rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Democratic Republic of Congo :
            product and market concentration and the vulnerability to
            exogenous shocks
The high level of exports and their
            product and market concentration exposes the Democratic
            Republic of Congo to the economic fluctuations of the
            country's trade partners. This paper uses the United
            Nations Conference on Trade and Development trade data set
            to analyze the Democratic Republic of Congo's export
            patterns for the period 1960-2014. The data confirm that the
            country's exports remain highly concentrated. The
            product concentration on minerals is high and reaches
            exceptional levels. The geographic concentration is also
            high, while there is a shift in destinations. Hence, EU27,
            traditionally the main market destination for the Democratic
            Republic of Congo, lost its importance to China for most of
            the past decade. This trend continued to increase in the
            past few years from 2010 to 2013.  The clear prevalence of
            commodity products within the Democratic Republic of
            Congo's exports and the higher exposure to the Chinese
            economic cycle are sources of vulnerability. The empirical
            analysis indicates that the country's exports appear to
            be significantly sensitive to foreign demand fluctuations.
            This exposure increases the volatility of the country's
            macroeconomic framework to exogenous shocks, with negative
            consequences on growth in gross domestic product and on
            external balances. The analysis concludes that increasing
            the Democratic Republic of Congo's resilience requires
            product and market diversification of exports. This
            diversification requires improvements in the investment
            climate and business environment, with emphasis on skills
            and infrastructure.
How do we prioritize the GHG
            mitigation options development of a marginal abatement cost
            curve for the building sector in Armenia and Georgia
Armenia and Georgia are taking the
            climate change agenda seriously and contributing to efforts
            for mitigating global climate change through various ways,
            including preparation of low-carbon development strategies
            for their future economic growth. The improvement of energy
            efficiency is one of the key elements of the low-carbon
            development strategies. This study develops a methodology to
            estimate a marginal abatement cost curve for energy
            efficiency measures and applies it to the building sector in
            both countries. The study finds that among the various
            energy efficiency measures considered, the replacement of
            energy inefficient lightbulbs (incandescent lamps) with
            efficient lightbulbs is the most cost-effective measure in
            saving energy and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the
            building sector. Most energy efficiency improvement options
            considered in the study would produce net economic benefits
            even if the value of reduced carbon is not taken into account.
Using administrative data to assess
            the impact and sustainability of Rwanda's land tenure regularization
Rwanda's completion, in 2012/13, of
            a land tenure regularization program covering the entire
            country allows the use of administrative data to describe
            initial performance and combine the data with household
            surveys to quantify to what extent and why subsequent
            transfers remain informal, and how to address this. In
            2014/15, annual volumes of registered sales ranged between
            5.6 percent for residential land in Kigali and 0.1 percent
            for agricultural land in the rest of the country; and US$2.6
            billion worth of mortgages were secured against land and
            property. Yet, informality of transfers in rural areas
            remains high. Decentralized service provision and
            information campaigns help reduce but not eliminate the
            extent of informality. A strategy to test the efficacy of
            different approaches to ensure full registration, scale up
            promising ones, and rigorously monitor the effect of doing
            so is described.
Expediting trade : impact evaluation
            of an in-house clearance program
Despite the importance of trade
            facilitation as an area of trade and development policy,
            there have been very few impact evaluations of specific
            trade facilitation reforms. This paper offers an evaluation
            of in-house clearance, a reform that allows qualified firms
            in Serbia to clear customs from within their own warehouse
            rather than at the customs office. The pooled synthetic
            control method applied here offers a novel solution to many
            of the empirical challenges that frustrate efforts to
            evaluate trade facilitation reforms. The method is used to
            estimate causal impacts on trade outcomes for 21 firms that
            adopted in-house clearance for import shipments. The program
            compressed the distribution of clearance times for adopting
            firms, but the estimated effects on median clearance times,
            inspection rates, and import value were not statistically
            significant. Tests for heterogeneous program impact do not
            indicate that the program affected adopting firms
            differently. Overall, the results suggest that the most
            evident benefit of the program for participating firms is
            reduced uncertainty about clearance times.
