rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Female-headed households were more likely to report poor community preparedness for natural disasters compared to male-headed households, while urban and rural households are almost equally prepared. By 2023, the most pronounced differences between male- and female-headed households in access to all community coping mechanisms were concentrated in access to shelter and community training to help others during a natural disaster (Table 2). In the first case, almost half of male heads of household surveyed reported access to shelters in their community while the proportion of female-headed households was 41 percent. Second, male heads of household were more likely than female heads of household to live in communities with members trained to help amid a disaster (28 percent vs. 23 percent). The difference between male-headed and female-headed households that reported accessing all other mechanisms was about 2 percentage points, yet not statistically significant. While access to shelter shows a higher difference between urban and rural households (7 percentage points).

**Table 2: Access to coping mechanisms within the community by sex of household head and area of residence – 2023**

||**Overall**|**Male (mean)**|**Female (mean)**|**Difference**|**Urban**<br>**(mean)**|**Rural**<br>**(mean)**|**Difference**|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|Evacuation routes|.6312|.6413|.6182|-.0231|0.63|0.63|0.00|
|Shelter|.4515|.4859|.4069|-.0790***|0.43|0.50|0.07**|
|Trained community|.2557|.2787|.2259|-.0528**|0.26|0.25|-0.01|
|Committee|.2351|.2474|.2192|-.0283|0.24|0.23|0.00|
|Emergency plan|.1154|.1250|.1029|-.0221|0.12|0.11|0.00|

Note: 1) Tests of significance with robust standard errors comparing means between groups are reported *** p<0.01, ** p<0.05, * p<0.1. 2) Results are from the full sample of wave 4 households.

The results are consistent with existing evaluations that found gaps in the social vulnerability associated with natural disaster preparedness and response. Llorente-Marrón et al. (2020a) found an increased gender gap associated with household social vulnerability after the Haiti earthquake in 2010, leading to a lower preparedness and response capacity of female-headed households. The authors highlighted the need for national and local disaster preparedness and mitigation programs that involve the community, address the gender gap, and empower women. In addition, Ndambuki and Al Hitmi (2021) found that although Haiti has a national disaster evacuation and transportation plan, the implementation of these plans has been deficient. For this reason, the authors recommend the diversification of means of transportation in the places most vulnerable and exposed to natural hazards and strategies for coordinating the effective response of transportation systems.

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THE CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC’S INFRASTRUCTURE: A CONTINENTAL PERSPECTIVE effective tariff (at 57 cents/m<sup>3</sup> )—below the average total cost (at 119 cents/m<sup>3</sup> )—calls for the introduction of mechanisms to get consumers to contribute more to the utilities’ financial sustainability.

**Table 8. Evolution of operational indicators associated with SODECA, Central African Republic**

|Year|Water<br>delivered|System<br>losses|Collection ratio|Average total<br>cost|Average<br>effective tariff|Total hidden<br>costs|Total hidden<br>costs|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
||(million<br>m<sup>3</sup>/year)|(%)|(%)|($/m<sup>3</sup>)|($/m<sup>3</sup>)|($ million/year)|(% revenues )|
|2000|8.2|39|61|0.87|0.44|4|185|
|2001|8.3|40|61|0.88|0.42|4|199|
|2002|9.0|45|61|0.85|0.45|4|185|
|2003|8.9|44|61|0.91|0.45|5|203|
|2004|9.3|53|61|1.09|0.64|5|214|
|2005|9.3|53|61|1.09|0.57|5|187|
|2006|10.0|48|61|1.01|0.57|5|177|
|2007|9.9|52|67|1.11|0.57|6|164|
|2008|9.9|51|83|1.11|0.57|5|166|
|2009|9.3|51|86|1.11|0.57|5|148|

_Source:_ Derived from Briceño-Garmendia, Smits, and Foster (2009).

Cost recovery may be complicated by the dominance of flat-rate tariff. Water from kiosks is priced at 207 CFA francs/m<sup>3</sup> (or 44 cents) and has not been adjusted since 1998. Moreover, revenue collection from private taps represents less than a tenth of the customer base. Also, the government represents around 35 percent of the total consumption but is unlikely to pay for months or years. On average, between 2002 and 2008 the arrears accounted for about $7 million, more than twice the utility’s revenue for 2008.

Despite recent improvements, hidden costs remain very high relative to benchmarks. Comparing the key performance indicators available for the CAR against those of a well-performing utility provides a quantified, monetary value of the major inefficiencies affecting the sector. Here three types of hidden costs are considered: first, losses on the water distributional network above the norm of 20 percent of production (losses); second, an inability to collect 100 percent of bills (collection inefficiencies); and, third, an average effective tariff that is not high enough to cover the cost of producing a cubic meter of water (underpricing).

