rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
# Conclusion

This paper has provided a comparative analysis of the distribution of subsidies across the MENA region and a comparative analysis of the welfare and budget effects of subsidy reforms considering a 30 percent reduction in subsidies. We used a special version of SUBSIM designed to make comparative analyses of subsidy reforms across countries in US$-PPP values. The purpose of the paper was not to provide exact estimates of the impacts of reforms but to compare outcomes across countries.

The population sample considered is large, almost 130 million people or 34 percent of the total population in the MENA region in 2014. All data were actualized to 2014, and all expenditures transformed into US$-PPP values using the latest 2011 PPP conversion factor. The total household expenditure considered is approximately $0.63 trillion-PPP or 3,913 US$-PPP per capita, per year on average. The sample of countries covered includes low-income countries, low-middle-income countries and middle-income countries. The sample also includes net oil exporters as well as net oil importers.

We found that the size of subsidies does not necessarily relate to the needs of a population. In Djibouti, for example, the poorest of the countries considered in this paper, the price of LPG is 15 times the price in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the richest country considered. Products such as LPG and electricity tend to have higher subsidies than gasoline. Food subsidies tend to be higher among net oil exporters, as the oil wealth is partly distributed to the population via food subsidies.

Subsidized products are quite important for the populations of the MENA region. LPG can account for more than 2 percent of total expenditure as for the poorest quintile in Tunisia, and electricity can reach 3.5 percent of expenditure as for the poorest quintile in Tunisia. And products such as sugar can reach up to 8 percent for the poorest people in Djibouti. The importance of LPG decreases with welfare, but it increases for gasoline.

The consumption pattern of subsidized products partly explains who benefits from subsidies, and it is clear that the main beneficiaries can be very different depending on the product and country considered. For example, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, subsidies are progressive for LPG but 22
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# FUNCTIONAL LITERACY, HETEROGENEITY AND THE RETURNS TO SCHOOLING:  MULTI-COUNTRY EVIDENCE

# Tazeen Fasih<sup>*</sup>

# Harry Anthony Patrinos<sup>†</sup>

# Chris Sakellariou<sup>‡</sup>

**Abstract:** Little is known about which of the skills that make up workers’ human capital contribute to higher earnings. Past empirical evidence suggest that most of the return to schooling is generated by effects or correlates unrelated to the skills measured by the available tests. This paper uses the International Adult Literacy and the Adult Literacy and Life Skills surveys to obtain multi-country estimates of the components of the return to schooling.  The results reveal considerable heterogeneity and a dichotomy between two groups of countries. For a subgroup of educationally advanced countries, nearly half of the return to schooling can be attributed to labor marker-relevant functional literacy skills associated with schooling, while for a subgroup of less educationally advanced countries, such skills account for just over 20 percent of the return to schooling, while the return to schooling mostly reflects the signaling value of schooling.

JEL classification: I21; J24; J31 Keywords: Literacy skills; schooling; rate of return Sector Board: Education We are grateful to Flavio Cunha for comments provided on an earlier draft of the paper, and to Emiliana Vegas and other participants in the World Bank workshop on Linking Education Outcomes to Labor Market Policies for valuable comments.

> * World Bank

> † World Bank

> ‡ Division of Economics, Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
# **1 Introduction**

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe disruptions to the global economy, with significant effects on livelihoods particularly in developing and emerging economies. To stem the spread of the virus and save lives, governments around the world imposed restrictions on movement of people. Notable among these restrictions were stay-at-home (SAH) orders or lockdowns and social distancing. As a consequence, many (non-essential) employment activities also transitioned to home-based-work (HBW). For work environments, where home-based-work was not possible, workers often worked in shifts to reduce the capacity of people at the work place at any given point in time. In the developing world, where majority of people work in the informal sector, these restrictions and SAH orders were less strict due to the economic and logistic constraints. Nonetheless, overall, the restrictions and associated impact on the global economy have implications on energy demand. For instance, the transition to HBW is likely to increase residential energy consumption while decreasing non-residential consumption, especially given the important role of energy in the modern economy. At the same time, pandemic relief measures such as electricity subsidies implemented in several countries are likely to have intended and unintended consequences on electricity consumption (Saltane et al., 2022; Berkouwer et al., 2022).

