rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
31 match those in the developed economy – which are lower. See the SW panel. Changing the returns has less impact than changing the quantity of schooling alone, increasing output to 67 _._ 7 percent of the developed economy. Again, a portion of this is due to the experience premium. If we remove the premium, _pcGDP_ only rises to 63 _._ 6 percent.

The SE panel shows what happens if we increase the returns to experience only. This increases _pcGDP_ to 66 _._ 4 percent. This is similar to the impact of increasing the quantity of education. The panel also compares the impact from changing the returns to experience to changing the quantity of education (NE panel): the impact on income of changing the returns to experience is faster. This is notable as significant reform to the schooling system is likely costly and slow. On the other hand, if reforms that improve the returns to experience are institutional, costs may be lower.

**Robustness.** Web Appx. Section A.7 shows that our quantitative results hold when we perform a number of robustness experiments with different parameter values. For example, the results are robust to alterations in demographics, retirement ages, labor market conditions or sets of returns. Furthermore, the findings are unchanged if specific types of workers or countries are excluded, more prominence is given to youth unemployment, experience is allowed to be accumulated before age 18, human capital spillovers are accounted for, or the sample is divided into three income groups (low, middle- and high-income countries). Web Appx. Section A.8 discusses the longrun welfare impacts of reforms. These impacts depend on the chosen discount rate, especially as reforms to experience have a faster impact than reforms to education. The same section then describes how our results can shed light on the long-run impact of reforms to the retirement age (since they affect the period of time over which the returns to experience or education pay off) or reforms that increase youth employment.

Finally, if human capital accumulation is not entirely a by-product of production (i.e. some investment in time is required) then the time spent by workers at work is reduced by the amount of time spent investing in human capital – let us call this “training.” If training is spread over one’s working life, then our estimates of the gap are not biased. However, as suggested Ben-Porath (1967), training is likely concentrated in a worker’s early years. This means that workers’ earnings in their early years are higher than measured, so that the experience slope is flatter. If workers in developed economies spend more time training than workers in developing
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- || Cumulative distribution of rides —— Percent of rides in reserved space — Percent of reserved space passengers who are men
parents rather than district-, state- or national- level education staff to make management, curricular, or budgetary decisions. A limited group of other educational interventions might improve learning (see, _inter alia_ , Jalan and Glinskaya 2005; and Glewwe and Kremer 2006). We focus on examining whether the new breed of school-level management programs can improve learning.

Evidence on the impacts of these programs is mixed. A review of school-based management plans in the U.S. (Summers and Johnson 1996) finds four evaluations with comparison groups. Collins and Hanson (1991) compared mean outcomes in Dade County, Florida schools that the county had picked to create faculty councils with budgetary and personnel power against other schools without the councils. After three years, they found unchanged test scores but decreased dropout and suspension rates in schools with councils. Taylor and Bogotch (1992) mined the same data to find no significant correlation between teacher autonomy and student test scores. South (1991) compared trends in Scholastic Assessment Test (sat) test scores between 1985 and 1989 in Monroe County, FL, which gave schools power to make budget, personnel, and curriculum decisions, all of Florida, and all of the U.S. They found no evidence of better performance in Monroe County. Winfield and Hawkins (1993) studied a Philadelphia program which attempted to increase collaboration within elementary schools. They ran regressions including non-project schools as a comparison group, controlling for various background indicators. They associated the project with teachers purchasing basic materials and hardware but little change in reading test scores.

Jimenez and Sawada (1999) examine 1996 data on Community Managed Schools (EDUCO), a program created to expand coverage in rural El Salvador. With no background controls, they found that parents of students in EDUCO schools were three times more likely to engage in daily classroom activities and significantly more likely to meet with teachers. Overall, EDUCO’s poor students had lower mean Spanish and math exam scores than the 5
8s11 - _Pgo, (XJ)De,(Sll)_ - _PpEp(XI,)D,I(ST)_ + = 0 (2.5 From equation (15): From (16), it is clear that 1) measures<sup>the shadow price or</sup> social cost of a marginal change in<sup>the pest population. This cost</sup> is a weighted average of the direct<sup>damage to cotton and the</sup> indirect (externality) damage to the<sup>rest of the crops.</sup> By rearranging equation (11), we get the following<sup>optimality</sup> condition: Equation (17) states that the basic input<sup>X. will be applied</sup> upto the point where its marginal benefit,<sup>as measured by the LHS</sup> of equation (17), is equal to its marginal<sup>market cost, W</sup> 2<sup>, npij</sup> the marginal cost arising due to the damage<sup>inflicted by the pest</sup> population.

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necessary to integrate the VAT and income tax databases, though that budgetary limitations prohibit the necessary investments).

