rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Global Investment Costs for Coastal
            Defense through the 21st Century
Sea-level rise threatens low-lying areas
            around the world's coasts with increased coastal
            flooding during storms. One response to this challenge is to
            build or upgrade coastal flood defenses. This report
            examines the potential investment costs of such an
            adaptation strategy applied globally over the 21st century
            for sea-level rise scenarios consistent with three
            Representative Concentration Pathways and 3 Shared
            Socioeconomic Pathways. For all the protection models
            considered, much less than half of the world's coast is
            protected. The total defense costs are significantly higher
            than earlier estimates, amounting to as much as US$18.3
            trillion. With cost-benefit analysis, there are large
            uncertainties and empirical observations of protection
            standards are limited. Hence, the estimates should be
            considered as indicative, and this remains an important
            topic for future research. Further, building defenses is not
            a one-off capital investment. Over the 21st century, the
            cost of a comprehensive protection strategy is dominated by
            maintenance costs in all the cases considered in this
            report. This indicates that in addition to capital
            investment, the development of appropriate institutions and
            governance mechanisms to deliver maintenance, as well as the
            necessary funding streams, are essential for such a
            protection-based adaptation strategy to be effective.
Global Investment Costs for Coastal
            Defense through the 21st Century
Policy Research Working Paper 8745

**Beyond the Gap** How Countries Can Afford the Infrastructure They Need While Protecting the Planet

_Background Paper_ Global Investment Costs for Coastal Defense through the 21<sup>st</sup> Century _Robert J. Nicholls Jochen Hinkel Daniel Lincke Thomas van der Pol_ Sustainable Development Practice Group Office of the Chief Economist February 2019
Meeting the Sustainable Development
            Goal for Electricity Access -- Using a Multi-Scenario
            Approach to Understand the Cost Drivers of Power
            Infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper explores the investments
            needed to achieve universal access to electricity in
            Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030, and the additional operation and
            maintenance costs these investments entail. It also explores
            the drivers of these costs, by exploring hundreds of
            scenarios that combine alternative assumptions on the level
            of service targeted, population growth, urbanization,
            industrial demand, and technology cost. The main driver of
            electrification costs is found to be the tier of service
            offered to newly connected households. The annual investment
            required to reach universal access varies between US$14.5
            billion per year on average for the basic access scenarios
            (0.7 percent of the region's gross domestic product per
            year over the period) and US$22.7 billion on average for the
            high-quality scenarios (1 percent of gross domestic
            product). In the basic access scenario, costs depend mostly
            on industrial demand, which takes a large share of total
            demand. In the high-quality scenarios, costs depend on
            urbanization rates, as it is cheaper to connect urban
            households to the grid. Investment costs are not sufficient
            to provide reliable service, and when operations and
            maintenance are accounted for, total costs increase to
            US$39.7 billion on average for the basic scenarios and
            US$61.5 billion on average for the high-quality scenarios.
Scenarios : Leapfrog, Lock-in, and Lopsided
This paper presents the details of three
            scenarios -- leapfrog, lock-in, and lopsided -- that
            describe an illustrative set of technological states. Based
            largely on expert interviews, the paper argues that the
            technology outcomes are heavily attributable to the actions
            (or in some cases, inaction) of policy makers and
            incumbents. For each scenario, the paper presents
            descriptive levels of technology achievement and market
            outcomes for the energy, transport, and water sectors. One
            of the central differentiating features of the three
            scenarios is the extent to which governments perform their
            roles as enabling, that is, whether the policies are
            designed to help or hinder innovations that improve service
            levels, and distributive, that is, whether the policies are
            designed to ensure that multiple segments of society reap
            the rewards of innovation. A question raised as part of that
            theme is how countries can avoid lock-in, or how they might
            become derailed into a lopsided scenario. Some institutional
            behavioral markers of the scenarios were identified in these
            discussions and are noted in the paper. It is important to
            recognize that multiple combinations of these behaviors can
            lead to a lock-in or lopsided scenario. In addition to
            describing the scenarios in detail, the paper discusses the
            rationale for their creation, along with a brief discussion
            on the nature of uncertainty. The paper also describes the
            methodology employed in the creation of the scenarios,
            including expert interview methods and a day-long workshop.
