rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
A framework for assessing systemic risk
When faced with financial crises,
            authorities worldwide tend to respond aggressively with
            public support measures. Given the adverse impact on moral
            hazard and market discipline, support measures involving
            public money are ideally limited to crisis situations
            involving systemic risk: a disturbance in the financial
            system that is serious enough to affect the real economy.
            This note sets out the main characteristics of a systemic
            risk assessment framework: a simple analytical framework
            that can be used by authorities with financial crisis
            management responsibilities in times of financial crisis to
            assess the extent to which that particular crisis situation
            poses systemic risk.
The global apparel value chain,
            trade and the crisis : challenges and opportunities for
            developing countries
This paper examines the impact of two
            crises on the global apparel value chain: the World Trade
            Organization phase-out of the quota system for textiles and
            apparel in 2005, which provided access for many poor and
            small export-oriented economies to the markets of
            industrialized countries, and the current economic recession
            that has lowered demand for apparel exports and led to
            massive unemployment across the industrys supply chain. An
            overarching trend has been the process of global
            consolidation, whereby leading apparel suppliers (countries
            and firms alike) have strengthened their positions in the
            industry. On the country side, China has been the big
            winner, although Bangladesh, India, and Vietnam have also
            continued to expand their roles in the industry. On the firm
            side, the quota phase-out and economic recession have
            accelerated the ongoing shift to more streamlined global
            supply chains, in which lead firms desire to work with
            fewer, larger, and more capable suppliers that are
            strategically located around the world. The paper concludes
            with recommendations for how developing countries as well as
            textile and apparel suppliers can adjust to the crisis.
OECD imports : diversification and
            quality search
This paper explores the evolution of
            OECD imports over time and as a function of income levels,
            measuring the concentration of those imports across origin
            countries at the product level. The authors find evidence of
            diversification followed, in the last years of the sample
            period (post-2000), by a slight re-concentration. This
            re-concentration is entirely explained by the growing
            importance of Chinese products in OECD imports. They also
            find evidence of relatively more volatile concentration
            levels for differentiated goods, consistent with a simple
            model of adverse selection and screening of suppliers by
            OECD buyers. Finally, they find that "accession"
            to OECD markets occurs directly (rather than after acquiring
            prior export experience on other markets) for more than half
            of the (extra-OECD) exporter/product pairs, but that one to
            eight years of experience enhances subsequent survival on
            OECD markets. Exports that reach OECD markets after more
            than eight years of experience elsewhere tend to survive less.
Assessing poverty and distributional
            impacts of the global crisis in the Philippines : a
            microsimulation approach
As the financial crisis has spread
            through the world, the lack of real-time data has made it
            difficult to track its impact in developing countries. This
            paper uses a micro-simulation approach to assess the poverty
            and distributional effects of the crisis in the Philippines.
            The authors find increases in both the level and the depth
            of aggregate poverty. Income shocks are relatively large in
            the middle part of the income distribution. They also find
            that characteristics of people who become poor because of
            the crisis are different from those of both chronically poor
            people and the general population. The findings can be
            useful for policy makers wishing to identify leading
            monitoring indicators to track the impact of macroeconomic
            shocks and to design policies that protect vulnerable groups.
Increasing public expenditure
            efficiency in oil-rich economies : a proposal
This paper proposes that, to increase
            the efficiency of public spending in oil-rich economies,
            some or all of the oil revenues be transferred to citizens,
            and fiscal instruments such as taxation be used to finance
            public expenditures. The authors develop the case as
            follows. First, they confirm the well-known result that
            public-expenditure efficiency is lower in oil-rich countries
            compared with other developing countries. Second, they show
            that this efficiency gap is associated with differences in
            accountability to citizens of government's spending
            decisions. They find that various measures of accountability
            are systematically weaker in oil-rich countries. They
            attribute this difference to the fact that oil revenues
            typically accrue directly to the government, unlike tax
            revenues, which pass through the hands of citizens. Third,
            they show that, controlling for a number of factors,
            accountability is stronger in countries that rely more on
            direct taxation to finance public spending. They conclude
            that accountability, and hence public expenditure
            efficiency, can be increased by transferring oil revenues to
            citizens and then taxing them to finance public spending.