KRA’s Large Taxpayer Office (LTO), established in 1998, was able to streamline and improve service quality. The establishment of the LTO was facilitated by the agency’s autonomy, which allowed the CG to make and implement the decision. The KRA pursued a policy of posting its best staff to the LTO, which, as a result, improved monitoring of taxpayer compliance. For example, on-time quarterly payment compliance improved from about 85% in 1998 to about 99% in 1999.

Two additional objectives on which KRA focused are issuing refunds in a timely manner and collecting tax arrears. KRA’s management of VAT refund claims improved considerably since 1997, most notably in the reduction of the refund backlog from approximately 6.2 billion Kshs in 1997 to about 400 million Kshs in 2001. Moreover, refund claim values represent a backlog of less than one month in 2001, which was relatively low in comparison to other developing countries. The KRA was less successful at arrears collection. As of 2001 the KRA was owed approximately Kshs 52.8 million, representing about 70% of income and domestic VAT collections in that year. The ability of the tax agency to collect arrears, however, was also subject to exogenous factors, including the judiciary, which has had a major impact on the KRA’s ability to enforce collections.

In the case of the URA taxpayer registration performance was disappointing overall. For example, the number of registered taxpayers in the LTO was only 317 in 2001. Moreover, of these only 86% and 85% paid the corporate income and VAT, respectively. At the same time it was reported that LTO’s tax assessments have a high error rate. The Internal Revenue Department reported nearly 184,000 registered taxpayers in 2001, of which only 39,000 were active, and, of these, only 4,712 and 5,236 (13.4%) filed corporate income tax and VAT returns, respectively.<sup>47</sup> Of those filing VAT returns, only 50.4% filed returns with payments in May 2001. The low active to registered ratio, as well as the high shares of non-filing and non-paying taxpayers, was partly a reflection of the inadequacy of the taxpayer registry and partly a reflection of low compliance rates.

> 47 There are questions about the reliability of URA data on taxpayer registration.

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# **VIII. CONCLUSION**

The paper examined what factor is the most important to develop the telecommunications network. In particular, it focused on the effect of termination-based price discrimination on network expansion, because price discrimination, in theory, induces customers to reveal their preferences and allow telephone operators to exploit more revenue opportunities.

Data from 45 fixed-line and mobile telephone operators in 18 African countries reveal that peak load pricing and termination-based discriminatory pricing are widely used. Advanced price discrimination instruments may remain to be exploited in the future.

The estimated demand function for telecommunications services shows that traditional network externalities are very weak, but the termination-based discrimination effect is significant particularly for peak and off-peak hours. Essentially, it is found that an instantaneous reduction of 1 percent in a rival’s market share would result in a 1 percent increase in own market share as a direct counterpart and an additional 0.2 percent increase due to the indirect network effect through differentiated tariffs.

To enhance access to telecommunications services and improve social welfare, discriminatory pricing has a potential to be developed. However, a significant termination-based discrimination effect, as estimated in this paper, might raise concern about the raising-each-other’s-cost problem. The authorities need to deregulate telecommunications pricing carefully to encourage telephone operators to take advantage of various price mechanisms. At the same time they have to contain access charges between telephone networks at a reasonable level.

The implied price cost margins (PCMs) are very high, ranging from 2.6 to 7.9. These estimated profit margins imply that telephone operators could expect to recover their investments within the order of 5-10 years. This indicates a great possibility of the private sector developing the telecommunications network even in Africa, however, the 39
Such potential gains are very important for African countries in relation to their current taxation levels. They could stem from two pathways: First, from a direct effect linked to tax audits based on actual information received. In other words, from ‘catching’ fraudsters and evaders. A second stems from an indirect compliance effect, i.e. the fact that people will have less recourse to tax avoidance strategies due to the existence of exchanges in the first place (which imply an increase in the risk of being caught). Evidence of the latter effect is brought by the implementation of voluntary disclosure programs. In the case of South Africa, the said program, running from October 2016 to August 2017, unveiled USD 1.8 billion worth of foreign assets and revenue gains of USD 296 million, while Nigeria’s program helped collect an extra USD 162 million between July 2017 and June 2019 (OECD 2022).

These effects are however subject to certain caveats, first of which is the capacity of tax authorities to process the data received via the exchanges. While digitization and tax administration capacity are accounted for in the analysis, it may not account for a sudden surge of information at a given time – especially as AEOI is usually done around a specific period (September).

A second caveat is the absence of political involvement blocking audits – considering that evaders are often part of a business/political establishment. Holding offshore accounts is typically a matter of high-net worth individuals. News stories over the past years regarding the extent of tax avoidance revealed by the Panama papers, Paradise papers or recently the Pandora papers suggest that avoidance is conducted by individuals close to power. Lobbying to escape audits should not be discounted.

