rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Energy access, efficiency, and
            poverty : how many households are energy poor in Bangladesh
Access to energy, especially modern
            sources, is a key to any development initiative. Based on
            cross-section data from a 2004 survey of some 2,300
            households in rural Bangladesh, this paper studies the
            welfare impacts of household energy use, including that of
            modern energy, and estimates the household minimum energy
            requirement that could be used as a basis for an energy
            poverty line. The paper finds that although the use of both
            traditional (biomass energy burned in conventional stoves)
            and modern (electricity and kerosene) sources improves
            household consumption and income, the return on modern
            sources is 20 to 25 times higher than that on traditional
            sources. In addition, after comparing alternate measures of
            the energy poverty line, the paper finds that some 58
            percent of rural households in Bangladesh are energy poor,
            compared with 45 percent that are income poor. The findings
            suggest that growth in electrification and adoption of
            efficient cooking stoves for biomass use can lower energy
            poverty in a climate-friendly way by reducing carbon dioxide
            emissions. Reducing energy poverty helps reduce income
            poverty as well.
Factors that predispose youth to
            risk in Mexico and Chile
About half of Latin Americas youth are
            considered "at risk," meaning that they engage in
            or are at risk of engaging in risky behaviors that are
            detrimental to their own development and to the well-being
            of their societies. While child psychologists identify many
            factors that may cause some youth to engage in at-risk
            behaviors and others not to, only empirical evidence can
            identify the set that is relevant to a particular
            population. This paper uses youth surveys from Chile and
            Mexico to test which of a large set of potential factors are
            correlated with a range of risky behaviors among youth.
            These factors range from relationships with parents and
            institutions to household behaviors (abuse, discipline
            techniques) to social exclusion. The authors use stepwise
            regressions to sort out which variables best explain the
            observed variance in seven different risky behaviors. They
            find that higher socioeconomic status, a good relationship
            with parents and peers, strong connection with local
            governmental institutions and schools, urban residence,
            younger age, and spirituality emerge as key explanatory
            factors for all seven behaviors for boys and girls in both
            countries. This points to a wider range of policy entry
            points than currently used, including targeting parents and
            the relationship with schools.
Potential implications of a special
            safeguard mechanism in the WTO : the case of wheat
The Special Safeguard Mechanism was a
            key issue in the July 2008 failure to reach agreement in the
            World Trade Organization negotiations under the Doha
            Development Agenda. It includes both price and
            quantity-triggered measures. This paper uses a stochastic
            simulation model of the world wheat market to investigate
            the effects of policy makers implementing policies based on
            the Special Safeguard Mechanism rules. As expected,
            implementation of the quantity-triggered measures is found
            to reduce imports, raise domestic prices, and boost mean
            domestic production in the Special Safeguard Mechanism
            regions. However, rather than insulating countries that use
            it from price volatility, it would actually increase
            domestic price volatility in developing countries, largely
            by restricting imports when domestic output is low and
            prices high. This paper estimates that implementation of the
            quantity-triggered measures would shrink average wheat
            imports by nearly 50 percent in some regions, with world
            wheat trade falling by 4.7 percent. The price measures
            discriminate against low price exporters -- many of whom are
            developing countries -- and tend to increase producer price instability.
The growth report and new structural economics
Despite its heavy human, financial, and
            economic cost, the recent global recession provides a unique
            opportunity to reflect on the knowledge from several decades
            of growth research, draw policy lessons from the experience
            of successful countries, and explore new approaches going
            forward. In an increasingly globalized world where fighting
            poverty is not only a moral responsibility but also a
            strategy for confronting some of the major problems
            (diseases, malnutrition, insecurity and violence) that
            ignore boundaries and contribute to global insecurity,
            thinking about new ways of generating and sustaining growth
            is a crucial task for economists. This paper reassesses the
            evolution of knowledge on growth and suggests a new
            structural approach to the analysis. It offers a brief,
            critical review of lessons learned from growth research and
            examines the remaining challenges -- especially from the
            policy standpoint. It highlights how the 2008 Growth
            Commission Report identifies the stylized facts associated
            with sustained and inclusive growth. And it explains how the
            new structural economics provides a consistent framework for
            understanding the key findings of the Report.
