rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
What affects the Russian regional
            governments' propensity to subsidize
Subsidies funded by Russia's
            regional governments represented about 5.2 percent of GDP in
            1995, almost triple the 2 percent of GDP in subsidies funded
            by the federal government. Regional policies vary greatly,
            influenced more by local factors than by the federal
            government. To find out what affects the regional
            governments' propensity to subsidize, the authors
            examined available data for 1992-95, asking: How great is
            the variation across regions in the incidence of subsidies,
            and what are recent trends in such variation? What are the
            relative influences of supply and demand factors in shaping
            the current levels of subsidy? How do federal budget
            transfers affect regionally funded subsidies to local
            enterprises? To what extent are federal transfers
            distortionary, encouraging subsidies and postphoning the
            liberalization of local markets? Their findings: 1) Regional
            wealth and federal budget transfers to regional governments
            are two of the most important determinants of regional
            propensity to subsidize. 2) Even when regional budgetary
            wealth is controlled for, depressed regions (those affected
            most by industrial decline and unemployment) tend to spend
            less on subsidies than regions with more favorable
            economies. 3) Federal budget transfers are quite
            distortionary, that is, they encourage regional governments
            to continue subsidy policies and postpone structural
            reforms. In fact, federal transfers tend to be concerned in
            regions with the most distortionary policies. 4) Housing
            receives the lion's share of total regional subsidies,
            and there are greater disparities in housing subsidies than
            in agricultural subsidies. 5) Housing and transportation
            subsidies are strongly counter-equalizing: Households in
            wealthier regions receive more in housing subsidies and
            rural populations have less access to those subsidies, so up
            to 30 percent of regional subsidies are questionable in
            terms of equity. 6) Federal transfers have less effect on
            regional subsidies in agriculture, which are influenced more
            by the region's own tax base and its share of rural
            population or by such factors as the political influence of
            local interest groups. 7) To accelerate structural reforms,
            the federal government might consider reducing the number of
            recipients of federal budget transfers and changing the
            rules of allocation of the transfers, in particular by
            introducing conditional transfers linked to increases in
            cost recovery.
How government policies affect the
            relationship between Polish and world wheat prices
Cash prices for wheat in Poland are not
            closely related to futures prices in Chicago and London, for
            several reasons: differences in seasonality, fluctuations in
            exchange rate, poor dissemination of information in Poland,
            and most important the Polish government's intervention
            in wheat markets.  Polish wheat prices generally move to
            expected intervention prices and then stay there until the
            next intervention level becomes known.  The exception was in
            1994-95, when sharply higher world prices raised prices in
            Poland.  A wheat futures exchange in Poland could give the
            private sector a tool for hedging against price risk,
            improving efficiency and price discovery in Poland.  It
            would be difficult to develop, however, under present
            interventionist policies.  This situation could be improved
            by reducing the protection of prices and by making any
            intervention rules-based (reducing uncertainty about
            policies).  Should intervention be reduced or rationalized,
            the next question is whether Poland needs its own wheat
            futures exchange or whether Poland's private sector can
            use futures exchanges in London and Chicago to hedge against
            risk.  The answer to that question is not an easy one.
The costs and benefits of regulation
            : implications for developing countries
The past two decades have seen an
            unparalleled rise in new health, safety, and environmental
            regulation in industrial countries.  At the same time, in
            some countries there has been substantial economic
            deregulation of several industries (including airlines,
            railroads, trucking, energy, telecommunications, and
            financial markets).  Developing countries are engaged in
            deregulating some sector of the economy and devising new
            regulatory frameworks for others. After reviewing the
            literature, the authors provide an overview of the costs and
            benefits of regulation throughout the world, highlight the
            potential gains from reform of regulation and deregulation
            in both industrial and developing countries, draw lessons
            from experience with government  regulation, and suggest how
            to improve regulation in developing countries.  They find
            that it is possible to explore systematically the cost and
            benefits of regulatory activities using standard economic
            analysis.  They conclude that regulation - especially
            regulation aimed at controlling prices and entry into
            markets that would otherwise be workably competitive - can
            limit growth and significantly reduce economic welfare.
            Although unnecessary process regulation can hurt the
            economy, social regulations may significantly benefit the
            average consumer.  But some regulations do not meet goals
            effectively and may sometimes reduce living standards.
            Developing countries can consider several regulatory
            policies, tools, and frameworks to improve their approach to
            regulation.  What they choose will depend on available
            administrative expertise and resources, as well as political
            constraints and economic impacts.  Generally, local and
            national capabilities for evaluating regulation need to
            improved.  Regulation is not generally undesirable, but it
            often has undesirable economic consequences, which result in
            part from political forces to redistribute wealth.  These
            forces can be mitigated by more sharply evaluating in
            consequences and tradeoffs of proposed regulations.
