rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Estimating a Poverty Line for Brazil
            Based on the 2017-18 Household Budget Survey
This study applies the
            cost-of-basic-needs approach to estimate food and total
            poverty lines for the Brazilian case. Using detailed data on
            expenditures from a 2017/18 household budget survey and
            caloric information from the Brazilian Table of Food
            Composition, calorie intake is assigned to more than 1,400
            items to estimate the cost per calorie for a representative
            group of the population. The preferred results estimate the
            value of the food poverty line at R$258 (in 2018 urban
            Southeast prices), and the lower total poverty line
            (covering also nonfood necessities) at R$455. Robustness
            checks show that varying the assumptions leads to
            qualitatively similar results. The findings are also close
            in value to lines found in earlier studies and the societal
            poverty line. Finally, this work provides a data-driven
            validation of the income threshold used to determine
            eligibility for Brazil&#x2019;s social registry.
Taxation, Accountability, and Cash
            Transfers : Breaking the Resource Curse
Why is governance in resource-rich
            countries so poor? This paper argues that it is because
            governments in these countries do not rely on taxation,
            which is an important instrument for citizens to hold their
            governments accountable. Using a game-theoretic model, the
            authors show that the combination of low taxes and weak
            governance can be an equilibrium in an economy with sizeable
            mineral revenues. As income from natural resources
            ultimately declines, replacing it with tax revenues may
            require governments to give control of these proceeds to
            citizens, in the form of cash transfers say, as a credible
            commitment to accountability, thereby breaking the country
            out of its resource curse.
Monetary, Fiscal, and Structural
            Drivers of Inflation in Ethiopia : New Empirical Evidence
            from Time Series Analysis
This study empirically investigates the
            drivers of inflation in Ethiopia using monthly data from
            July 1998 to September 2020. It explores short-run and
            long-run effects of domestic and external determinants of
            inflation&#x2014;including demand-side, supply-side, and
            structural factors&#x2014;using the cointegration and
            vector error correction methodology. Four measures of
            inflation are considered: cereals, food, nonfood, and all
            items consumer price index inflation. A key contribution to
            the existing literature is the investigation of the role of
            the fiscal sector in modeling inflation, a topic that has
            been neglected in the existing studies on inflation in
            Ethiopia. The empirical results show that disequilibria in
            the monetary sector, grains sector, and food markets have
            long-run effects on inflation. In the short run, inflation
            is driven by structural factors (notably, cereal output gaps
            and imported inflation) as well as demand-side factors
            (notably, money growth and public sector borrowing). The
            results hold when the analysis is limited to the high growth
            period from 2005 onward, following the end of the
            International Monetary Fund program in the country. The
            evidence provides valuable insights in the context of
            ongoing macroeconomic policy reforms in Ethiopia.
The Global Diffusion of Electric
            Vehicles : Lessons from the First Decade
Electrifying the transportation sector
            is key to reaching the goal of carbon neutrality. This paper
            provides a comprehensive analysis of the diffusion of
            passenger electric vehicles based on detailed data on
            model-level electrical vehicle sales across the world from
            2013 to 2020. The analysis shows that the highly uneven
            electrical vehicle penetration across countries is partly
            driven by cross-country variation in incentives and
            especially in the availability of charging infrastructure.
            Investment in charging infrastructure would have been much
            more cost-effective than consumer purchase subsidies in
            promoting electrical vehicle adoption. This finding
            highlights the importance of expanding charging
            infrastructure in the next phase of deeper electrical
            vehicle diffusion.
Lost in Interpretation : Why Spouses
            Disagree on Who Makes Decisions
Across a wide variety of regions and
            contexts, surveys have found high rates of disagreement
            within couples on matters of household decision making.
            Using a unique data set from a spousal survey of 421
            agricultural households in the Philippines, this paper finds
            that 50.2 percent of couples disagree about who makes any
            given decision in the household. The paper systematically
            explores the empirical relevance of theoretical explanations
            from the existing literature for this spousal disagreement.