Revisiting between-group inequality
            measurement : an application to the dynamics of caste
            inequality in two Indian villages
Standard approaches to decomposing how
            much group differences contribute to inequality rarely show
            significant between-group inequality, and are of limited use
            in comparing populations with different numbers of groups.
            This study applies an adaptation to the standard approach
            that remedies these problems to longitudinal household data
            from two Indian villages -- Palanpur in the north, and Sugao
            in the west. The authors find that in Palanpur the largest
            scheduled caste group failed to share in the gradual rise in
            village prosperity. This would not have emerged from
            standard decomposition analysis. However, in Sugao the
            alternative procedure did not yield any additional insights
            because income gains applied relatively evenly across castes.
Inheritance law reform and
            women's access to capital : evidence from India's
            Hindu succession act
This paper examines whether and to what
            extent amendments in inheritance legislation impact
            women's physical and human capital investments, using
            disaggregated household level data from India. The authors
            use inheritance patterns over three generations of
            individuals to assess the impact of changes in the Hindu
            Succession Act that grant daughters equal coparcenary birth
            rights in joint family property that were denied to
            daughters in the past. The causal effect is isolated by
            exploiting the variation in the timing of father's
            death to compare within household bequests of land given to
            sons and daughters in the states of Maharashtra and
            Karnataka. The analysis shows that the amendment
            significantly increased daughters' likelihood to
            inherit land, but that even after the amendment substantial
            bias persists. The results also indicate a robust increase
            in educational attainment of daughters, suggesting an
            alternative channel of wealth transfer.
The economy-wide effects of further
            trade reforms in Tunisia's services sectors
The purpose of this paper is to
            benchmark Tunisia against other emerging economies in terms
            of the regulatory barriers affecting particular services
            sectors, and to assess the economy-wide effects of further
            liberalizing these services trade restrictions, compared
            with reducing the dispersion in barriers to its merchandise
            trade. On the basis of a rather restricted sample of
            services sectors, partial regulatory reform would yield
            gains roughly equivalent to full unilateral reform of
            manufacturing tariffs, but roughly one-tenth the gains from
            full bilateral reform of border protection in agriculture
            with the European Union. The adjustment costs associated
            with these services trade reforms would be minimal. The
            paper identifies the reasons why the gains from these
            services reforms are relatively small, and argues that a
            wider set of reforms could provide win-win outcomes and even
            fewer adjustment costs. By contrast, the gains in
            agriculture and manufacturing tend to come at the expense of
            domestic output in the reforming sectors -- the gains are
            greater, but so too are the adjustment costs.
Adaptation to climate extremes in
            developing countries : the role of education
Global climate models predict a rise in
            extreme weather in the next century. To better understand
            future interactions among adaptation costs, socioeconomic
            development, and climate change in developing countries,
            observed losses of life from floods and droughts during
            1960-2003 are modeled using three determinants: weather
            events, income per capita, and female education. The
            analysis reveals countries with high female education
            weathered extreme weather events better than countries with
            equivalent income and weather conditions. In that case, one
            would expect resilience to increase with economic growth and
            improvements in education. The relationship between
            resilience in the face of extreme weather events and
            increases in female education expenditure holds when
            socioeconomic development continues but the climate does not
            change, and socioeconomic development continues with weather
            paths driven by "wet" and "dry" Global
            Climate Models. Educating young women may be one of the best
            climate change disaster prevention investments in addition
            to high social rates of return in overall sustainable
            development goals.