Explaining agricultural and agrarian
            policies in developing countries
Political outcomes - such as
            agricultural taxation, subsidization, and the provision of
            public goods - result from political bargaining among
            interest groups.  Such bargaining is likely to be
            efficiency-enhancing and growth-enhancing when equally
            powerful interest groups - aware of the economywide budget
            constraint and know the economic implications of different
            policy options - participate, and when impartial
            institutions are available to enforce decisions.  The
            greater the deviation from these conditions, the greater the
            potential for efficiency-reducing outcomes, the costs of
            which will generally fall disproportionately on politically
            underrepresented or powerless groups.  Material conditions
            of agriculture production - such as spatial dispersion,
            seasonal work cycles, covariance of risk, and the associated
            market imperfections - exacerbate the difficulties faced by
            small producers to engage in collective action.  So, despite
            being generally the economically most efficient form of
            production, family farmers' ability to counteract the
            political influence of rural elites and urban dwellers is
            extremely limited.  Lack of independent institutions and
            clearly defined property rights - and the presence of
            organizational residues - not only reduce peasants'
            bargaining power but may also make it more profitable for
            powerful groups to prefer rent seeking to productive
            activities.  How can these undesirable outcomes be avoided,
            and how can sustainable policy   changes be initiated?
            Experience indicates that fiscal crises of the state, often
            triggered or aggravated by an external shock, can cause
            lasting changes of policies and institutions.  By forcing
            the state to devolve some of its power in exchange for
            financial assistance to meet its immediate needs, such a
            crisis can give rise to the emergence of independent legal,
            political, and economic institutions that are maintained
            even once the crisis has subsided,  External actors that
            provide resources in terms of crisis and at the same time
            enhance the scope for politically least vocal parts of civil
            society to participate in political discourse can have a
            significant impact on changing policy.  The paper discusses
            in detail the implications for research as well as for
            policy advice.
Agricultural trade and rural
            development in the Middle East and North Africa: recent
            developments and prospects
Despite petroleum's prominence in
            the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), agriculture remains
            important to most to the region's economies.  And more
            robust and more dynamic agricultural growth could
            significantly boost sustainable economic growth and rural
            development in those countries.  An appropriate avenue for
            improving agricultural growth is to expand agricultural
            exports in MENA countries with appreciable-to-large
            agricultural sectors and comparative advantage in cereal
            grains, agricultural raw materials, fruits and vegetables,
            and many categories of livestock and dairy products.  But
            high levels of protection in many MENA countries, especially
            for manufactures and some food products, contribute to
            overvalued exchange rates and a significant bias against
            agriculture.  Trade liberalization and other economic
            reforms to promote agriculture and improve rural welfare in
            MENA might be pursued through regional economic cooperation,
            but should be guided as much as possible by the principles
            of "open regionalism" - under which trade
            concessions negotiated between regional trading partners
            could be extended unconditionally to all trading partners,
            including trading partners outside the region.
EU (European Union) accession of
            central and eastern Europe : bridging the income gap
Joining the European Union (EU) is
            perhaps the key political and economic objective of Central
            and Eastern European (CEE) countries as they approach the
            21st century.  But how successful the CEE countries are in
            achieving this goal depends not only on how well and quickly
            they adapt their legal and regulatory systems to EU
            requirements but on how well and quickly the bridge they
            wide income gaps between CEE and EU countries.  Using a
            model and cross-sectional data to develop estimates, the
            authors investigate how  appropriate  structural policies
            adopted before and after accession to the EU can help CEE
            countries bridge this income gap.  They have much to gain
            from implementing policies that increase investment, support
            the development of human capital, and promote the legal,
            regulatory, and policy framework needed for market
            mechanisms to function, the faster they implement such
            changes, the faster they will bridge the income gap between
            them and the EU countries - and the more likely their
            accession to the EU will be successful.
The productivity effects of
            decentralized reforms - an analysis of the Chinese
            industrial reforms
The empirical literature on the effects
            of ownership has not distinguished between the effects of
            ownership and the effects of control.  It has also generally
            ignored the dynamic effects of various ownership and control
            rights.  Using a rich set of panel data about changes in
            China's state-owned enterprises, the author examines
            the static and dynamic effects of decentralizing ownership
            and control rights.  He finds that productivity and growth
            rates improved significantly when reform improved the
            incentives for managers and employees to learn and to work
            hard - for example by decentralizing the rights to control
            wages, make production decisions, and appoint new managers.
            Increasing profit-retention rates and adopting performance
            contracts - conventionally viewed as the most important
            reforms for China's state enterprises - did not improve
            productivity much.  Overall, decentralization accounted for
            a least 42 percent of productivity growth in Chinese state
            enterprises in the 1980s.  Much of that gain came from
            improvements in the growth rate of productivity rather than
            in improved levels of productivity.
Debt maturity and firm performance :
            a panel study of Indian companies
Economic policy makers traditionally
            hold the view that, because of imperfections in capital
            markets, a shortage of long-term finance acts as a barrier
            to industrial performance and growth.  Long term finance is
            thought to allow firms to invest in more productive
            technologies, even when they do not produce immediate
            payoffs, without fear of  premature liquidation.  As a
            result, special state-supported term-lending institutions
            have been established, especially in developing countries.