Increased coverage of maternal
            health services among the poor in western Uganda in an
            output-based aid voucher scheme
Vouchers stimulate demand for health
            care services by giving beneficiaries purchasing power. In
            turn, health facilities’ claims are reimbursed for providing
            beneficiaries with improved quality of health care.
            Efficient strategies to generate demand from new, often
            poor, users and supply in the form of increased access and
            expanded scope of services would help move Uganda away from
            inequity and toward universal health care. A reproductive
            health voucher program was implemented in 20 western and
            southwest Ugandan districts from April 2008 to March 2012.
            Using three years of data, this impact evaluation study
            employed a quasi-experimental design to examine differences
            in utilization of health services among women in voucher and
            nonvoucher villages. Two key findings were a
            16-percentage-point net increase in private facility
            deliveries and a decrease in home deliveries among women who
            had used the voucher, indicating the project likely made
            contributions to increase private facility births in
            villages with voucher clients. No statistically significant
            difference was seen between respondents from voucher and
            nonvoucher villages in the use of postnatal care services,
            or in attending four or more antenatal care visits. A net
            33-percentage-point decrease in out-of-pocket expenditure at
            private facilities in villages with voucher clients was
            found, and a higher percentage of voucher users came from
            households in the two poorest quintiles. The greater uptake
            of facility births by respondents in voucher villages
            compared with controls indicates that the approach has the
            potential to accelerate service uptake. A scaled program
            could help to move the country toward universal coverage of
            maternal health care.
On the central role of small farms
            in African rural development strategies
Improving the productivity of
            smallholder farms in Sub-Saharan Africa offers the best
            chance to reduce poverty among this generation of rural
            poor, by building on the limited resources farming
            households already possess. It is also the best and shortest
            path to meet rising food needs. Using examples from
            farmers' maize and rice fields, and comparisons with
            Asia, this paper examines why the set of technologies
            promoted to date have produced localized successes rather
            than transformational change. The paper explains the
            limitations of alternative policies that are not centered on
            small farms. It provides indicative examples of how
            resource-management technologies can supplement
            seed-fertilizer technologies to speed an African Green Revolution.
Openness, specialization, and the
            external vulnerability of developing countries
Deepening real and financial integration
            of developing countries into the world economy has prompted
            renewed interest in the contribution of external shocks to
            their macroeconomic fluctuations. This paper revisits the
            issue using four decades of annual data for a large sample
            of developing countries. The paper implements a
            conditionally-homogeneous panel vector autoregression with
            exogenous variables to model GDP fluctuations in these
            countries. It uses sign restrictions to identify four
            external structural shocks -– demand, supply, monetary, and
            commodity shocks -– and analyzes how their impact on growth
            is shaped by countries' policy and structural
            framework. External shocks are found to account for a small
            share of the forecast error variance of GDP, especially at
            short horizons. However, their contribution has been on the
            rise in recent decades. Further, global monetary shocks have
            become the leading external source of GDP volatility in
            developing countries. The paper presents a quantitative
            assessment of the effects of real and financial opening up,
            as well as those of commodity specialization, on the impact
            of external shocks on GDP. The results suggest that
            increasing openness can account for the increasing trend in
            the volatility attributable to external shocks, as well as
            the changing roles of different shocks. Moreover,
            commodity-intensive developing countries are found to be
            more vulnerable than the rest to all types of external
            shocks, not just commodity shocks.