            Spouses are no more likely to agree on specific decisions
            compared with general decision making, are more likely to
            agree on the decision-making process, and are less likely to
            agree on decision making for activities in which both take
            part. Moreover, women are more likely to report that their
            husbands were involved in decision making when speaking with
            a female enumerator. The findings suggest that
            intrahousehold disagreement is not driven by differing
            interpretations of which decisions count as
            &#x201c;major,&#x201d; or by asymmetric information.
            Although the paper finds evidence of enumerator effects,
            their magnitude is small and cannot explain the observed
            rates of spousal disagreement over decision making. Rather,
            spousal disagreement appears to stem primarily from
            systematic gender differences in interpreting what it means
            to be a decision maker. The paper discusses the implications
            of the findings for the measurement of intrahousehold
            decision making in household surveys.
Transnational Terrorism and the Internet
Does the internet enable the recruitment
            of transnational terrorists? Using geo-referenced population
            census data and personnel records from the Islamic State in
            Iraq and the Levant&#x2014;a highly tech-savvy terrorist
            organization&#x2014;this paper shows that internet
            access has facilitated the organization&#x2019;s
            recruitment of foreign fighters from Tunisia. The positive
            association between internet access and Daesh recruitment is
            robust to controlling for a large set of observable and
            unobservable confounders as well as instrumenting internet
            access rates with the incidence of lightning strikes.
Estimating Food Price Inflation from
            Partial Surveys
The traditional consumer price index is
            often produced at an aggregate level, using data from few,
            highly urbanized, areas. As such, it poorly describes price
            trends in rural or poverty-stricken areas, where large
            populations may reside in fragile situations. Traditional
            price data collection also follows a deliberate sampling and
            measurement process that is not well suited for monitoring
            during crisis situations, when price stability may
            deteriorate rapidly. To gain real-time insights beyond what
            can be formally measured by traditional methods, this paper
            develops a machine-learning approach for imputation of
            ongoing subnational price surveys. The aim is to monitor
            inflation at the market level, relying only on incomplete
            and intermittent survey data. The capabilities are
            highlighted using World Food Programme surveys in 25 fragile
            and conflict-affected countries where real-time monthly food
            price data are not publicly available from official sources.
            The results are made available as a data set that covers
            more than 1200 markets and 43 food types. The local
            statistics provide a new granular view on important
            inflation events, including the World Food Price Crisis of
            2007&#x2013;08 and the surge in global inflation
            following the 2020 pandemic. The paper finds that
            imputations often achieve accuracy similar to direct
            measurement of prices. The estimates may provide new
            opportunities to investigate local price dynamics in markets
            where prices are sensitive to localized shocks and
            traditional data are not available.
The Role of Work-from-Home in the
            Gender Asymmetries of COVID-19 : An Analysis for Latin
            America Based on High-Frequency Surveys
This paper studies factors that could
            account for the asymmetric impact of the COVID-19 pandemic
            in Latin America, by exploiting microdata from the World
            Bank&#x2019;s high-frequency phone household surveys
            conducted immediately after the onset of the pandemic. The
            paper codifies the occupation variables in these surveys,
            constructs measures of the individual&#x2019;s potential
            for work from home, and estimates fixed-effects models of
            job loss and other labor outcomes. In line with previous
            studies, the findings show that the impact of the COVID-19
            shock was (i) harder for women and (ii) strongly decreasing
            in the ability to work from home. Importantly, the analysis
            finds that the mitigating effect of working from home on the
            severity of the impact was especially relevant for women
            with children. These effects were larger in
            countries/periods in which the containment measures
            implemented by governments against the spread of the disease
            were more stringent. The paper also provides suggestive
            evidence on a plausible mechanism underlying the results:
            women with children were more likely to stay home due to
            school closures and the traditional intrahousehold
            distribution of childcare responsibilities, and thus the
            possibility of working from home was crucial for them to
            keep their jobs.