The AICD calculations estimated SODECA’s hidden costs at 185 percent of its revenues in 2000, with underpricing accounting for half of the total. Hidden costs reached a maximum of 214 percent of the revenues in 2004, when distributional losses were the highest in the decade, at 53 percent of the production (figure 10a). Since 2005, estimated hidden costs decreased due to improvements in the collection ratio and a decrease in nonrevenue water. But as the average effective tariffs have remained at 57 cents/m<sup>3</sup> , the hidden costs have been driven by underpricing (table 8). Whereas in 2005, SODECA’s hidden costs were above the average level for utilities in the Central African region (below 150 percent of revenues), as of 2009 SODECA’s hidden costs were at the same level of other utilities in Central Africa (figure 10b).

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While growing dedicated biomass crops can result in large scale land use changes that affect biodiversity, producing biofuels from crop/forest residues or waste should have much less of an negative impact.

The overall impact on biodiversity depends on (Anderson and Fergusson 2006): (1) the biomass crop’s intrinsic biodiversity value, which is largely determined by the crop and management practices (e.g., perennial woody or grass crops may provide benefits to wildlife, but crops that are more intensively managed are more likely to have a negative impact), (2) the relative biodiversity value of the biomass crop to other land uses they replace (as more marginal land, known to provide biodiversity benefits, is replaced by intensively managed biomass crop, the effect on overall biodiversity is likely to be negative), (3) landscape scale effects, the location, intensity, and spatial distribution of the biomass crops. In this line, the consequences of relatively low energy contents of major feedstocks for second-generation biofuels include: (i) large quantities of feedstocks need to be produced in order to meet energy demand, which will potentially induce large scale land use changes. (ii) The transportation costs of these bulky raw biomass materials are likely to have the effect of limiting biomass processing facilities to be close to the monocultures of biomass feedstocks. In these cases, the overall biodiversity effect is likely to be negative.

In general, biomass energy crops will be more biodiversity friendly if they are native and perennial species that can be produced with few inputs. However, if it is developed as a high-yield monoculture variety is likely to have worse biodiversity effect than native species. Second-generation biofuels produced from crop residues, perennial species or wood may prove to be more ecologically friendly than grain and grass feedstocks (Groom, Gray, and Townsend 2008).

# **5    Challenges and Policies**

A myriad of policies affect the markets for biofuels. Keeping track of the fast changing policy environment in which biofuels are produced, consumed and traded is challenging as new policies are being rapidly enacted by different countries and previous legislation is frequently modified. REN21 (2009) reports that 73 (many of them developing) countries had bioenergy targets as of early 2009. These include not only biofuels, but also 37
<!-- Start of picture text --> Figure 6. Coefficient of lagged presence of roads<br>2.5%<br>2.0%<br>1.5%<br>1.0%<br>0.5%<br>0.0%<br>In cell In N1 In N2 In cell In N1 In N2 In cell In N1 In N2 In cell In N1 In N2<br>-0.5%<br>Class 1 road Class 2 road Class 3 road Track road<br>-1.0%<br>-1.5%<br>1990 regression 2000 regression<br>Impact on buildup proportion<br><!-- End of picture text --> Notes: Figure 6 summarizes the coefficients from two separate regressions. The dependent variable in the two regressions is the proportion of a cell that is built up in 1990 and 2000, respectively. The Figure shows the coefficients of the presence of a road of a certain class (i.e., category) in the cell, the neighborhood N1 and the neighborhood N2. The road quality ordering is: class 1 (top category), class 2, class 3, and track (bottom category). In the 1990 regression, the road data refers to 1976; in the 2000 regression, the road data refers to 1986. Each of the regressions also includes all the regressors that were present in those for Figure 5. More precisely, each regression includes lagged values of buildup in the cell and in the neighboring cells n1 and n2. The lagged values are for 1975 and 1990, respectively. Each of the three lagged buildup variables appears in the regression as a series of 10 dummies, one per buildup decile. Each regression also includes the following time invariant regressors: longitude, latitude, and their product [three variables]; soil humidity and soil quality dummies [six variables]; and dummies for the presence of a water body, a land border, or the sea in the cell, the neighboring cells n1 and the neighboring cells n2, respectively [9 variables]. The number of observations in each regression is just shy of 3.8 million. R-squares are 0.796 and 0.796, respectively. All coefficients shown here are significant at the 1% or better.
ten, 2007; Place and Hazell, 1993). Although very few of the program beneficiaries exercised the opportunity to acquire individual titles, all received communal titles that many believe hold similar value (Barrows and Roth, 1990).