Insuring growth : the impact of
            disaster funds on economic reconstruction in Mexico
Climate change has considerably
            increased the likelihood of experiencing extreme weather
            events. Governments in developing countries have a limited
            capacity to smooth the losses created by extreme weather,
            and could potentially benefit from the introduction of
            disaster funds, that is, ex-ante budgeting allocations for
            post-disaster reconstruction. So far the implementation of
            disaster funds has been limited, in part because it is still
            unclear whether disaster funds provide a cost-effective way
            of coping with these losses. By taking advantage of the
            sharp rules that govern the municipal-level eligibility for
            reconstruction funds in Mexico, this paper provides some of
            the first estimates of the impact of disaster funds on local
            economic activity. The main finding is that access to
            disaster funding boosts local economic activity between 2
            and 4 percent in the year following the disaster. Another
            finding is that the positive impact of disaster funds on
            local economic recovery can persist for as long as a year
            and a half after the disaster. Consistent with these
            findings, we additionally show that access to disaster
            funding leads to a large and sustained 76 percent increase
            in the growth of local construction employment. This labor
            market impact slightly precedes the overall increase in
            local economic activity.
Potential for application of a
            probabilistic catastrophe risk modelling framework to
            poverty outcomes : general form vulnerability functions
            relating household poverty outcomes to hazard intensity in Ethiopia
This paper analyzes the potential to
            combine catastrophe risk modelling (CAT risk modeling) with
            economic analysis of vulnerability to poverty using the
            example of drought hazard impacts on the welfare of rural
            households in Ethiopia. The aim is to determine the
            potential for applying a derived set of damage
            (vulnerability) functions based on realized shocks and
            household expenditure/consumption outcomes, onto a
            forward-looking view of drought risk. The paper outlines the
            CAT risk modeling framework and the role of the
            vulnerability module, which describes the response of an
            affected exposure to a given hazard intensity. The need to
            explicitly account for different household characteristics
            that determine vulnerability within our model is considered,
            analogous to how a CAT risk model would differentiate damage
            functions for buildings by different classes of
            construction. Results for a regression model are presented,
            estimating ex-post drought impacts on consumption for
            heterogeneous household types (e.g. with cattle, safety-net
            access, illness). Next, the validity/generalizability of the
            derived functions are assessed, to infer applicability of
            the derived relationships within a CAT risk modelling
            framework. In particular, the analysis focuses on external
            validity: whether the relationships established in the
            dataset can be used for forecasting outside of the sample
            used for analysis. The model is stress-tested using
            statistical methods of resampling. This involves randomly
            splitting the data into “training” and "testing"
            datasets. The tests show consistency of results across the
            datasets. Finally, future plans are outlined with regard to
            developing a fuller catastrophe risk model to combine with
            the consumption results.
Weather index insurance and shock
            coping : evidence from Mexico's CADENA Program
Weather risk and incomplete insurance
            markets are significant contributors to poverty for rural
            households in developing countries. Weather index insurance
            has emerged as a possible tool for overcoming these
            challenges. This paper provides evidence on the impact of
            weather index insurance from a pioneering, large-scale
            insurance program in Mexico. The focus of this analysis is
            on the ex-post effects of insurance payments. A regression
            discontinuity design provides find evidence that payments
            from weather index insurance allow farmers to cultivate a
            larger land area in the season following a weather shock.
            Households in municipalities receiving payment also appear
            to have larger per capita expenditures and income in the
            subsequent year, although there is suggestive evidence that
            some of this increase is offset by a decrease in
            remittances. While the cost of insurance appears to be high
            relative to the payouts, the benefits exceed the costs for a
            substantial range of outcomes.
A methodology to assess indicative
            costs of risk financing strategies for scaling up
            Ethiopia's productive safety net programme
This paper proposes and illustrates a
            methodology to assess the economic cost of the sovereign
            risk finance instruments available to the Government of
            Ethiopia and its development partners for financing the
            shock-responsive scalability component of the Productive
            Safety Net Programme. The methodology involves: (i)
            specifying rules for when additional expenditures would be
            triggered in each woreda; (ii) specifying alternative risk
            finance strategies; and (iii) analyzing the costs of each
            risk financing strategy, including sensitivity and scenario
            testing of the results. The methodology is applied to a
            hypothetical set of rules for drought-responsive
            scalability, and a range of potential risk finance strategies.
