rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Designing cost-effective cash
            transfer programs to boost schooling among young women in
            Sub-Saharan Africa
As of 2007, 29 developing countries had
            some type of conditional cash transfer program in place,
            with many others planning or piloting one. However, the
            evidence base needed by a government to decide how to design
            a new conditional cash transfer program is severely limited
            in a number of critical dimensions. This paper presents
            one-year schooling impacts from a conditional cash transfer
            experiment among teenage girls and young women in Malawi,
            which was designed to address these shortcomings:
            conditionality status, size of separate transfers to the
            schoolgirl and the parent, and village-level saturation of
            treatment were all independently randomized. The authors
            find that the program had large impacts on school
            attendance: the re-enrollment rate among those who had
            already dropped out of school before the start of the
            program increased by two and a half times and the dropout
            rate among those in school at baseline decreased from 11 to
            6 percent. These impacts were, on average, similar in the
            conditional and the unconditional treatment arms. Although
            most schooling outcomes examined here were unresponsive to
            variation in the size of the transfer to the parents, higher
            transfers given directly to the schoolgirls were associated
            with significantly improved school attendance and progress -
            but only if the transfers were conditional on school
            attendance. There were no spillover effects within treatment
            communities after the first year of program implementation.
            Policymakers looking to design cost-effective cash transfer
            programs targeted toward young women should note the
            relative insensitivity of these short-term program impacts
            with respect to conditionality and total transfer size.
Can a market-assisted land
            redistribution program improve the lives of the poor
            evidence from Malawi
This paper uses a rural household survey
            dataset collected in 2006 and 2008 to investigate the impact
            of a market-based land resettlement project in southern
            Malawi.  The program provided a conditional cash and land
            transfer to poor families to relocate to larger plots of
            farm land.  The average treatment effect of the program is
            estimated using a difference-in-difference matching
            technique based on propensity score matching; qualitative
            information complement the analysis to ensure unobservable
            characteristics do not bias the findings. As expected, the
            results show a significant effect on landholdings and
            agricultural production, with land size increasing and maize
            production increasing by more than 100 kilograms relative to
            the control.  However, the impacts on food security and
            asset holdings were mixed.  Households that relocated great
            distances had systematically lower impacts than those
            households that stayed within their district of origin
            because they had to adapt to unfamiliar agro-ecological,
            cultural, and market environments.  Impacts also varied
            across gender of the household head; female-headed
            beneficiary households increased their productive and
            consumption assets significantly, while male-headed
            households increased their asset holdings less so.
Coping with crises : why and how to
            protect employment and earnings
Events of the past two years are a
            reminder that crises are a recurring phenomenon with deep
            and often protracted impacts on labor markets. This paper
            examines the challenges inherent in crafting policy
            responses, with particular attention to developing
            countries. It focuses on the potential tradeoffs between
            offsetting adverse short-term impacts and preserving
            incentives for economic recovery and future growth, and
            between protecting the most vulnerable and compensating
            those most immediately impacted. It also highlights how
            policymakers room for maneuver is constrained in crisis
            times by deteriorating fiscal space, limited institutional
            capacity, and mounting political pressures. Based on
            empirical evidence from previous crises, the paper asserts
            that taking a myopic and reactive approach may be costly and
            counterproductive. Instead, it advocates a more
            comprehensive approach, designed to build institutions -
            such as automatic stabilizers and safety nets - that can
            deliver a coordinated and coherent policy package. This
            approach will make crises catalysts for institutional
            changes and long-run growth.