            But some believe that short-term finance may offer better
            incentives because it allows suppliers of finance to monitor
            and control firms more effectively, thus improving the
            firms' performance.  The authors empirically
            investigate the determinants and consequences of the term
            structure of debt.  Using a rich panel of data on privately
            owned companies in India, they also examine the influence of
            debt maturity structures on those firm's performance,
            especially on productivity.  The results are not conclusive,
            but seem to support conventional beliefs about the
            importance of long term finance to firm performance.  Heavy
            leveraging, however, has a strong negative impact on
            productivity.  They base their econometric evidence on
            estimates of a maturity equation and of a production
            function augmented by financial variables.  The data on
            which these results are based have been generated by a
            financial system in which there is little competition, in
            which state-owned financial institutions  are not guided by
            the profit motive and have no control over interest rates,
            so one cannot say whether short term finance would have been
            more beneficial in a less regulated system.  Moreover, by
            the end of the 1980s, the capital base of India's
            government-owned financial institutions had been severely
            eroded and they carried a heavy burden of nonperforming
            assets.  This means that the benefits of long term finance
            must be weighed against the costs.
Regional labor markets during
            deregulation in Indonesia : have the Outer Islands been left behind
Indonesia's labor markets,
            especially on the island of Java, have been transformed in
            the past 30 years, especially since liberalization picked up
            speed in the mid-1980's.  The author explores the
            regional dimensions of that transformation.  In some other
            countries, when labor markets changed, disparities among
            regions occurred.  In Indonesia, when the employment
            structure changed markedly, real wages rose not only in
            Java-Bali, but also in most Outer Island provinces.  Wages
            have grown more rapidly in Java-Bali, but labor in the Outer
            Island provinces has enjoyed large gains, the result of the
            rapid economic growth that came during deregulation.  Among
            Outer Island provinces, Northern Sumatra and the poorer
            Eastern Island provinces have experienced substantial
            growth, while the Kalimantan provinces have lagged in
            manufacturing employment and wages.  Labor market outcomes
            have also been less favorable in land-abundant provinces
            that received many assisted migrants during Indonesia's
            earlier oil boom.  The author concludes that export-led
            industrialization concentrated in Java-Bali has helped
            change the labor market and income growth outside Java-Bali
            also.  Improved wages and the shift of labor out of
            agriculture also partly reflect the government's
            continuing support for infrastructure and human resource
            development in the Outer Island provinces.
The economics of the informal sector
            : a simple model and some empirical evidence from Latin America
The author presents the view that
            informal economies arise when governments impose excessive
            taxes and regulations that they are unable to enforce. The
            author studies the determinants and effects of the informal
            sector using an endogenous growth model whose production
            technology depends essentially on congestable public
            services. In this model, changes (in both policy parameters
            and the quality of government institutions) that promote an
            increase in the relative size of the informal economy will
            also generate a reduction in the rate of economic growth.
            Using data from Latin American countries in the early
            1990's, the author tests some of the model's
            implications and estimates the informal sector's size
            in these countries --identifying the size of the informal
            sector to latent variables for which multiple causes and
            indicators exist. The results suggest that: the size of the
            informal sector depends positively on proxies for tax burden
            and restrictions on the labor market; it depends negatively
            on a proxy for the quality of government institutions; and
            an increase in the size of the informal sector hurts growth
            by reducing the availability of public services for everyone
            in the economy, and by increasing the number of activities
            that use some existing public services less efficiently or
            not at all.
Access to long term debt and effects
            of firm's performance : lessons from Ecudaor
Recent theory increasingly emphasizes
            the association of short-term debt with higher-quality firms
            and better incentives.  The possibility of premature
            liquidation, for example, may serve as a disciplinary device
            to improve firm performance.  At the same time the role of
            long-term debt, especially when it is heavily subsidized, is
            being rethought because so many development banks are
            plagued with nonperforming loans and doubts about the
            selection criteria used in allocating funds.  The authors
            explore empirical evidence about the structure of debt
            maturity in Ecuadorian firms.  They discuss how it has been
            affected by government intervention in credit markets, and
            by financial liberalization.  Using firm panel data, they
            investigate the determinants of access to long-term debt in
            Ecuador.  Finally, they provide evidence about how the
            maturity structure of debt affects firms' performance,
            particularly productivity and capital accumulation.  They
            find that:  a) long-term debt is very unevenly distributed;
            b) large firms are more likely to have access to long term
            debt than small firms and are on average more profitable; c)
            conditional on size, operating profits do not increase
            probability of receiving long-term credit and may actually
            decrease it, suggesting that the mechanism used to allocate
            long-term resources in Ecuador may be flawed; d) the
            allocation problem was worse for directed credit, though
            there is evidence this problem was less severe after
            financial liberalization; e) there is a strong positive
            association between asset maturity and debt maturity, a
            matching of assets and liabilities; f) shorter-term loans
            are not conducive to greater productivity, while long-term
            loans may lead to improvements in productivity; and g) while
            long-term loans may positively affect the quality of capital
            accumulation, they do not have an impact on the amount of
            fixed investment.