforms on labor productivity growth for
            37 developing countries over 2006-14. It combines newly
            constructed reform indexes using the International Monetary
            Fund's Monitoring of Fund Arrangements data set and
            firm-level productivity from the World Bank Enterprise
            Surveys. The paper highlights the following results.
            Structural reforms under consideration in this study --
            financial, fiscal, real sector, and trade reforms --
            significantly improve productivity at the firm level.
            Interestingly, real sector reforms have the most sizable
            effects on firms' productivity. The relationship
            between reforms and productivity is nonlinear and shaped by
            certain characteristics of firms, including financial
            access, a distortionary environment, and firms' size.
            The pace of reforms matters, since being a “strong reformer”
            is associated with a clear productivity dividend for firms.
            Finally, except for financial and trade reforms, all the
            macroeconomic reforms considered are bilaterally
            complementary in improving firms' productivity. These
            findings are robust to several sensitivity checks, including
            alternative methodologies and measures of productivity, and
            a counterfactual experiment based on unsuccessful reforms.
The changing way governments talk
            about poverty and inequality : evidence from two centuries
            of Latin American presidential speeches
This study uses text mining techniques
            on almost 900 presidential
            "state-of-the-union"--type speeches from 10 Latin
            American countries from 1819 to 2016. The paper documents a
            sharp increase in recent decades in references to poverty
            and inequality. The study's long-term view shows that
            the way in which poverty and inequality are discussed has
            been changing. Using a Latent Dirichlet Allocation
            algorithm, the paper shows that in recent years poverty has
            been increasingly discussed as a broader multidimensional
            challenge that requires a variety of social programs.
            Inequality has been increasingly framed as an issue of equal
            opportunities, whereas previously there was a greater focus
            on social justice. The paper assesses whether the prevalence
            of poverty and inequality in presidential speeches
            correlates with measures such as social public spending, as
            well as the poverty and inequality levels of the country. It
            finds that during the 2000s, the countries that discussed
            poverty and inequality at greater length were also the ones
            that increased social spending and reduced poverty and
            inequality the most.
The impact of social mobilization on
            health service delivery and health outcomes : evidence from
            rural Pakistan
This paper uses a randomized community
            development program in rural Pakistan to assess the impact
            of citizen engagement on the quality of public health
            services. The program had a strong emphasis on organizing
            women, who also identified health services as a development
            priority at baseline. Assessing the program at midline, the
            paper finds that the mobilization effort alone had a
            significant impact on the performance of village-based
            health providers. The study detects economically large
            improvements in pregnancy and well-baby visits by lady
            health workers, as well as increased utilization of pre- and
            post-natal care by pregnant women. In contrast, the quality
            of supra-village health services did not improve,
            underscoring the importance of community enforcement and
            monitoring capacity for improving service delivery.
Global data set on education quality (1965-2015)
This paper presents the largest globally
            comparable panel database of education quality. The database
            includes 163 countries and regions over 1965-2015. The
            globally comparable achievement outcomes were constructed by
            linking standardized, psychometrically-robust international
            and regional achievement tests. The paper contributes to the
            literature in the following ways: (1) it is the largest and
            most current globally comparable data set, covering more
            than 90 percent of the global population; (2) the data set
            includes 100 developing areas and the most developing
            countries included in such a data set to date -- the
            countries that have the most to gain from the potential
            benefits of a high-quality education; (3) the data set
            contains credible measures of globally comparable
            achievement distributions as well as mean scores; (4) the
            data set uses multiple methods to link assessments,
            including mean and percentile linking methods, thus
            enhancing the robustness of the data set; (5) the data set
            includes the standard errors for the estimates, enabling
            explicit quantification of the degree of reliability of each
            estimate; and (6) the data set can be disaggregated across
            gender, socioeconomic status, rural/urban, language, and
            immigration status, thus enabling greater precision and
            equity analysis. A first analysis of the data set reveals a
            few important trends: learning outcomes in developing
            countries are often clustered at the bottom of the global
            scale; although variation in performance is high in
            developing countries, the top performers still often perform
            worse than the bottom performers in developed countries;
            gender gaps are relatively small, with high variation in the
            direction of the gap; and distributions reveal meaningfully
            different trends than mean scores, with less than 50 percent
            of students reaching the global minimum threshold of
            proficiency in developing countries relative to 86 percent
            in developed countries. The paper also finds a positive and
            significant association between educational achievement and
            economic growth. The data set can be used to benchmark
            global progress on education quality, as well as to uncover
            potential drivers of education quality, growth, and development.
Financial sector strategies and
            financial sector outcomes : do the strategies perform
Financial sector strategies enable
            financial policy makers and stakeholders to take a holistic
            view of the financial development needs in their country and
            formulate balanced financial policies. They help policy
            makers consider the systemic risk that different development
            policies involve and choose an informed way forward. This
            study constructed a new data set of historical financial
            sector strategies covering 150 countries over 1985-2014. It
            assesses the strategies using the rating criteria proposed
            by Maimbo and Melecky (2014). It further investigates how
            the quality of the strategies can affect financial sector
            outcomes, such as financial depth, inclusion, efficiency,
            and stability. The investigation finds that the use of
            financial sector strategies helped increase financial sector
            deepening, inclusion, and stability, and this impact could
            be greater for higher-quality strategies. However, a
            significant relationship between the use of strategies and
            the efficiency of banks is not confirmed. One way how
            financial sector strategies can improve financial sector
            outcomes is by improving the regulatory framework for finance.