A polycentric approach for coping
            with climate change
This paper proposes an alternative
            approach to addressing the complex problems of climate
            change caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The author, who
            won the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences,  argues that
            single policies adopted only at a global scale are unlikely
            to generate sufficient trust among citizens and firms so
            that collective action can take place in a comprehensive and
            transparent manner that will effectively reduce global
            warming. Furthermore, simply recommending a single
            governmental unit to solve global collective action problems
            is inherently weak because of free-rider problems. For
            example, the Carbon Development Mechanism (CDM) can be
            gamed in ways that hike up prices of natural resources and
            in some cases can lead to further natural resource
            exploitation. Some flaws are also noticeable in the Reducing
            Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in
            Developing Countries (REDD) program. Both the CDM and REDD
            are vulnerable to the free-rider problem. As an alternative,
            the paper proposes a polycentric approach at various levels
            with active oversight of local, regional, and national
            stakeholders. Efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas
            emissions are a classic collective action problem that is
            best addressed at multiple scales and levels. Given the
            slowness and conflict involved in achieving a global
            solution to climate change, recognizing the potential for
            building a more effective way of reducing green house gas
            emissions at multiple levels is an important step forward. A
            polycentric approach has the main advantage of encouraging
            experimental efforts at multiple levels, leading to the
            development of methods for assessing the benefits and costs
            of particular strategies adopted in one type of ecosystem
            and compared to results obtained in other ecosystems.
            Building a strong commitment to find ways of reducing
            individual emissions is an important element for coping with
            this problem, and having others also take responsibility can
            be more effectively undertaken in small- to medium-scale
            governance units that are linked together through
            information networks and monitoring at all levels. This
            paper was prepared as a background paper for the 2010 World
            Development Report on Climate Change.
Missing women and India's
            religious demography
The authors use recent data from the
            2006 National Family Health Survey of India to explore the
            relationship between religion and demographic behavior. They
            find that fertility and mortality vary not only between
            religious groups, but also across caste groups. These groups
            also differ with respect to socio-economic status. The
            central finding of this paper is that despite their
            socio-economic disadvantages, Muslims have higher fertility
            than their Hindu counterparts and also exhibit lower levels
            of infant mortality (particularly female infant mortality).
            This effect is robust to the inclusion of controls for
            non-religious factors such as socio-economic status and area
            of residence. This result has important policy implications
            because it suggests that India's problem of
            "missing women" may be concentrated in particular
            groups. The authors conclude that religion and caste play a
            key role in determining the demographic characteristics of India.
Constraints to growth in Malawi
This paper applies a growth diagnostics
            approach to identify the most binding constraints to
            private-sector growth in Malawi - a small, landlocked
            country in Southern Africa with one of the lowest per capita
            incomes in the world. The approach aims to identify the
            constraints (in terms of public policy, implementation, and
            investments) most binding on marginal investment, and
            therefore whose relaxation would have the largest impact on
            growth through the investment channel. The authors find that
            growth in Malawi has been primarily driven by the domestic
            multiplier effect from export revenues. The multiplier
            effect is particularly pronounced due to the high number of
            smallholder farmers, which produce Malawis main export
            crop, tobacco, and consequently results in the widespread
            and rapid transmission of agricultural export income.
            Furthermore, despite changes in the structure of
            agricultural production from estate to smallholder farming
            and liberalization of prices and finance, a longstanding
            relationship persists between exports in real domestic
            currency and overall gross domestic product. This central
            role of exports in creating domestic demand highlights the
            importance of the real exchange rate in Malawis growth
            story, which directly increases the strength of the export
            multiplier. The most pressing constraint to growth in Malawi
            continues to be the regime of exchange rate management.
            Despite good progress, there is compelling evidence that the
            rate is still substantially overvalued. Furthermore, it is
            also likely that the inflow of foreign aid - in excess of 50
            percent of exports -contributes to the overvaluation through
            its large component of recurrent expenditures.