The impact of water supply
            variability on treaty cooperation between international
            bilateral river basin riparian states
This paper assesses the impact of water
            supply variability on treaty cooperation between
            international bilateral river basin riparian states. Climate
            change is anticipated to change the variability of water
            supply, as well as its expected magnitude. Previous studies
            have focused mainly on water scarcity, measured in terms of
            mean precipitation or per capita water availability in the
            country, as a trigger for conflict or cooperation. The water
            variability measure used here captures both annual runoff
            variability and precipitation variability over periods of 30
            and 100 years. The analysis used economic and international
            relations data to identify incentives for international
            cooperation in addressing water supply variability. The
            authors find that small-to-moderate increases in variability
            create an impetus for cooperation, although large increases
            in variability would reduce incentives for treaty
            cooperation. Stronger diplomatic and trade relations support
            cooperation, while uneven economic power inhibits
            cooperation. Various measures of democracy/governance
            suggest different impacts on cooperation across the basin
            riparians. The findings have policy implications in the
            context of preparedness for impacts of climate change on the
            water sector.
Characterizing the business cycles
            of emerging economies
Using the dating algorithm by Harding
            and Pagan (2002) on a quarterly database for 23 emerging
            market economies (EMEs) and 12 developed countries over the
            period 1980.Q1 - 2006.Q2, the authors proceed to
            characterize and compare the business cycle features of
            these two groups. They first find that recessions are deeper
            and more frequent among EMEs (especially, among LAC
            countries) and that expansions are more sizable and longer
            (especially, among East Asian countries). After this
            characterization, this paper explores the linkages between
            the cost of recessions (as measured by the average annual
            rate of output loss in the peak-to-trough phase of the
            cycle) and several country-specific factors. The main
            findings are: (a) adverse terms of trade shocks raises the
            cost of recessions in countries with a more open trade
            regime, deeper financial markets and, surprisingly, a more
            diversified output structure. (b) U.S. interest rate shocks
            seem to have a significant impact on the cost of recessions
            in East Asian countries. (c) Recessions tend to be deeper if
            they coincide with a sudden stop, but the effect tends to be
            mitigated in countries with deeper domestic credit markets.
            (d) Countries with stronger institutions tend to have less
            costly recessions.
Agricultural distortions in
            Sub-Saharan Africa : trade and welfare indicators, 1961 to 2004
For decades, agricultural price and
            trade policies in Sub-Saharan Africa have hampered farmers
            contributions to economic growth and poverty reduction.
            Although there has been much policy reform over the past two
            decades, the injections of agricultural development funding,
            together with ongoing regional and global trade
            negotiations, have brought distortionary policies under the
            spotlight once again. A key question asked of those policies
            is: How much are they still reducing national economic
            welfare and trade? Economy-wide models are able to address
            that question, but they are not available for many poor
            countries. Even where they are, typically they apply to just
            one particular previous year and so are unable to provide
            trends in effects over time. This paper provides a
            partial-equilibrium alternative to economy-wide modeling, by
            drawing on a modification of so-called trade restrictiveness
            indexes to provide theoretically precise indicators of the
            trade and welfare effects of agricultural policy distortions
            to producer and consumer prices over the past half-century.
            The authors generate time series of country level indexes,
            as well as Africa-wide aggregates. They also provide annual
            commodity market indexes for the region, and a sense of the
            relative importance of the key policy instruments used.
Empirical econometric evaluation of
            alternative methods of dealing with missing values in
            investment climate surveys
Investment climate Surveys are valuable
            instruments that improve our understanding of the economic,
            social, political, and institutional factors determining
            economic growth, particularly in emerging and transition
            economies. However, at the same time, they have to overcome
            some difficult issues related to the quality of the
            information provided; measurement errors, outlier
            observations, and missing data that are frequently found in
            these datasets. This paper discusses the applicability of
            recent procedures to deal with missing observations in
            investment climate surveys. In particular, it presents a
            simple replacement mechanism -- for application in models
            with a large number of explanatory variables -- which in
            turn is a proxy of two methods: multiple imputations and an
            export-import  algorithm. The performance of this method in
            the context of total factor productivity estimation in
            extended production functions is evaluated using investment
            climate surveys from four countries: India, South Africa,
            Tanzania, and Turkey. It is shown that the method is very
            robust and performs reasonably well even under different
            assumptions on the nature of the mechanism generating
            missing data.