            The paper reviews existing schemes that redistribute oil
            revenues to the population, such as the Alaska Citizen Fund,
            to assess the feasibility of a modest proposal in African
            countries. The authors conclude that, while it may be
            difficult to implement such a proposal in existing oil
            producers, there is scope for introducing it in some of
            Africa's new oil producers.
Designing the payout Phase of
            pension systems : policy issues, constraints and options
This paper examines the policy issues,
            constraints and options facing policymakers in promoting the
            development of sound markets for retirement products. It
            discusses the various risks faced by pensioners and the risk
            characteristics of alternative retirement products and also
            reviews the risks faced by providers of retirement products
            and the management and regulatory challenges of dealing with
            these risks. The paper focuses on policies that could be
            adopted by developing and transitioning countries where
            financial and insurance markets are not well developed. It
            argues for promoting an adequate level of annuitization but
            avoiding excessive annuitization. It also argues for
            favoring combinations of payout options, covering different
            products at a particular point in time as well as different
            payout options over time. The paper also discusses the
            choice between centralized and decentralized markets and
            highlights the basic elements of an effective regulation of
            risk management.
China's export growth and the
            China safeguard : threats to the world trading system
Is there evidence from China's
            pre-WTO accession period that newly imposed U.S. or EU
            import restrictions deflect Chinese exports to third
            markets? The authors examine this question by drawing on a
            newly constructed data set of U.S. and EU product-level
            import restrictions on Chinese trade imposed between 1992
            and 2001 and estimate their impact on Chinese exports to 38
            alternative markets. There is no systematic evidence that
            the import restrictions imposed during this period resulted
            in Chinese exports surging to such alternate destinations.
            To the contrary, there is weak evidence of a chilling effect
            on China's exports to third markets.
Inertia in infrastructure
            development : some analytical aspects, and reasons for
            inefficient infrastructure choices
This paper uses some simple conceptual
            models to draw out various implications of infrastructure
            investments with long lifetimes for the ability of societies
            to reduce their future greenhouse gas emissions. A broad
            range of such investments, related both to energy supply and
            demand systems, may commit societies to high and persistent
            levels of greenhouse gas emissions over time, that are
            difficult and costly to change once the investments have
            been sunk. There are, the author argues, several strong
            reasons to expect the greenhouse gas emissions embedded in
            such investments to be excessive. One is that infrastructure
            investment decisions tend to be made on the basis of
            (current and expected future) emissions prices that do not
            fully reflect the social costs of greenhouse gas emissions
            resulting from the investments. A second, related, set of
            reasons are excessive discounting of future project costs
            and benefits including future climate damages, and a
            too-short planning horizon for infrastructure investors.
            These issues are illustrated for two alternative cases of
            climate damages, namely with the possibility of a
            "climate catastrophe," and with a sustained
            increase in the marginal global damage cost of greenhouse
            gas emissions.
Carbon offsets with endogenous
            environmental policy
Interests in obtaining carbon offsets in
            host countries for Clean Development Mechanism projects may
            serve as an obstacle to implementing more stringent general
            environmental policies in the same countries. A relatively
            lax environmental policy, whereby carbon emissions remain
            high, can be advantageous for such countries as it leaves
            them with a higher than otherwise scope for future emissions
            reductions through Clean Development Mechanism and other
            offset projects. In this note, the potential to affect the
            availability of future Clean Development Mechanism projects
            is shown to distort environmental and energy policies of
            Clean Development Mechanism host countries in two ways.
            Measures to reduce use of fossil energy are weakened.
            Because this weakens private sector incentives to switch to
            lower-carbon technology through Clean Development Mechanism
            projects, host governments then also find it attractive to
            subsidize this switch, in order to maximize the countrys
            advantage from the Clean Development Mechanism.