Solving commitment problems in
            disaster risk finance
Those at risk from natural disasters are
            typically under-protected, possibly because they expect
            benefactors such as governments and donors to come to their
            aid. Yet when relief comes, it is often insufficient,
            delayed or misallocated. Benefactors may wish to commit to
            provide an efficient amount of fast well-targeted relief,
            and leave the rest up to recipients, but such commitments
            are difficult. This article analyses how transferring risk
            to third-parties such as private insurers may help resolve
            these commitment problems. Using a simple model of disaster
            risk finance is used to identify three distinct commitment
            problems and then show how various properties of risk
            transfer schemes can help to resolve these problems. The
            paper illustrates how these commitment problems play out
            using examples from around the world, and demonstrates where
            risk transfer schemes seem to have helped in practice.
            Overall, the findings show that the benefits of such schemes
            depend on the relative severity of the different commitment problems.
Evaluating sovereign disaster risk
            finance strategies : a framework
This paper proposes a framework for ex
            ante evaluation of sovereign disaster risk finance
            instruments available to governments for funding disaster
            losses. The framework can be used by governments to help
            choose between different financial instruments, or between
            different combinations of instruments, to achieve
            appropriate and financially efficient strategies to fund
            disaster losses, taking into account the risk of disasters,
            economic conditions, and political constraints. The paper
            discusses the framework in the context of a hypothetical
            country, with parameters selected to represent a
            disaster-prone small island state. The paper shows how a mix
            of instruments can be chosen to minimize the economic
            opportunity cost given the underlying disaster risk faced
            and prevailing economic and financial conditions.
The Nexus of financial inclusion and
            financial stability : a study of trade-offs and synergies
Policy makers and regulators have
            devoted much effort to reforms aimed at improving financial
            stability in response to lessons from the 2007-09 crisis. At
            the same time, much effort has also been directed to
            promoting greater financial inclusion as an enabler of equal
            opportunity. To some extent, these endeavors have been
            exerted in silos, neglecting the possibility that financial
            inclusion and financial stability could be significantly
            intertwined, positively or negatively. If there are
            synergies or trade-offs between inclusion and stability,
            policy decisions must be informed, and the policy setting,
            design, and implementation adjusted accordingly. This paper
            (i) discusses the relationship between financial inclusion
            and stability, (ii) illustrates empirically interactions
            between the two financial sector outcomes, and (iii)
            outlines policy challenges stemming from these interactions.
Is inequality underestimated in
            Egypt evidence from house prices
Household income surveys often fail to
            capture top incomes which leads to an underestimation of
            income inequality. A popular solution is to combine the
            household survey with data from income tax records, which
            has been found to result in significant upward corrections
            of inequality estimates. Unfortunately, tax records are
            unavailable in many countries, including most of the
            developing world. In the absence of data from tax records,
            this study explores the feasibility of using data on house
            prices to estimate the top tail of the income distribution.
            In an application to Egypt, where estimates of inequality
            based on household surveys alone are low by international
            standards, the study finds strong evidence that inequality
            is indeed being underestimated by a considerable margin. The
            Gini index for urban Egypt is found to increase from 36 to
            47 after correcting for the missing top tail.
Roads and rural development in
            Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper assesses the relation between
            access to markets and cultivated land in Sub-Saharan Africa.
            Making use of a geo-referenced panel over three decades
            (1970-2005) during which the road network was significantly
            improved, the analysis finds a modest but significant
            positive association between increased market accessibility
            and local cropland expansion. It also finds that cropland
            expansion, in turn, is associated with a small but
            significant increase in local gross domestic product. These
            results are suggestive of agricultural activities that
            develop at the extensive margin, which are mostly to serve
            local demand, but are not indicative of commercial
            agriculture that serves external markets.