From a policy perspective, it is clear that the digital maturity of public administration works in favor of joining the Global Forum and engaging in information exchange.<sup>11</sup> However, the risks associated with digitalization should be mitigated by adequate administrative and institutional capacity to take advantage of digital dividends. In this regard, efforts to upgrade tax administrations should be sustained, and drawing donor support for countries with lesser capacities would be important. There are also compliance costs to exchange of information over and above a tax administration’s digital maturity. From a tax authority’s perspective, legal adaptation costs, security and confidentiality requirements as well as capacity building

> 11 This specifically applied to AEOI since EOIR can be done through registered letters or other simpler means. However, in practice, EOIR requires a level of digitization, not least in the way audits are conducted and cases for information exchanges handled. Lastly, GFM membership is done on the account that AEOI is the ultimate goal.

14
could also provide the basis for introducing an element of targeting whereby transfers would go prim.arily to the needy among those on the lists and medals to the less needy. Of course, this wouald require a method for correctly identifying the poor.

'The political and economic realities would also have to be carefully examined. These prograrns and the political and societal will to support them have become sacrosanct. Reform efforts aimed at, for example, better targeting of the poor among war victims and heros are unlikely to make much headway. The collective belief in the country 's debt to those who participated in the national liberation struggle is deep-seated, at least in the present ruling generation. However, payments under "veterans and war invalids" should eventually depend more on individual circumstances such that the poorest continue to receive the subsidies longer than ot]hers. Lastly, if many of those covered by the war-related programs are poor, it is likely that those who similarly suffered on the loosing side are likewise in need of assistance. Information is needed to confirm this. If so, help to this group could be targeted on the basis of the same indicators, under a different policy initiative if necessary for political reasons.

# CONCLUSIONS

This paper reviewed the main sources of poverty and vulnerability for households in Vietnamn, the government's assistance programs for the poor and vulnerable, and plans for a new urabrella program. In the absence of conclusive evidence on performance, costs and benefits, the paper's assessment approach is descriptive and qualitative. Judgements about what s,pecific interventions do and do not work in Vietnam's safety net must await careful field surveys and rigorous analysis of impacts. In the meantime, it is clear that a better poverty 34
Table 15: Fees per day of school participation

|(6)<br>Treatment<br>all<br>-0.19<br>(0.30)<br>-0.07<br>(0.08)<br>-2.78<br>(1.46)*<br>0.53<br>(0.32)<br>0.25<br>(0.21)<br>1.46<br>(0.83)*<br>1495<br>1.06<br>e dependent<br> period and<br>nly includes<br>hildren were<br>.= 1 USD).<br>2) to (6) is<br>d errors are|
|---|
|(5)<br>y of attendance<br>Comparison<br>All<br>-0.91<br>(0.46)**<br>0.12<br>(0.06)*<br>0.51<br>(1.55)<br>0.64<br>(0.42)<br>0.46<br>(0.39)<br>-2.02<br>(0.96)**<br>1247<br>0.64<br>ys per term. Th<br>on over the same <br>. The sample o<br> status. Other c<br>hillings (80 K.Sh<br>del in columns (<br> Robust standar<br>percent|
|(3)<br>(4)<br>Price of preschool per da<br>All<br>All<br>Non-baseline<br>All<br>1.30<br>1.03<br>(0.42)***<br>(0.30)***<br>-0.49<br>(0.29)*<br>0.02<br>(0.05)<br>-1.74<br>(1.06)<br>0.51<br>(0.24)**<br>0.32<br>(0.18)*<br>-0.65<br>-0.47<br>(0.35)*<br>(0.59)<br>239<br>2742<br>0.39<br>0.64<br>1.00<br>1.06<br> by the number of school da<br>ed by observed participati<br>de...ned on a scale of 0 to 1<br>ed to their initial treatment<br>und. Fees are in Kenyan S<br>ol level. The regression mo<br>ation is de...ned in Table 1. <br>ercent; *** signi...cant at 1|
|(1)<br>(2)<br>O¢ cial fee<br>All<br>All<br>NA<br>Baseline<br>0.24<br>0.93<br>(0.67)<br>(0.34)***<br>0.34<br>(0.68)<br>-1.00<br>(0.94)<br>0.09<br>(0.11)<br>-0.85<br>(1.83)<br>-0.18<br>(0.40)<br>2.30<br>-0.29<br>(1.11)**<br>(0.25)<br>49<br>2503<br>0.06<br>2.82<br>0.66<br>2.62<br>1.06<br> is the o¢ cial fee per term, divided <br> paid in 2000 (terms 2 and 3), divid<br>l days. Observed participation is <br>2000. Baseline children were assign<br>he ...rst school where they were fo<br>is OLS with clustering at the scho<br>he school level. Ethnic fractionaliz<br> at 10 percent; ** signi...cant at 5 p|
|Sample schools<br>Sample children<br>Treatment<br>Dummy for treatment school <4km<br>Treatment school <4km *Treatment<br>Number of schools <4km<br>Ethnic fractionalization<br>Additional teacher<br>Child in baseline<br>Constant<br>Observations<br>R-squared<br>Mean fee/day for Comp.<br>Mean fee/day for Treatm.<br>Notes:<br>The dependent variable in column (1)<br>variable in columns (2) to (6) is fees <br>by the approximate number of schoo<br>children who were found in school in <br>assigned to the treatment status of t<br>The regression model in column (1) <br>a one-sided tobit with clustering at t<br>reported in parentheses. * signi...cant|