This study uses a panel dataset collected by the project team specifically to evaluate the program that includes information on 256 program beneficiary households immediately before resettlement (2006) and two years after relocation (2008), as well as 381 households in nearby districts with similar climatic and socioeconomic conditions who were not eligible to participate in the program at the time of data collection<sup>i</sup> . In order to measure the impact of the program on all variables of interest propensity score matching is used to identify a control group among the ineligible population that is similar to the beneficiaries at baseline, a series of t-tests at baseline helps ensure that the groups are comparable at baseline, qualitative information obtains indepth information on potential sources of biases that need to be taken care of in the estimations and difference-in-difference is used.

Changes in several outcomes of interest, including landholdings, agricultural production, asset holdings, and indicators of food security, are then compared between beneficiaries and controls. As the survey conducted in 2008 is more extensive than that collected in 2006, for some variables, simple differences between the control and treatment groups two years after beneficiaries resettled are presented.

This analysis indicates that the program had overall positive effects on the landholdings, title-holdings, and agricultural production of participating households. However, there is mixed evidence of the impact of the program on the food security and asset holding. This is somewhat surprising, given the large transfer of both land and money for farm development 5
_* Valuation of Tangible and Intangible Assets:_ Normally, under corporate income tax rules of a country, the transfer of assets from the old to new owners as a result of a merger of investor-owned companies - including fixed assets, inventory, goodwill and depletable assets - are transacted in a range between the fair market value and the tax-determined cost of the asset. Depreciation of assets is based on tax rules for calculating capital cost allowances, not book depreciation. If the fair market value of assets is used and there is a capital gain, the seller pays taxes on capital gains on the difference between the sale price and the original cost of the asset and income tax on recaptured depreciation.<sup>2</sup> If there is a capital loss, the seller may be able to apply the capital losses against capital gains of other years through carryover provisions. The purchaser, whose assets are valued at the fair market value, is able to claim depreciation deductions and other cost deductions at the bumped up (down) value of assets. If an explicit rollover<sup>3</sup> is provided, the assets may be transferred at the undepreciated cost that allows the seller to defer capital gains taxes. On the other hand, the purchaser is required to use the undepreciated cost of assets to value the assets. Investors may be able to elect whether to transfer the assets at a price no greater than fair market value and no less than the undepreciated cost base of assets. If capital gains taxes paid by the seller are greater than the present value of tax writeoffs for 2 Recaptured depreciation is either the difference between the smallest of the original or disposition value and the undepreciated capital cost of the asset.

3 The general rule under the Canadian Income Tax Act is that a capital gain or loss must be recognized for tax purposes in the year it is realized by the taxpayer. However, in certain circumstances where a taxpayer's economic interest in a capital property remain unchanged, a deferral of any capital gain is pennitted until the time of disposal of the property received in exchange. The permission for such a deferral is commonly called a "rollover". The Act provides an elective provision under which a taxpayer may dispose of eligible property to a taxable Canadian corporation without the immediate income tax consequences that would ordinarily result from the disposition. The general purpose of the provision is to permit a disposition of eligible property to a taxable Canadian corporation on a rollover basis. That is, in a manner whereby the disposing party avoids some or all of the tax that would otherwise arise on disposition and the corporation inherits this as a potential liability. The center piece of this provision is a joint election by the disposing party and the corporation in which they elect an amount that will be deemed to be the disposing party's proceeds of disposition and the corporation's cost of the property. For details, refer to CCH, Canadian Master Tax Guide.

8
(signed by both parties) has the same value as a court order. Others countries that have successfully established ADR structures to resolve these types of disputes are Serbia, BosniaHerzegovina, Montenegro and Pakistan. A country with the right ADR framework in place can benefit tremendously from these mechanisms to enforce debt, as illustrated in the case of Colombia (Box 5).

# **<mark>Box 5: Banco Caja Social in Colombia: Recovering Assets Through Conciliation</mark>**<sup>**34**</sup>

<mark>In 2006, Banco Caja Social (the bank) initiated, on a pilot basis, a conciliation process to recover nonperforming loans from clients, in addition to the bank’s established use of collection houses and litigation. After the completion of the pilot, the bank realized that the conciliation mechanisms had produced a much more effective outcome in the recovery of small amount loans than the other two methods.</mark> <mark>While the effectiveness of recovering assets from non-performing loans through litigations is around 1%, the effectiveness has increased to around 6% using conciliation. The time spent by bank staff trying to recover the loan and associated costs has also been reduced by using conciliation. With regard to the effectiveness of conciliation, only around 8% of the conciliation cases between the creditor (Banco Caja Social) and the debtors/clients held (around 9,000) between 2006 and 2008 were not settled.</mark> In MENA, unfortunately, the examples of out of court enforcement procedures are virtually inexistent. Only three countries allow out of court procedures in their legislation (Bahrain, Iran, and Qatar), but there is no evidence of how the process works in practice. In Jordan, the new Leasing Law enacted in 2008 introduced out of court procedures to repossess leased assets, however it is not clear at this stage if the government of Jordan will be willing to expand the application of this mechanism to the enforcement of other security interests in movable property beyond leasing. Enforcement of debts, however, has been identified as one of the major constraints that hamper access to finance. A number of studies and surveys have shown that enforcement is constantly mentioned by creditors as a major issue. In terms of ADR initiatives, some countries like Morocco and Egypt have established mechanisms in the recent past, but as far as collection of debts is concerned, there is still no evidence that these mechanisms are being used. When compared across regions, MENA is also clearly lagging very far behind other regions (16% vs. 33% in Latin America which is the second worst), with very restrictive frameworks for allowing the recovery of debts outside of the formal judicial system (see Table 10).