Small state regional cooperation,
            south-south and south-north migration, and international trade
This paper provides a different basis
            than previous analyses for regional bloc formation and
            regional migration. Due to low bargaining power and fixed
            costs, small states face a severe disadvantage in
            negotiations with the rest of the world and might benefit by
            forming a regional bloc. The study a) presents a general
            equilibrium model where bargaining power, international and
            regional negotiation costs, number of issues negotiated, and
            accession rule to the bloc determine its size and welfare
            impact; and b) examines the impact of international
            migration as well as the migration-trade relationship. The
            main findings are: i) the likelihood of regional bloc
            formation, its size and welfare impact, increases with
            international negotiation costs and the number of issues
            negotiated, and decreases with regional negotiation costs;
            ii) bloc size is optimal (below the optimum) if an accession
            fee is (is not) charged; iii) South-South migration raises
            bloc size and welfare; iv) South-South migration and trade
            are complements under market access negotiations and are
            substitutes under negotiations for unilateral transfers as
            well as under migrant remittances; and v) South-North
            migration and bloc formation, and South-North and
            South-South migration, are substitutes for the states that
            benefit from membership in the bloc.
Thirty-five years of long-run energy
            forecasting : lessons for climate change policy
This paper sheds light on an implicit
            dimension of the climate policy debate: the extent to which
            supply-side response (emission-reducing energy technologies)
            may substitute for the transformation of consumption
            behavior and thus help get around the political difficulties
            surrounding such behavioral transformation. The paper
            performs a meta-review of long-term energy forecasts since
            the end of the 1960s in order to put in perspective the
            controversies around technological optimism about the
            potential for cheap, large-scale, carbon-free energy
            production. This retrospective analysis encompasses 116
            scenarios conducted over 36 years and analyzes their
            predictions for a) fossil fuels, b) nuclear energy, and c)
            renewable energy. The analysis demonstrates how the
            predicted relative shares of these three types of energy
            have evolved since 1970, for two cases: a) predicted shares
            in 2010, which shows how the initial outlooks for the
            2000-2010 period have been revised as a function of observed
            trends; and b) predicted shares for t+30, which shows how
            these revisions have affected medium-term prospects. The
            analysis shows a decrease, since 1970, in technological
            optimism about switching away from fossil fuels; this
            decrease is unsurprisingly correlated with a decline in
            modelers beliefs in the suitability of nuclear energy. But,
            after a trend of increasing optimism, a declining trend also
            characterizes renewable energies in the 1980s and 1990s
            before a slight revival of technological optimism about
            renewables in the aftermath of Kyoto.
Decentralization (localization) and
            corruption : new cross-country evidence
This paper attempts to improve the
            understanding and measurement of decentralization and its
            relationship with corruption in a worldwide context. This is
            done by presenting the conceptual underpinnings of such
            relationship as well as using superior and more defensible
            measures of both decentralization in its various dimensions
            as well as corruption for a sample of 182 countries. It is
            the first paper that treats various tiers of local
            governments (below the inter-mediate order of government) as
            the unit of comparative analysis. In contrast, previous
            analyses erroneously focused on subnational governments as
            the unit of analysis which yields invalid cross-country
            comparisons. By pursuing rigorous econometric analysis, the
            paper demonstrates that decentralization, when properly
            measured to mean moving government closer to people by
            empowering local governments, is shown to have significant
            negative effect on the incidence of corruption regardless of
            the choice of the estimation procedures or the measures of
            corruption used. In terms of various dimensions of
            decentralized local governance, political decentralization
            matters even when we control for fiscal decentralization.
            Further voice (political accountability) is empirically
            shown to be more important in combating corruption than exit
            options made available through competition among jurisdictions.