Korea and the BICs (Brazil, India
            and China) : catching up experiences
This paper tests a neo-Schumpeterian
            model with industry-level data to analyze how Brazil, India,
            and China are catching up with South Koreas technological
            frontier in a globalized world. The paper validates Aghion
            et al.s inverted-U hypothesis that industries that are
            closer to the technological frontier innovate to escape
            competition while longer distances discourage innovating. It
            suggests that for effective catching up, distance-shortening
            (or innovation-enhancing) policies may be a necessary
            complement to liberalization. South Korea and China combined
            a variety of distance-shortening policies with financial
            subsidies to promote high tech industries and an export-led
            growth strategy. Post-liberalization, they leveraged swift
            competition to spur catch-up. In comparison, Brazil, which
            was as rich as South Korea, and India, which was as rich as
            China in 1980, are catching up more slowly.
            Import-substitution industrialization strategies saddled
            Brazil and India with a large anti-export bias, and
            unfocused attention to innovation-enhancing policies
            dampened global competitiveness. Post liberalization, many
            of their industries were too far behind the technological
            frontier to effectively benefit from competition. The
            catch-up experiences of Brazil, India, and China with South
            Korea illustrate that distance from the technological
            frontier matters and that the design of country-specific
            distance- shortening policies can be an important complement
            to trade liberalization in promoting catching up with richer countries.
Mind the neighbors : the impact of
            productivity and location on firm turnover
This paper examines the impact of firm
            productivity and local industrial structure on firm entry
            and exit in Morocco between 1985 and 2001. There is strong
            evidence of productivity exerting a market-cleansing role.
            Less productive firms are found to be more likely to exit -
            and locations with more productive firms attract higher
            rates of new firm entry. The effect of productivity operates
            not only in an absolute sense; a firms relative
            productivity or distance to the local sector frontier
            matters too. First, large productivity gaps are associated
            with higher rates of exit, while new firms are attracted to
            locations with small productivity gaps. Second, local
            competition increases the probability of exit, although it
            does not encourage entry. Third, there is evidence of scale
            or agglomeration effects that increase firm turnover.
            Fourth, measures of sector diversity are not associated with
            lower turnover. Fifth, the geographic level at which
            agglomeration and competition effects are defined matters
            differently for exit than entry. For exit, the provincial
            measures are strong, while those for communes are weaker.
            For entry, it is the local productivity at the commune level
            that is more significant. This implies that competitive
            pressures are less geographically constrained while the
            potential benefits of agglomeration and spill-overs are
            indeed more local.
Left behind to farm women's
            labor re-allocation in rural China
The transformation of work during
            Chinas rapid economic development is associated with a
            substantial but little noticed re-allocation of traditional
            farm labor among women, with some doing much less and some
            much more. This paper studies how the work, time allocation,
            and health of non-migrant women are affected by the
            out-migration of others in their household. The analysis
            finds that the women left behind are doing more farm work
            than would have otherwise been the case. There is also
            evidence that this is a persistent effect, and not just
            temporary re-allocation. For some types of women (notably
            older women), the labor re-allocation response comes out of
            their leisure.
Infrastructure and economic growth
            in the Middle East and North Africa
This paper analyzes the impact of
            infrastructure on growth of total factor productivity and
            per capita income, using both growth accounting techniques
            and cross-country growth regressions. The two econometric
            techniques yield some consistent and some different results.
            Regressions based in the growth accounting framework suggest
            that electricity production helps explain cross-country
            differences in total factor productivity growth in the
            Middle East and North Africa region. Growth regressions
            support that conclusion, while also stressing an effect of
            telecommunications infrastructure. Finally, growth
            regressions also indicate quite consistently that the
            returns to infrastructure have been lower in the Middle East
            and North Africa region than in developing countries as a whole.
How do local-level legal
            institutions promote development
This paper develops a framework and some
            hypotheses regarding the impact of local-level, informal
            legal institutions on three economic outcomes: aggregate
            growth, inequality, and human capabilities. It presents a
            set of stylized differences between formal and informal
            legal justice systems, identifies the pathways through which
            formal systems promote economic outcomes, reflects on what
            the stylized differences mean for the potential impact of
            informal legal institutions on economic outcomes, and looks
            at extant case studies to examine the plausibility of the
            arguments presented. The paper concludes that local-level,
            informal legal institutions can support social substitutes
            for the enforcement of contracts, although these substitutes
            tend to be limited in range and scale; they are flexible and
            could conceivably be adapted to serve the interests of the
            poor and marginalized if supportive organizational and
            social resources could be brought to support the legal
            claims of the disempowered; and they are more likely to
            support personal integrity rights than the positive
            liberties that are also constitutive of development as freedom.