In this paper, we examine the electricity demand response of households and firms to the COVID pandemic in Africa using unique administrative data on billing records from Ghana and Rwanda. The choice of these countries is motivated by two unique features: (i) Ghana has one of the highest electrification rates (86%) in Africa, while access rate in Rwanda remain relatively low (47%) but rising;<sup>1</sup> and (ii) Ghana offered electricity subsidies to customers during the pandemic while Rwanda did not. Thus, data from these countries will provide comprehensive evidence of the effect of the pandemic and associated policy measures on households and firms in the context of developing economies. Specifically, we seek to address two key questions: first, how did the pandemic affect electricity consumption by households and firms in the developing world? Second, to what extent did pandemic relief measures such as electricity subsidies matter for mediating the impact of the pandemic on households?

Causal identification of the impact of COVID on outcomes is beset with several challenges. The main challenge relates to the universal nature of the pandemic and the wide reach of the lockdowns (SAH) in many countries. This limits the ability of researchers to

> 1https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.ELC.ACCS.ZS?locations=GH-RW

1
# Is Deliberation Equitable? Evidence from Transcripts of Village Meetings in South India<sup>�</sup>

Radu Ban<sup>y</sup> London School of Economics and World Bank Vijayendra Rao<sup>z</sup> Development Research Group - World Bank

> �We are grateful to Babu Dasari Srinivas and Jillian Waid for valuable research assistance, and to SRI-IMRB for conducting the ...eldwork. Valuable suggestions were provided by Timothy Besley, Francisco Ferreira, Christian List, Riccardo Puglisi, Paromita Sanyal and participants at seminars at Boston University, Brown University, LSE, NEUDC and The World Bank. We are indebted to the Dutch Government, the Swedish International Development Agency, and the British Department for International Development for ...nancial support. The points of view expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors and should not be attributed to the World Bank, its executive directors or its member countries. yr.ban@lse.ac.uk

> zvrao@worldbank.org

1
education Turkish to a subregion. In sum, there is some evidence that the inflow of Syrian refugees results in a decrease in the number of Turkish living in a subregion. The evidence, however, is weak and the impact unlikely to be very large.

# **5. PLACEBO TESTS AND ROBUSTNESS CHECKS**

# **5.1 Placebo Tests**

The key threat to the validity of our instrument is that there are subregion specific economic trends that are correlated with the instrument, and not fully controlled for by the inclusion of the log distance of a Turkish subregion from the Syrian border. _A priori_ this seems unlikely since the instrument is also based on travel distances, but we can test for the existence of such trends in a pre-period. Specifically, we run regressions that are analogous to those reported in Tables 5, 6 and 7 using data from the LFS 2009 and 2011. As a placebo test we pretend that the Syrian refugees had arrived between 2009 and 2011, rather than between 2011 and 2014, to see if the instrument is correlated with Turkish outcomes in this pre-period.

Table 10a presents the results of our placebo tests. For the overall sample there is no statistically significant trend that is correlated with subsequent (instrumented) refugee flows in formal or informal employment, or in log wages. For subgroups of natives (by gender, age or education) we find only one statistically significant pre-trend at a 5 percent significance level.<sup>35</sup> However, we do find five estimates that are significant at the 10 percent level, which suggests there may be some (marginally) significant pre-trends. These possible pre-trends suggest that we may be overestimating some of the positive total wage impact of refugees and on female formal employment. However, we would be underestimating the negative impact on informal employment for older workers and the high skilled, but overestimating it for younger workers. Clearly, to the extent that there might be pre-trends they are not simply positive or negative trends that increase or decrease demand for all types of labor. Rather they would have to far more subtle changes in the demand for specific types of workers. In sum, there is no strong evidence of pre-trends, but we cannot rule out that there may be some. One way to address this concern is to reduce the regions of Turkey used in the analysis and focus on a more homogeneous sample. We do so in Section 5.3 below.

> 35 This would be expected even if there were no significant pre-trends.

26
WPS3747 unemployment closure may not be significant. On the other hand, it is clear that the third case – that of fixed labor – does generate significantly smaller poverty reduction.

Of course any model is an abstraction of reality and labor markets in Indonesia probably don’t function precisely in the manner described under any of the three alternative specifications depicted above; rather they are likely to reflect of combination of these polar views of the world. Therefore, these results should be viewed as providing a range of plausible poverty outcomes subject to the other assumptions embedded in the model.

# **5. Summary and Conclusions**

The framework presented in this study has permitted us to generate detailed poverty outcomes resulting from international trade shocks. Given the magnitude of the shocks examined here, and the structural features of the Indonesian economy, only the full liberalization scenarios generate significant poverty changes. Their impacts are examined under alternative specifications of the functioning of labor markets. These assumptions generate quite different results but all conclude that the impact on poverty of full liberalization would be positive, with efficiency and income gains dominating the adverse food price changes that could hurt the poorest households. Results also suggest that poverty reduction would be higher in the rural than in the urban sector. Two alternative tax replacement schemes are examined. While the direct tax replacement appears to be more desirable in terms of efficiency gains and translates into higher poverty reduction, political and practical considerations could lead the Government of Indonesia to choose a replacement scheme through the adjustment of VAT rates across non-exempt sectors. Such a move would dampen the poverty reducing potential of trade reform.