39
MALI’S INFRASTRUCTURE: A CONTINENTAL PERSPECTIVE Mali’s infrastructure spending needs are particularly high relative to the country’s GDP—around 19 percent of GDP annually for a decade. Infrastructure investment alone would absorb 13 percent of GDP, close to the 15 percent of GDP China invested per year in infrastructure during the mid-2000s. Nevertheless, Mali’s spending needs relative to GDP are on par with other low-income nonfragile African countries, which would need to spend 22 percent of GDP per year (figure 24).

**Figure 24. Mali’s infrastructure spending needs are substantial relative to GDP**

Estimated infrastructure spending needed to meet targets, as percentage of GDP <!-- Start of picture text --> Sub-Saharan Africa<br>fragile low-income countries<br>nonfragile low-income countries<br>ECOWAS<br>resourch-rich countries<br>middle-income countries<br>Senegal<br>Niger<br>Mali<br>Ghana<br>Benin<br>Cote d'Ivoire<br>Nigeria<br>Burkina Faso<br>Rwanda<br>Cape Verde<br>0 10 20 30 40<br>% of GDP<br>capital expenditure operations and maintenance<br><!-- End of picture text --> Source: Foster and Briceño-Garmendia 2009.

Mali currently spends only $555 million on meeting its infrastructure needs (table 19). About 60 percent of the total is allocated to capital expenditure and 40 percent to operating expenditures. Operating expenditure is entirely covered by budgetary resources and payments from infrastructure users. The two largest sources of funding for infrastructure investment are the public sector and donors, both of which provide an average of $120 million per year. The private sector has been investing at about half of this level. Existing spending is predominantly channeled to the ICT, transport, and power sectors, with WSS spends at half this level.

Spending on infrastructure in Mali is about 10 percent of GDP, which is comparable to other lowincome African countries (figure 25). The sources of infrastructure investment finance in Mali differ somewhat from the peer group. In particular, ODA has a pronounced role in the transport sector and a limited role in the power sector, and public investment is important for ICT (figure 26). Mali has benefited from non-OECD finance in the transport and power sectors.

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Figure 7: Impacts of joining Chaldal <!-- Start of picture text --> Business grown<br>Registered for Daraz<br>More flexibility<br>Easier to WFH<br>Connect<br>Customer trust<br>Easier loans<br>0 20 40 60 80 100<br>percent<br>S disagree Disagree Indifferent<br>Agree S agree<br><!-- End of picture text --> Joining an e-commerce platform may enable firms to better signal credit-worthiness to banks, improving their access to formal credit. The evidence for this hypothesis in the case of Chaldal is mixed: 33 percent of Chaldal sellers strongly agree with the statement that joining the platform has helped them get easier access to financing, but 29 percent strongly disagree with it (figure 7). The survey also asked firms if their use of bank loans increased since joining the platforms. Of the respondents, 17 percent replied in the affirmative to this question. Note that a negative reply to this question could also reflect a lack of demand for credit.

Consumer trust is another important issue for firms selling on a digital platform, particularly in settings where formal consumer protection mechanisms are weak. On the one hand, e-commerce platforms may face more consumer distrust than traditional shops because of their newness. On the other hand, e-commerce websites can build consumer trust through quality control, seller feedback mechanisms and liberal returns or refund policies. Consumer distrust issues seem to have been largely surmounted in the case of Chaldal, given that more than 80 percent of sellers strongly agree or agree with the statement that consumers trust the quality of a product sold on the platform more than they trust the quality of products sold at other shops or stores (figure 7).

Selling on a digital platform could also encourage firms to upgrade their business practices by improving their access to information on technologies and consumer preferences, and by generating the incentive to innovate in order to capture a large share of the online market. This appears to be true for a sizable fraction of Chaldal sellers, though generally not for the majority. For example, 13
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