The Impact of the Minimum Wage on
            Firm Destruction, Employment and Informality
This paper studies the effects of a
            large increase in the minimum wage on the destruction of
            formal firms, and the associated impacts on employment,
            wages, and informality in a developing economy. It examines
            the ramifications of a 33 percent nominal increase in the
            minimum wage that took effect in Turkey in 2016. It utilizes
            an exceptionally rich, employer-employee-linked dataset that
            shows the wage distribution within firms, which enables to
            measure the degree of firms’ minimum-wage exposure, and to
            estimate causal effects using a difference-in-differences
            approach. The paper shows that raising the minimum wage
            substantially increased the destruction of formal firms,
            leading to a fall in the number of formal firms in the
            economy. Effects are concentrated among small firms with low
            levels of productivity; highly productive firms are
            unaffected. The minimum-wage increase had negative effects
            on formal employment that largely originated through firm
            destruction, rather than through cuts in formal employment
            within surviving firms. Among workers who lost jobs in firms
            that ultimately exited, only a minority had obtained new
            employment a year later. The minimum-wage increase was
            accompanied by a rise in inactivity and unemployment, rather
            than growth of informal employment, suggesting that workers
            who lost formal employment mostly failed to find new jobs
            one year after the minimum wage hike, even informally. While
            the higher minimum wage had large, positive effects on the
            wages of formally employed workers, limited effects on the
            wages of informal workers are reported.
Household Savings in Central Eastern
            and Southeastern Europe : How Do Poorer Households Save
Based on a survey of households in 10
            Central Eastern European and Western Balkan countries, this
            paper presents new and unique evidence on which households
            have savings and how they save. The paper shows that the
            percentage of savers is low, and savings are frequently
            informal. Formal savings are dominated by bank savings, and
            participation in contractual and capital market savings is
            very low in comparison to high-income countries. Poor
            households are significantly less likely to have any
            savings; income also has an effect, albeit smaller, on the
            choice of formal versus informal savings. With a high
            density of bank branches in Central Eastern European and
            Western Balkan countries lack of physical access to banks
            does not explain the lack of formal savings. Lack of trust
            in banks reduces the probability of formal savings,
            especially bank savings.
Equivalent Years of Schooling : A
            Metric to Communicate Learning Gains in Concrete Terms
In the past decade, hundreds of impact
            evaluation studies have measured the learning outcomes of
            education interventions in developing countries. The impact
            magnitudes are often reported in terms of "standard
            deviations," making them difficult to communicate to
            policy makers beyond education specialists. This paper
            proposes two approaches to demonstrate the effectiveness of
            learning interventions, one in "equivalent years of
            schooling" and another in the net present value of
            potential increased lifetime earnings. The results show that
            in a sample of low- and middle-income countries, one
            standard deviation gain in literacy skill is associated with
            between 4.7 and 6.8 additional years of schooling, depending
            on the estimation method. In other words, over the course of
            a business-as-usual school year, students learn between 0.15
            and 0.21 standard deviation of literacy ability. Using that
            metric to translate the impact of interventions, a median
            structured pedagogy intervention increases learning by the
            equivalent of between 0.6 and 0.9 year of business-as-usual
            schooling. The results further show that even modest gains
            in standard deviations of learning -- if sustained over time
            -- may have sizeable impacts on individual earnings and
            poverty reduction, and that conversion into a non-education
            metric should help policy makers and non-specialists better
            understand the potential benefits of increased learning.
Environment and Development :
            Penalized Non-Parametric Inference of Global Trends in
            Deforestation, Pollution and Carbon
This paper revisits the issue of
            environment and development raised in the 1992 World
            Development Report, with new analysis tools and data. The
            paper discusses inference and interpretation in a machine
            learning framework. The results suggest that production
            gradually favors conserving the earth's resources as
            gross domestic product increases, but increased efficiency
            alone is not sufficient to offset the effects of growth in
            scale. Instead, structural change in the economy shapes
            environmental outcomes across GDP. The analysis finds that
            average development is associated with an inverted $U$-shape
            in deforestation, pollution, and carbon intensities. Per
            capita emissions follow a $J$-curve. Specifically, poverty
            reduction occurs alongside degrading local environments and
            higher income growth poses a global burden through carbon.