Trade and regional inequality
This paper examines the relationship
            between openness and within-country regional inequality
            across 28 countries over the period 1975-2005, paying
            special attention to whether increases in global trade
            affect the developed and developing world differently. Using
            a combination of static and dynamic panel data analysis, we
            find that while increases in trade per se do not lead to
            greater territorial polarization, in combination with
            certain country-specific conditions, trade has a positive
            and significant association with regional inequality. In
            particular, states with higher inter-regional differences in
            sector endowments, a lower share of government expenditure,
            and a combination of high internal transaction costs with a
            higher degree of coincidence between the regional income
            distribution and regional foreign market access positions
            have experienced the greatest rise in territorial inequality
            when exposed to greater trade flows. This means that changes
            in trade regimes have had a more polarizing effect in low
            and middle-income countries, whose structural features tend
            to potentiate the trade effect and whose levels of internal
            spatial inequality are, on average, significantly higher
            than in high-income countries.
The publicity "defect" of
            customary law
This paper examines the extent to which
            dispute resolvers in customary law systems provide widely
            understandable justifications for their decisions. The paper
            first examines the liberal-democratic reasons for the
            importance of publicity, understood to be wide accessibility
            of legal justification, by reviewing the uses of publicity
            in Habermas and Rawls accounts of the rule of law. Taking
            examples from Sierra Leone, the paper then argues that
            customary law systems would benefit from making the reasons
            for local dispute resolution practices, such as
            "begging" from elders, witchcraft, and openness of
            hearings, more widely accessible. The paper concludes that
            although legal pluralism is usually taken to be an
            analytical concept, it may have a normative thrust as well,
            and that publicity standards would also apply to formal
            courts in developing countries, which are also typically
            "defective" along this dimension.
Political capture of
            decentralization : vote-buying through grants-financed local jurisdictions
A recent trend in decentralization in
            several large and diverse countries is the creation of local
            jurisdictions below the regional level -- municipalities,
            towns, and villages -- whose spending is almost exclusively
            financed by grants from both regional and national
            governments. This paper argues that such grants-financed
            decentralization enables politicians to target benefits to
            pivotal voters and organized interest groups in exchange for
            political support. Decentralization, in this model, is
            subject to political capture, facilitating vote-buying,
            patronage, or pork-barrel projects, at the expense of
            effective provision of broad public goods. There is
            anecdotal evidence on local politics in several large
            countries that is consistent with this theory. The paper
            explores its implications for international development
            programs in support of decentralization.
U.S. antidumping: much ado about zeroing
The United States use of
            "zeroing" in its antidumping procedures has become
            a political flash point threatening some legitimacy of the
            WTO's dispute settlement system. This paper provides a
            positive analysis of the zeroing issue, explains how it has
            evolved and who is likely to be affected by it. The authors
            use economic theory to identify how export price volatility
            accentuates the impact of zeroing on the size of U.S.
            antidumping tariffs and review the WTO caseload over
            zeroing. They describe the impact that the U.S.'s
            retrospective system for assessing antidumping margins has
            on zeroing and the political economy implications as the
            U.S. struggles to generate policy reform. The authors survey
            existing evidence of the impact of the zeroing on dumping
            margins and contribute their own evidence to suggest that
            zeroing is just as likely to impact the size of U.S.
            antidumping duties applied on developing country exports as
            developed economy exports. Thus while developed economies
            have filed the vast majority of WTO disputes against the
            U.S. over zeroing, the authors conclude that zeroing is also
            likely a relevant issue for developing country exporters as
            over 60 percent of the product lines currently subject to
            U.S. antidumping are exported by developing countries.