Microdata Collection and Openness in
            the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) : Introducing the
            MENA Microdata Access Indicator
This paper uses a “mystery client”
            approach and visits the websites of national statistical
            offices and international microdata libraries to assess
            whether foundational microdata sets for countries in the
            Middle East and North Africa region are collected, up to
            date, and made available to researchers. The focus is on
            population and  economic censuses, price data and
            consumption, labor, health, and establishment surveys.
            Following the exercise, a new microdata access indicator
            that measures the degree of opennes of microdata and the
            ease with which microdata users can understand and navigate
            the websites of national statistical offices is presented.
            The results show that about half of the expected core data
            sets are being collected and that only a fraction is made
            available publicly. As a consequence, many summary
            statistics, including national accounts and welfare
            estimates, are outdated and of limited relevance to decision
            makers. Additional investments in microdata collection and
            publication of the data once collected are strongly advised.
            National statistical offices in the region should make
            considerable improvements to the outlook of their websites
            to make them more user friendly. Specifically, microdata
            libraries and updated survey calendars should be a standard
            feature of the websites to ensure easy access to available microdata.
Measuring Quarterly Economic Growth
            from Outer Space
This paper presents a novel framework to
            estimate the elasticity between nighttime lights and
            quarterly economic activity. The relationship is identified
            by accounting for varying degrees of measurement errors in
            nighttime light data across countries. The elasticity is
            1.55 for emerging markets and developing economies, with
            only small deviations across country groups and different
            model specifications. The paper uses a light-adjusted
            measure of quarterly economic activity to show that higher
            levels of development, statistical capacity, and voice and
            accountability are associated with more precise national
            accounts data. The elasticity allows quantification of
            subnational economic impacts. During the COVID-19 pandemic,
            regions with higher levels of development and population
            density experienced larger declines in economic activity.
The US-China Trade War and Global Reallocations
How did the US-China trade war affect
            global trade? Surprisingly, exports of products taxed by US
            or China increased from &#x201c;bystander&#x201d;
            countries to the rest of world (excluding US and China).
            Hence, the trade war created trade opportunities rather than
            simply shifting trade across destinations. There was large
            cross-country variation in export growth of tariff-exposed
            products, explained mostly by country-specific components of
            tariff elasticities rather than by specialization patterns.
            Through a standard trade model, the signs of the tariff
            elasticities identify if a country complements or
            substitutes the US or China, and the slope of its supply
            curve. Countries that operate along downward-sloping
            supplies whose exports substitute (complement) US and China
            are among the larger (smaller) beneficiaries of the trade war.
Challenges of Public Credit
            Guarantee Schemes in Latin America during the Pandemic
Partial credit guarantees have been a
            central tool in countries&#x2019; strategies to support
            firms through the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper presents the
            results of a set of surveys covering 19 partial credit
            guarantees in 12 countries in the Latin America region,
            which were repeated at different stages of the pandemic
            crisis. The paper finds that most partial credit guarantees
            in the region are not large enough to foster change in the
            way the local financial sectors conduct business, how they
            engage with small and medium-size enterprises, and how they
            assimilate climate and gender considerations. Moreover, the
            response to the pandemic shows that most partial credit
            guarantees in the region have made limited use of the
            toolkit of parametric changes for boosting participation
            among financial institutions. Finally, the paper stresses
            the need for fair pricing methodologies and risk-based
            capital adequacy that may ensure the long-term
            sustainability of partial credit guarantee schemes.