17
|Study and Location|Definition of<br>Empowerment|Measurement<br>Concept|Data Sources|Focus|Conclusions|Implication|Scope|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|_Factors Affecting_<br>_Self Reliance_<br>www.scn.org/cmp|beyond political<br>or legal<br>permission to<br>participate in the<br>national political<br>system|common values,<br>communal services,<br>communications<br>within the<br>community and<br>between itself and<br>outside, confidence,<br>political and<br>administrative<br>context,<br>information,<br>intervention,<br>leadership,<br>networking,<br>organization,<br>political power,<br>skills, trust, unity<br>and wealth|evaluation<br>meeting to reach<br>consensus on the<br>relative strength<br>of and changes<br>in each item||empowerment|objectives||
|Spreitzer (1995)<br>_U.S._|Intrapersonal<br>empowerment as<br>the component<br>of psychological<br>empowerment<br>that deals with<br>cognitive<br>elements. Other<br>components are<br>interactional<br>(thinking about<br>and relating to<br>the environment)<br>and behavioral<br>(taking action<br>and engaging<br>issues)|Self-assessment<br>using a seven-point<br>Likert response<br>format for four<br>dimensions (sense<br>of meaning-beliefs<br>and attitudes,<br>competence, self-<br>determination, and<br>impact or efficacy)<br>averaged into a<br>single measure of<br>intrapersonal<br>empowerment|Survey data from<br>a sample of 324<br>middle managers<br>from different<br>units of a<br>Fortune 50<br>organization|Intrapersonal<br>empowerment<br>in the<br>workplace|Intrapersonal<br>empowerment<br>mediates the<br>relationship<br>between<br>workplace social<br>structure and<br>innovation, but<br>not effectiveness.|Intrapersonal<br>empowerment as<br>a mediator<br>between the<br>social context<br>(support,<br>information,<br>resources and unit<br>culture) and<br>behavioral<br>outcomes|Individual level;<br>perceptions (also<br>informational resources<br>and culture included in<br>social structural<br>context). Market<br>Domain.|
|McMillan, et al.|Gaining|Psychological|Data from|Predictors of|Predictors of|Ongoing|Individual and|

38
The first version of the program tests whether simplifying entry regulation and providing information alone could be effective in Benin, where formalization also means tax registration.<sup>2</sup> Specifically, in-person visits were conducted with informal businesses to present the new _entreprenant_ status available freely and in a day. The second version of the program is based on the idea that businesses may need additional incentives to take up formalization and, once formalized, additional support to access benefits and grow. In this version of the program, businesses that chose to formalize had the option to benefit from business training, counseling services, and some support to open a business bank account with advantageous conditions. Finally, in the third version of the program, businesses received tax mediation services as an additional incentive to formalization. The premise was to provide some form of protection in case the tax inspectors abused their power with newly formalized businesses. This last version of the programs aims to test the extent to which the fear of the tax administration is a barrier to formality. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to answer this question experimentally.

For the study, 3,600 informal businesses operating with a fixed location in Cotonou, including Dantokpa market (one of the largest markets in West Africa), were randomly allocated between these three treatment groups and one control group. In comparison to the studies mentioned above, this sample is composed of micro and small businesses with 1.2 employees on average and a monthly profit of CFAF 47,000 (US$213).<sup>3</sup> One year after the program started, all 2,400 informal businesses selected in the treatment groups received at least one visit from an advisor who presented the program and the potential benefits associated with formalization (specified by group). The advisors were affiliated with the CGA in Cotonou ( _Centres de Gestion Agréés_ ), a semi-public organization that specialized in business trainings. About 14 percent of businesses in groups 2 and 3 have started to use business training or counseling, and only 3% opened a bank account.<sup>4</sup> In this paper, we focus on the program’s impact on formalization one year after the program rollout. Important components of the program, like the business trainings, the counseling and the bank services were implemented more than 6 months after the program started. The impact that formalization could have on other outcomes like business performances or access to

> 2 A majority of informal businesses also pay taxes but usually the amounts to be paid are much smaller for informal firms. See Section 2 for a description of tax implications of formality.

> 3 USD 1 = XOF 218.82 in PPP terms in 2011-2015 (World Bank).