            Local economic structure further determines the shape,
            amplitude, and location of tipping points of the
            Environmental Kuznets Curve. The models are used to
            extrapolate environmental output to 2030. The daunting
            implications of continued development are a reminder that
            immediate and sustained global efforts are required to
            mitigate forest loss, improve air quality, and shift the
            global economy to a 2°pathway.
Pollution and Expenditures in a
            Penalized Vector Spatial Autoregressive Time Series Model
            with Data-Driven Networks
This paper introduces a Spatial Vector
            Autoregressive Moving Average (SVARMA) model in which
            multiple cross-sectional time series are modeled as
            multivariate, possibly fat-tailed, spatial autoregressive
            ARMA processes. The estimation requires specifying the
            cross-sectional spillover channels through spatial weights
            matrices. the paper explores a kernel method to estimate the
            network topology based on similarities in the data. It
            discusses the model and estimation, focusing on a penalized
            Maximum Likelihood criterion. The empirical performance of
            the estimator is explored in a simulation study. The model
            is used to study a spatial time series of pollution and
            household expenditure data in Indonesia. The analysis finds
            that the new model improves in terms of implied density, and
            better neutralizes residual correlations than the VARMA,
            using fewer parameters. The results suggest that growth in
            household expenditures precedes pollution reduction,
            particularly after the expenditures of poorer households
            increase; that increasing pollution is followed by reduced
            growth in expenditures, particularly reducing the growth of
            poorer households; and that there are significant spillovers
            from bottom-up growth in expenditures. The paper does not
            find evidence for top-down growth spillovers. Feedback
            between the identified mechanisms may contribute to
            pollution-poverty traps and the results imply that pollution
            damages are economically significant.
From Ghana to America : The Skill
            Content of Jobs and Economic Development
There is a growing body of literature
            exploring the skill content of jobs. This paper contributes
            to this research by using data on the task content of
            occupations in developing countries, instead of U.S. data,
            as most existing studies do. The paper finds that indexes
            based on U.S. data do not provide a fair approximation of
            the levels, changes, and drivers of the routine cognitive
            and nonroutine manual skill content of jobs in developing
            countries. The paper also uncovers three new stylized facts.
            First, while developed countries tend to have jobs more
            intensive in nonroutine cognitive skills than developing
            countries, income (in growth and levels) is not associated
            with the skill content of jobs once the analysis accounts
            for other factors. Second, although adoption of information
            and communications technology is linked to job
            de-routinization, international trade is an offsetting
            force. Last, adoption of information and communications
            technology is correlated with lower employment growth in
            countries with a high share of occupations that are
            intensive in routine tasks.
How Household Characteristics Shape
            Program Access and Asset Accumulation : A Mixed Method
            Analysis of the Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme in Rwanda
This paper assesses how household
            context and characteristics shape the welfare trajectory and
            more specifically the accumulation of productive assets
            among beneficiaries of the Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme in
            Rwanda, the government's flagship social assistance
            program. The analysis is based on a unique data set
            combining panel household survey data with in-depth
            qualitative interviews of a subsample of male and female
            beneficiaries from the survey data collected between 2009
            and 2015. By combining quantitative and qualitative
            information, the paper draws a more nuanced picture of how
            household characteristics—structural and
            temporal—contextualize opportunities for poor men and women
            and their households and shape how well they can leverage
            access to the Vision 2020 Umurenge Programme to accumulate
            productive assets. The mixed method analysis reveals that
            household composition, gender power dynamics, disability,
            care responsibilities, marital arrangements, intrahousehold
            communication, and access to other social programs and
            institutions play a crucial role in access to the Vision
            2020 Umurenge Programme and related asset accumulation. The
            findings suggest that households would benefit from a
            broader definition of the eligibility criteria and the
            availability of flexible and complementary programming, to
            reap the benefits of the income transfer received from the program.