Cyclonic storm landfalls in
            Bangladesh, west Bengal and Odisha, 1877-2016 : a
            spatiotemporal analysis
Recurrent cyclonic storms in the Bay of
            Bengal inflict massive losses on the coastal regions of
            Bangladesh and India. Information on occurrences and
            severities of cyclones is necessary for understanding
            household and community responses to cyclone risks. This
            paper constructs a georeferenced panel database that can be
            used to obtain such information for Bangladesh, West Bengal,
            and Odisha. Cyclone strike locations and impact zones are
            analyzed for several historical periods between 1877 and
            2016. The findings indicate that although the median
            location has shifted eastward, there is a marked variability
            in location, especially after 1960. Impacts also have varied
            considerably within and across zones over time, with the
            highest-impact zones in northern Odisha and the Sundarbans
            region of West Bengal. The pronounced spatial and temporal
            variation in cyclone impacts will provide robust controls
            for comparative research on household and community
            adaptation to cyclones in the study region. The methodology
            developed in the paper is general and could be expanded to
            an arbitrarily large set of coastal locations.
Broadband internet, labor demand,
            and total factor productivity in Colombia
This paper studies the relationship
            between information and communication technology, labor
            demand, and total factor productivity in Colombia. It
            estimates total factor productivity for the Colombian
            manufacturing sector using a method that assumes a law of
            motion where total factor productivity evolves according to
            an autoregressive process of order 1 as well as with the
            past use of broadband technologies. Using fixed effects
            models, the paper estimates the effect of broadband use on
            the labor demand of different workers, controlling for total
            factor productivity, capital, and wages. To address the
            potential endogeneity between broadband adoption and labor
            demand, the analysis uses state-industry level variation in
            broadband quality (speed) and intensity of use. The results
            show a positive association of broadband adoption on labor
            demand, suggesting that adoption of information and
            communication technology can offset the employment effects
            of technological growth. Attempts to identify causal effects
            using an instrumental variable approach were inconclusive.
Optimizing finance for development
The World Bank Group recently adopted
            the "cascade framework" to "maximize finance
            for development." The cascade recommends that reforms
            be tried first, followed by subsidies, and then public
            investments. To understand the economics of the cascade,
            this paper presents a model where reforms, subsidies, and
            public investments can be used to fill the investment gap,
            and computes the welfare associated with their different
            sequencing. The cascade is optimal when reforms increase
            efficiency at no cost. When they are costly, if policies can
            be project specific, their sequencing does not matter; if
            not, the cascade can be optimal if agents are myopic, but
            not if they are forward-looking. Tensions may thus arise
            between maximizing private financing and optimizing
            financing for development.
Relationship between energy
            intensity and economic growth : new evidence from a
            multi-country multi-sector data set
This paper revisits the relationship
            between energy intensity and economic growth, using a
            flexible piecewise linear regression model. Based on a panel
            data set of 137 economies during 1990-2014, the analysis
            identifies a threshold effect of income growth on energy
            intensity change: although energy intensity is negatively
            correlated with income growth throughout the entire sample
            and study period, the declining rate significantly slows by
            more than 30 percent after the level of per capita income
            reaches $5,000. Based on index decomposition, the analysis
            also finds that although structural change is important for
            intensity levels in all countries, the efficiency effect is
            more important in higher-income countries. The results
            suggest that when countries move beyond lower-middle-income
            levels, energy efficiency policies become far more critical
            for sustaining the rate of improvement in energy efficiency.
Why are more sovereigns issuing in
            Euros Choosing between USD and EUR-denominated bonds
This paper presents and discusses the
            arguments offered by several sovereigns that have joined a
            trend starting in 2013 whereby sovereign and corporate
            issuers, especially in Latin America, have gradually
            replaced a portion of the funding raised in U.S. dollars
            with euros. The trend seems to respond to the divergent
            monetary policies followed by the U.S. Federal Reserve Board
            and the European Central Bank. The selected country cases
            state strategic and tactical arguments for increasing their
            issuance in euros. The strategic reasons relate to internal
            currency benchmarks and their rationale. In some cases, such
            substitution is supported by the argument that further
            diversification in the investor base was needed. This
            argument was reinforced by the relatively tight conditions
            in the U.S. dollar market. Tactical arguments refer to the
            need to open the market to the private sector and raise
            funding in euros, or the need to access new investors as a
            preliminary step to attract them to the domestic market.
            Several countries also admit that the optical effect of
            lower coupons was a relevant consideration. This paper
            highlights that it is important that sovereigns avoid making
            decisions by comparing nominal coupons in both currencies.