> 4 Results on bank account opening are based on data from Bank of Africa (updated to November 2014) and Orabank (updated to April 2015).

4
There is very little rigorous empirical evidence that productivity spillovers even exist between the organized and unorganized sector. Our analysis focuses on both organized and unorganized sector productivity and fills in this hole in the literature.

- Lastly we make innovative use of many years of organized sector data to ask whether growth in organized manufacturing is jobless growth.

The paper is organized as follows. In Section II we survey the literature. Section III and Section IV describe the data and empirical methods used in this paper. Section V provides estimates on organized sector employment and output and Section VI provides results on unorganized sector employment and output. Section VII focuses on total factor productivity of the organized and unorganized sectors. In Section VIII we examine the extent the lagged spillovers between the two sectors and provide evidence of jobless growth. In Appendix I we extend the main results by examining several industry and plant-level sources of heterogeneity – industrial policy reforms, unorganized plant location as well as organized plant size – that may affect the size of spillovers between the organized and unorganized sectors.

# **Section II. Literature Survey**

Until recently the theoretical modeling of the informal/unorganized sector in an economy was constrained to the dual economy framework of [Lewis (1954)] and [Todaro (1969)] where the unorganized sector is treated as completely separate from the rest of the economy. The unorganized sector absorbs excess labor not absorbed by the organized sector. Hence the labor market is the only link between the organized and unorganized sectors. Further these models assumed segmentation in the labor market which leads to different wages in organized and unorganized sectors. These models imply that as the size of the organized sector expands (increasing rural to urban migration) the size of the unorganized sector expands. However unorganized sector wages fall as the same amount of earnings are split between the everincreasing unorganized work force. Further this literature also assumes strict dualism in product markets. Organized and unorganized sectors produce similar products but serve different markets and charge different prices. The unorganized sector mainly services low income consumers charging low prices and hence is stuck with low productivity.

5
# Estimating the Impact of Weather on Agriculture<sup>∗</sup>

Jeffrey D. Michler<sup>1</sup> , Anna Josephson<sup>1</sup> , Talip Kilic<sup>2</sup> , and Siobhan Murray<sup>2</sup>

> 1 _Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, University of Arizona_

> 2 _Development Data Group (DECDG), World Bank_

_JEL Classification_ : C83, O13, Q12 _Keywords_ : Remote Sensing, Agricultural Production, Crop Yield Estimation, Sub-Saharan Africa ∗ Correspondence to tkilic@worldbank.org and smurray@worldbank.org. A pre-analysis plan for this research has been filed with Open Science Framework (OSF): https://osf.io/8hnz5/. We gratefully acknowledge funding from the World Bank Knowledge for Change Program (KCP). This paper has been shaped by conversations with Leah Bevis as well as seminar participants at the AAEA annual meetings in Chicago and Atlanta, and participants in presentations at Arizona State University in September 2019, the University of Minnesota in November 2019, the World Bank in January 2020, the 31<sup>_st_</sup> triennial ICAE conference in August 2021, and Virginia Tech in September 2021. We are especially grateful Alison Conley, Emil Kee-Tui, and Brian McGreal for their diligent work as research assistants and to Oscar Barriga Cabanillas and Aleskandr Michuda for the early help in developing the Stata weather package. We are solely responsible for any errors or misunderstandings.
Policy Research Working Paper 7613

# **Abstract**

Building on recent analyses that find a sizeable overall gender wage gap in Azerbaijan’s workforce, this paper uses data on young workers in their early years in the labor market to understand how gender wage gaps evolve over time, if at all. The paper uses a unique database from a survey of young people ages 15–29 years. The analysis provides evidence that new labor market entrants begin with little or no gender differences in earnings, but a wage gap gradually emerges over time closer to the childbearing years. The gender wage gap grows from virtually zero, or even a small, positive gap in favor of women, until age 20 years, to about 20 percent two years later and even more than 30 percent at age 29 years. The gap in labor supply rises from almost zero to about 20 percent during the years from 19 to 22, while the gap in hours worked falls from positive (up to six hours per week more than their male counterparts) to negative (up to five hours per week less) over the same period in the life cycle. When decomposing the gap at different deciles of the wage distribution, it appears that most of it is at the lower and upper ends of the distribution, among young adults and prime-age workers. Selection of women into employment is strong and strongly skill-based: when controlling for sample selection bias, the gender gap becomes positive.

This paper is a product of the Poverty and Equity Global Practice Group. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world. Policy Research Working Papers are also posted on the Web at http://econ.worldbank.org. The authors may be contacted at nsingh@worldbank.org and ssattar@worldbank.org.

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent._ Produced by the Research Support Team