> 34 See ―Private Sector Approach to Commercial ADR: Commercial ADR Mechanisms in Colombia‖, Alejandro Alvarez de la Campa, March 2009. The World Bank Group.

28
Focusing first on results at the median, the wage gap ranges from 48 percent of the male wage in Armenia (women earn only 52 percent of what men earn) to -2 percent in Serbia, a femalefavoring wage gap. With the exception of Serbia and Kenya, in all countries the coefficients gap dominates the covariates gap. The coefficients gap is not significant at any decile. In Georgia, women at the median also have better covariates than men, but this covariate gap is not significant at any other decile. However, in Georgia the coefficients gap is significant at all deciles, leading to an overall female disadvantage across the earnings distribution. In Ukraine and Armenia as well, while there is no significant gap in covariates at any decile, the coefficient gap is significant, leading to a female disadvantage across the earnings distribution. These results are consistent with previous studies on Ukraine (Ganguli and Terrell, 2009) and Georgia (Khitarishvili, 2009).

Colombia, Ghana, and Vietnam also do not have a significant covariates gap but have significant coefficients gaps. By contrast, in Kenya, the gender earnings gap is due largely to better covariates for men than women, with the coefficients gap being small and insignificant. The results for Bolivia are different from Kenya’s in that there are significant male-favoring covariates gaps, except at the 90<sup>th</sup> percentile, as well as a significant male-favoring coefficients gap throughout the distribution.

As mentioned in Section III, relatively larger coefficients gaps at the top of the earnings distribution are indicative of glass ceilings, while larger coefficients gaps at the bottom of the distribution have been termed ‘sticky floors’. Here we observe distinctly different results for the FSU countries and for all other countries. Starting with the FSU countries, in Armenia and Ukraine, the largest coefficient gaps are found at the middle of the earnings distribution. Ganguli and Terrell (2006, 2009) find that in Ukraine the minimum wage policy reduced gender wage gaps at the bottom of the distribution. By contrast, in Georgia the smallest coefficient gap is at the median, 55
# **4.1 Political Aid Cycle**

If mission areas attract more aid because of stronger political connections, these connections might be expected to break down in the event of government turnover. Turnover is a relatively rare phenomenon in African countries, in both autocratic and democratic societies (in the data, the median country has two turnovers in 20 years). Against this backdrop, political connections are both durable and valuable. In order to test for the existence of a differential political aid cycle, an annual balanced panel of cells covering the period 1995–2014 is constructed, and data on national elections are compared with the timings of cell-level aid commitments. The equation to be estimated by OLS is where _i_ , _k_ , and _t_ are indices for cell, country, and year, respectively.

The variable Aid _ikt_ is an indicator that equals 1 if at least one aid project is committed in the corresponding calendar year with at least one project location in cell _i_ ; Election _kt_ is a binary indicator that equals 1 if there is a national election for the office of head of state; and Turnover _kt_ is an indicator that equals 1 if the election results in a change in the person holding office. Turnover is defined as a change in the head of state, irrespective of party affiliation.<sup>31</sup> The data on elections come from the Varieties of Democracy (VDEM) dataset, version 7.1 (Coppedge, Gerring, Lindberg, Skaaning, Teorell, Altman, Bernhard, Fish, Glynn, Hicken, et al., 2017). Fixed effects at the country-year level ( _λkt_ ) and at the cell level ( _μi_ ) are included in all regressions.

Note that the inclusion of country-year fixed effects means that the specification cannot identify a general political aid cycle at the country level, which is beyond the scope of this article. It does, however, allow credible testing for the presence of a political aid cycle specific to mission cells. The coefficient _β_ captures whether mission cells are more likely to receive aid in election years when the incumbent is re-elected, and _γ_ captures the additional effect in case of turnover. The presence of cell fixed effects gives a difference-in-differences interpretation of the parameters of interest, _β_ and _γ_ .<sup>32</sup>

> 31Estimates are virtually identical if turnover is defined as a change of party; the results are available from the authors upon request.

32This difference-in-differences setup is admittedly somewhat unconventional, due to the 34