The Economic Lives of Young Women in
            the Time of Ebola : Lessons from an Empowerment Program
This paper evaluates an intervention to
            raise young women's economic empowerment in Sierra
            Leone, where women frequently experience sexual violence and
            face multiple economic disadvantages. The intervention
            provides them with a protective space (a club) where they
            can find support, receive information on health and
            reproductive issues, and vocational training. Unexpectedly,
            the post-baseline period coincided with the 2014 Ebola
            outbreak. The analysis leverages quasi-random across-village
            variation in the severity of Ebola-related disruption, and
            random assignment of villages to the intervention to
            document the impact of the Ebola outbreak on the economic
            lives of 4,700 women tracked over the crisis, and any
            ameliorating role played by the intervention. In highly
            disrupted control villages, the crisis leads younger girls
            to spend significantly more time with men, out-of-wedlock
            pregnancies rise, and as a result, they experience a
            persistent 16 percentage points drop in school enrolment
            post-crisis. These adverse effects are almost entirely
            reversed in treated villages because the intervention
            enables young girls to allocate time away from men,
            preventing out-of-wedlock pregnancies and enabling them to
            re-enrol in school post-crisis. In treated villages, the
            unavailability of young women leads some older girls to use
            transactional sex as a coping strategy. The intervention
            causes them to increase contraceptive use so this does not
            translate into higher fertility. The analysis pinpoints the
            mechanisms through which the severity of the aggregate shock
            impacts the economic lives of young women and shows how
            interventions in times of crisis can interlink outcomes
            across younger and older cohorts.
The Economic Lives of Young Women in
            the Time of Ebola : Lessons from an Empowerment Program
Policy Research Working Paper 8760

# The Economic Lives of Young Women in the Time of Ebola

Lessons from an Empowerment Program _Oriana Bandiera Niklas Buehren Markus Goldstein Imran Rasul Andrea Smurra_ Africa Region Office of the Chief Economist February 2019
Growing a Developing City : A
            Computable Spatial General Equilibrium Model Applied to Dhaka
As one of world's fastest growing
            cities, Dhaka faces acute challenges in housing its growing
            population and developing a more productive economy. Central
            to this is the scarcity of high-quality urban land. Yet a
            vast tract of land near the heart of the city, East Dhaka,
            currently remains predominantly agricultural and undeveloped
            as a consequence of flooding. This paper uses a computable
            spatial general equilibrium model that captures the economic
            geography of the city, to estimate the economic returns of
            coordinated action to develop this land. The model captures
            different productive sectors, household skill levels, and
            types of housing. Firms and residents choose their location
            within the city given the transport network and land
            availability, generating a pattern of commercial and
            residential land-use. The paper estimates the incremental
            impacts on income, employment and population of an
            embankment and other flood protection measures to protect
            this land, as well as from improvement in transport
            infrastructure and targeted support for economic development
            in East Dhaka.
Business Regulations and Poverty
Using panel data for 189 economies from
            2005 to 2013, this paper shows that business-friendly
            regulations are correlated with the poverty headcount at the
            country level. This association is significant using the
            World Bank's Doing Business indicators on getting
            credit and contract enforcement. The findings suggest that
            the conduit for poverty reduction is business creation, as a
            source of new jobs and a manifestation of thriving entrepreneurship.
The Nutrition Sensitivity of Food
            and Agriculture in South Asia
Through a review of the literature, this
            paper examines the links of food and agriculture with
            nutrition in South Asia, a region characterized by a high
            level of malnutrition. The review finds that the level and
            stability of food prices play a critical part in food
            consumption, with rising prices affecting poor households
            the most. Although public food transfer programs are aimed
            at addressing this, most are too small to have a marked
            effect in protecting or promoting nutrition. Several
            supply-side food and agricultural interventions suggest
            promise in improving nutrition, although their effects have
            yet to be well identified. These include the cultivation of
            home gardens, animal farming, and use of biofortification
            and post-harvest fortification. All these efforts will be
            futile, however, without parallel efforts to mitigate the
            effects of climate change.