Public interest litigation in India
            : overreaching or underachieving
Public interest litigation has
            historically been an innovative judicial procedure for
            enhancing the social and economic rights of disadvantaged
            and marginalized groups in India. In recent years, however,
            a number of criticisms of public interest litigation have
            emerged, including concerns related to separation of powers,
            judicial capacity, and inequality. These criticisms have
            tended to abstraction, and the sheer number of cases has
            complicated empirical assessments. This paper finds that
            public interest litigation cases constitute less than 1
            percent of the overall case load. The paper argues that
            complaints related to concerns having to do with separation
            of powers are better understood as criticisms of the impact
            of judicial interventions on sector governance. On the issue
            of inequality, the analysis finds that win rates for
            fundamental rights claims are significantly higher when the
            claimant is from an advantaged social group than when he or
            she is from a marginalized group, which constitutes a social
            reversal, both from the original objective of public
            interest litigation and from the relative win rates in the 1980s.
Urban youth bulges and social
            disorder : an empirical study of Asian and Sub-Saharan
            African cities
By 2050, two-thirds of the worlds
            population will live in cities, and the greatest growth in
            urban populations will take place in the least developed
            countries. This presents many governments with considerable
            challenges related to urban governance and the provision of
            services and opportunities to a burgeoning urban population.
            Among the concerns is that large youth bulges in urban
            centers could be a source of political instability and
            violence. Here, we assess this claim empirically using newly
            collected data on city-level urban social disorder, ranging
            from non-violent actions, such as demonstrations and
            strikes, to violent political actions, such as riots,
            terrorism, and armed conflict. The dataset covers 55 major
            cities in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa for 1960-2006. The
            study also utilizes a new United Nations Population Division
            dataset on urban populations by age and sex. The study
            further considers factors that could condition the effect of
            age structure, in particular the level of informal
            employment, economic growth, education, and gender
            imbalances. The analysis finds that large male youth bulges
            aged 15-24 are not generally associated with increased risks
            of either violent or non-violent social disturbance.
            Furthermore, the proxy measures of "youth
            exclusion" do not seem to increase the risk that large
            urban male youth bulges are associated with either form of
            disturbance. However, several other factors that may be
            associated with higher levels of youth exclusion - notably
            absence of democratic institutions, low economic growth, and
            low levels of secondary educational attainment - are
            significantly and robustly associated with increasing levels
            of urban social disturbance.
Innovating development finance -
            from financing sources to financial solutions
As early as 2000, development partners
            embarked on a decade-long search for "innovative"
            or alternative sources of Official Development Assistance to
            help finance achievement of the Millennium Development
            Goals. For their part, developing countries have sought not
            only more financial flows but better financial solutions,
            for example, through partnerships that mobilize private
            finance for public service delivery, risk mitigation efforts
            that promote private entry in the productive sectors, and
            support for carbon trading. This paper offers a framework to
            organize and understand this heterogeneous mix of
            innovations in fund-raising and financial solutions for
            development. It also provides, for the first time, a
            stocktaking of actual innovations that make up the
            international landscape and highlights the World Bank
            Groups role to date. The stocktaking shows that innovative
            finance mechanisms have played a more significant role in
            supporting financial solutions on the ground than in
            identifying and exploiting "alternative sources of
            ODA." Innovative fund-raising therefore should be
            viewed as a complement to - rather than a substitute for -
            traditional efforts to mobilize official flows, in
            particular concessional flows. Going forward, innovations
            need to be tested and evaluated to determine value-added.