More Is Better : Evaluating the
            Impact of a Variation in Cash Assistance on the
            Reintegration Outcomes of Returning Afghan Refugees
This paper studies the effect of a
            change in the amount of cash assistance provided to Afghan
            refugees returning from Pakistan on household outcomes
            post-return. Using a regression discontinuity design, it
            measures the impact of a large exogenous change in cash
            assistance amounts on post-return outcomes in a
            quasi-experimental setting. Administrative data and
            post-return monitoring data suggest that more than 16 months
            after their return, returnees who received a larger cash
            allowance of $350 per returnee&#x2014;equivalent to 2.5
            times the average annual pre-return annual
            income&#x2014;were better off than those who received a
            smaller cash allowance of $150. Recipients of the $350 cash
            assistance were more likely to invest in durable assets,
            such as a house (17 percentage point difference); recipients
            of the $150 cash allowance were more likely to use the
            assistance for immediate food consumption needs (40
            percentage point difference). Households that received $350
            per returnee were significantly more likely to have been
            issued legal documentation for their household members. In
            line with the literature on cash assistance, the change in
            cash assistance had no effect on post-return employment
            outcomes. The findings provide new evidence on the effects
            of unconditional cash transfers on refugee reintegration and
            show that larger cash transfer programs can have a large and
            long-term impact following refugees&#x2019; return.
More Is Better : Evaluating the
            Impact of a Variation in Cash Assistance on the
            Reintegration Outcomes of Returning Afghan Refugees
Policy Research Working Paper 9897

# More Is Better

Evaluating the Impact of a Variation in Cash Assistance on the Reintegration Outcomes of Returning Afghan Refugees _Hisham Esper Nandini Krishnan Christina Wieser_ Poverty and Equity Global Practice January 2022
The Interplay of Regional and Ethnic
            Inequalities in Malaysian Poverty Dynamics
This study employs a synthetic panel
            approach based on nationally representative micro-level data
            to track poverty and income mobility in Malaysia in
            2004&#x2013;16. On aggregate, there were large
            reductions in chronic poverty and increases in persistent
            economic security, but those who remained poor in 2016 were
            increasingly likely to be poor in a structural sense.
            Further, the poverty and income dynamics differ notably
            across geographic dimensions. Such disparities are most
            striking when comparing affluent urban Peninsular Malaysia
            with poorer rural East Malaysia. Although there are
            important differences in welfare levels between the main
            ethnic groups in Malaysia, the mobility trends generally
            point in the same direction. While the findings show that
            there is still scope for poverty reduction through the
            reduction of interethnic inequalities, the study underscores
            the importance of taking regional inequalities into account
            to ensure a fairer distribution of socioeconomic
            opportunities for poor and vulnerable Malaysians. Hence,
            addressing chronic poverty is likely to require additional
            attention to less developed geographic areas, as a
            complement to the current policies that are largely ethnicity-based.
Multidimensionality of Land
            Ownership among Men and Women in Sub-Saharan Africa
Across Sub-Saharan African countries
            with customary tenure systems and low levels of documented
            land ownership, there are limited nationally representative
            insights on men and women landowners&#x2019; rights over
            land. Variations in institutions and norms governing land
            ownership further complicate cross-country comparisons.
            Using machine learning techniques and nationally
            representative, intrahousehold survey data elicited in
            private from men and women on their ownership of assets,
            this paper creates unique profiles of landowners in
            Ethiopia, Malawi, and Tanzania, anchored in a range of
            constructs related to self-reported rights and control over
            land parcels. The analysis reveals a high degree of
            cross-country consistency in the new insights. Landowners,
            particularly women, often do not have full rights and
            decision-making power over land. Multiple correspondence
            analysis demonstrates that transfer rights (rights to
            bequeath, sell, rent out, and use as collateral) contribute
            the most to the variation in the composition of the
            constructs related to rights and control over land.
            Hierarchical clustering shows that landowners can
            effectively be clustered into three categories: (1) owners
            with mostly exclusive transfer rights, (2) owners with
            mostly joint transfer rights, and (3) owners with no/limited
            transfer rights. Owners with transfer rights tend to have
            all other rights and measures of control. Women are
            overrepresented in the cluster of landowners with no/limited
            transfer rights, and in moving from the cluster with mostly
            joint transfer rights to the one with mostly exclusive
            transfer rights, the increase in the share of individuals
            not needing permission to exercise any right is considerably
            greater among women than men.