North-south trade-related technology
            diffusion : virtuous growth cycles in Latin America
This paper examines the impact on total
            factor productivity in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)
            and in other developing countries of trade-related
            technology diffusion from the North) (denoted by NRD),
            education, and governance, research and development The NRD
            value for a developing country is an average of R&D
            stocks in the North, with weights related to openness with
            the North. Industry-specific NRD is based on the Norths
            industry-specific R&D, North-South trade patterns, and
            input-output relations in the South. The main findings are:
            i) the impact of education and governance on TFP is
            significantly larger in LAC than in other developing
            countries, while the opposite holds for NRD; and ii)
            education, governance and NRD have additional effects on TFP
            in LACs R&D-intensive industries through their
            interaction with either or both of the other two variables;
            and iii) since NRD increases with openness and with R&D
            in the North, both variables raise the South's TFP
            directly as well as through their interaction with education
            and governance. These interaction effects imply that
            increasing the level of any of the three policy variables --
            education, governance, or openness --results in virtuous
            growth cycles. These are smallest under an increase in one
            of these variables, stronger under an increase in two of
            them and strongest under an increase in all three variables.
Developing countries and monitoring
            WTO commitments in response to the global economic crisis
This paper examines the role of the
            public sector in providing additional information to
            exporters in developing countries as they seek to monitor
            and keep open their access to foreign markets by using the
            rules of the WTO system. It highlights new information
            generation and dissemination initiatives undertaken by the
            WTO Secretariat, Global Trade Alert, and the World Bank in
            response to the global economic crisis of 2008-2009. Given
            trends in the imposition of new crisis-era trade barriers
            that these initiatives have identified, the paper describes
            ways in which the new sources of rich and detailed data may
            be used to further assist developing country exporters that
            may lack the capacity to sufficiently monitor their trading
            interests by relying solely on private resources.
Rigidities in employment protection
            and exporting
A large number of studies have shown
            that contribution of exporters to economic growth and
            development is much higher than non-exporting firms. This
            evidence has lead governments to improve their trade
            policies in order to increase foreign exposure of firms.
            However, improvements in trade policies can only be fully
            effective when they are complemented with other regulatory
            reforms that improve the investment climate for firms. This
            study focuses on a particular aspect of investment climate,
            namely employment protection legislation, and shows how
            these regulations discourage firms from exporting. Using a
            rich set of firm level data from 26 countries in the Eastern
            Europe and Central Asia region, the author shows that firms
            that cannot create new jobs due to restrictive labor
            regulations are less likely to export. Evidence shows that
            firms that plan to export expand their size before they
            start to export. However the rigidities in labor markets
            make this adjustment costly. Higher costs of labor decrease
            operating profits and lead to a higher threshold value of
            productivity required for entering export markets. As a
            result, a smaller fraction of firms chooses to export.
Access to water, women's work
            and child outcomes
Poor rural women in the developing world
            spend considerable time collecting water. How then do they
            respond to improved access to water infrastructure? Does it
            increase their participation in income earning market-based
            activities? Does it improve the health and education
            outcomes of their children? To help address these questions,
            a new approach for dealing with the endogeneity of
            infrastructure placement in cross-sectional surveys is
            proposed and implemented using data for nine developing
            countries. The paper does not find that access to water
            comes with greater off-farm work for women, although in
            countries where substantial gender gaps in schooling exist,
            both boys' and girls' enrollments improve with
            better access to water. There are also some signs of impacts
            on child health as measured by anthropometric z-scores.
Social protection in Latin America :
            achievements and limitations
Social protection systems in Latin
            America have been transformed in the past two decades. Until
            the 1980s, those who were not covered by the social security
            arrangements available primarily in the urban formal sector
            received little public assistance beyond universal subsidies
            for some food or fuel purchases. Since the 1990s, the
            introduction of non-contributory social insurance programs
            (including "social pensions") and conditional cash
            transfers has substantially extended the coverage and
            improved the incidence of social assistance. However, the
            organic growth of subsidized social assistance in parallel
            to the older social insurance system, financed largely out
            of taxes on formal sector employment, has led to a dual
            system that is neither properly equitable nor efficient. The
            twin challenges that now face social protection in Latin
            America are to better integrate those two halves of the
            system, and to develop programs that promote sustainable
            self-reliance, by moving from "safety nets" to
            "opportunity ropes."