            More important, a formal debt management strategy, including
            a target for the currency composition, should guide debt
            managers. Without a strategy, the debt manager cannot tell
            how the issuance in a particular currency affects the
            exposure of the debt portfolio to foreign currency risk and
            helps or not in achieving the debt management objectives.
Tobacco price elasticity and tax
            progressivity in Moldova
Tobacco-use–related diseases are the
            main cause of mortality in Moldova, where tobacco
            consumption is widely spread, especially among men. In
            addition to health concerns, tobacco consumption has
            economic consequences, as households spend substantial
            resources on tobacco and related out-of-pocket medical
            costs. Tobacco tax increases are one of the most effective
            measures to reduce tobacco consumption, but are usually
            believed to be regressive, taxing the poor proportionally
            more than the rich. This paper estimates the tobacco price
            elasticity of demand for Moldova by income decile and
            undertakes an extended cost-benefit analysis to estimate the
            distributional effect of a rise in tobacco taxes on income
            distribution. The paper's main findings are that a
            tobacco price increase would generate a rise in expenditure
            deriving from direct tobacco price increases, but would
            reduce the costs of out-of-pocket medical expenses. Based on
            these two factors, the net effect of a tobacco tax increase
            would be progressive in the analyzed cases, ultimately
            benefitting the incomes of the lower-income groups in the population.
The price elasticity of African
            elephant poaching
The objective of this paper is to
            provide an estimate of the elasticity of elephant poaching
            with respect to prices. Ivory being a storable commodity
            subjects its price to Hotelling's no-arbitrage
            condition, hence allowing identification of the supply
            curve. The price of gold, one of many commodities used as
            stores of value, is thus used as an instrument for ivory
            prices. The supply of illegal ivory is found to be
            price-inelastic with an elasticity of 0.4, with changes in
            consumer prices passing-through to prices faced by producers
            at a rate close to unity. Estimations based on a number of
            alternative estimation approaches all confirm the conclusion
            that supply is inelastic. The paper ends with a brief
            discussion on what such finding implies for elephant
            conservation policies.
The state of jobs in post-conflict
            areas of Sri Lanka
Although Sri Lanka has made significant
            progress in social and economic development over the past
            decade, the Northern and Eastern provinces that faced the
            brunt of the decades-long conflict remain disproportionately
            poor. To understand the labor market dimensions of poverty
            in these regions, this paper examines a range of job-related
            indicators, using data from 2011 to 2015. The overall labor
            force participation rate in these provinces is significantly
            lower than in the rest of the country. Much of the
            difference can be attributed to adult women, although the
            participation rates of youth and those with lower
            educational attainment are also low. The distribution of
            wages for male and female wage workers in these provinces is
            similar to that in other parts of the country. The pattern
            of low employment rates and comparable wages is consistent
            with a combination of low demand for labor and greater
            reluctance to work in these regions, which each depress
            employment but have counteracting effects on equilibrium
            wages. Skills are an issue, as adults in these provinces
            tend to score lower on literacy tests and have lower
            self-reported skills in reading, writing, and numeracy.
            Households in these provinces have less access to formal
            finance, which may also contribute to a lack of
            self-employment opportunities.
"If it's already tough,
            imagine for me..." a qualitative perspective on youth
            out of school and out of work in Brazil
Drawing on in-depth interviews with
            young women and men in rural and urban Brazil, this
            qualitative research explores gender dimensions in the
            causes and consequences of being "out of work and out
            of school." A key conclusion from this research is that
            this term (or the Portuguese: "nem-nem") does not
            translate well the complex realities of this highly
            heterogeneous group. The paper develops inductively from the
            data a typology of these youth, who face different barriers
            along their trajectories: a) barriers to building
            aspirations and internal motivation to return to school or
            work, b) barriers to action, and c) external barriers.
            Participants' position along this spectrum is shaped by
            social context and gender norms that frame youth's
            trajectories and envisioned futures. These observed patterns
            are particularly strong in rural areas, where youth perceive
            fewer quality economic opportunities and stronger division
            of gender roles within the household and in farming
            activities, which keeps young women in lower paid or unpaid
            roles. Participants who have successful trajectories to
            technical schools, universities, or formal work demonstrate
            strong resilience, which seems to be built on their
            relationships with their families, peers, partners, and role models.
The reallocation of district-level
            spending and natural disasters : evidence from Indonesia
This paper combines district-level
            government spending data from Indonesia and natural disaster
            damage indices to analyze the extent to which districts are
            forced to reallocate their expenditures across categories
            after the incidence of floods, earthquakes, and volcanic
            eruptions. The results reveal that district government
            spending is quite sensitive to the incidence of natural
            disasters at the local level. In the case of floods,
            districts reallocate spending away from the category of
            general administration to sectors such as health and
            infrastructure. Moreover, volcanic eruptions seem to lead to
            less investment in durable assets both in the year of the
            disaster as well as the following year. Overall, these
            results highlight the potentially useful role of a national
            disaster risk financing insurance program toward maintaining
            a relatively stable level of district-level spending in
            different sectors.