rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Children left behind in China : the
            role of school fees
The barriers faced by Chinese
            rural-urban migrants to access social services, particularly
            education, in host cities could help explain why the
            majority of migrants choose to leave their children behind.
            This paper proposes a theoretical framework that allows for
            an explicit discussion of the link between school fees and
            the decision of migrant parents to bring their children to
            the city. The analysis instruments the endogenous school
            fees with unexpected shocks to the city's public
            education spending, and empirically tests the theoretical
            predictions. The findings suggest that higher fees deter
            migrant workers from bringing their children, especially
            their daughters; reduce the number of children they bring;
            and increase educational remittances to rural areas for the
            children left behind. Increases in school fees most affect
            vulnerable migrant workers, and are likely to have stronger
            impacts during an economic crisis. These findings hold for
            different model specifications and robustness checks.
Does input-trade liberalization
            affect firms' foreign technology choice
This paper studies the impact of
            input-trade liberalization on firms' decision to
            upgrade foreign technology embodied in imported capital
            goods. The empirical analysis is motivated by a simple
            theoretical framework of endogenous technology adoption,
            heterogeneous firms and imported inputs. The model predicts
            a positive effect of input tariff reductions on firms'
            technology choice to source capital goods from abroad. This
            effect is heterogeneous across firms depending on their
            initial productivity level. Relying on India's trade
            liberalization episode in the early 1990s, this paper
            demonstrates that the probability of importing capital goods
            is higher for firms producing in industries that have
            experienced greater cuts on tariffs on intermediate goods.
            Only those firms in the middle range of the initial
            productivity distribution have benefited from input-trade
            liberalization to upgrade their technology.
Socioeconomic resilience :
            multi-hazard estimates in 117 countries
This paper presents a model to assess
            the socioeconomic resilience to natural disasters of an
            economy, defined as its capacity to mitigate the impact of
            disaster-related asset losses on welfare. The paper proposes
            a tool to help decision makers identify the most promising
            policy options to reduce welfare losses from natural
            disasters. Applied to riverine and storm surge floods,
            earthquakes, windstorms, and tsunamis in 117 countries, the
            model provides estimates of country-level socioeconomic
            resilience. Because hazards disproportionally affect poor
            people, each $1 of global natural disaster-related asset
            loss is equivalent to a $1.6 reduction in the affected
            country’s national income, on average. The model also
            assesses policy levers to reduce welfare losses in each
            country. It shows that considering asset losses is
            insufficient to assess disaster risk management policies.
            The same reduction in asset losses results in different
            welfare gains depending on who (especially poor or nonpoor
            households) benefits. And some policies, such as adaptive
            social protection, do not reduce asset losses, but still
            reduce welfare losses. Post-disaster transfers bring an
            estimated benefit of at least $1.30 per dollar disbursed in
            the 117 countries studied, and their efficiency is not very
            sensitive to targeting errors.
Enforcement capacity and the impact
            of labor regulation : evidence from the Russian Federation
The impact of business regulations on
            firms could depend on how the regulations are enforced in
            practice. Exploiting variation in enforcement capacity
            across the Russian Federation's administrative regions,
            this paper examines whether the enforcement of restrictive
            regulations on hiring and firing workers affects how firms
            adjust employment during industry upswings and downswings.
            The analysis finds that the extent to which firms adjust
            employment upward during industry upswings and downward
            during downswings is smaller in regions with stronger
            enforcement capacity (or stricter de facto employment
            protection). The effect of enforcement is sizable: for
            example, increasing enforcement capacity from the 25th to
            the 75th percentile dampens employment adjustment in a
            downswing by 34 percent. Thus, although restrictive
            regulation on hiring and firing reduces the ability of firms
            to adjust employment, the extent to which it does so depends
            on enforcement.
Benefits of electrification and the
            role of reliability : evidence from India
This paper estimates the welfare impact
            of rural electrification in India using nationally
            representative household panel survey data for 2005 and
            2012. Analysis based on a propensity-score-weighted
            fixed-effects model finds that while electrification is
            associated with a broad range of social and economic
            benefits, the size of the effects depends importantly on the
            reliability of electricity service. Gaining access to
            electricity combined with a reliable power supply is
            associated with a 17 percent increase in income during the
            sample period, but gaining access to electricity alone is
            associated with only a 9.6 percent increase in income. The
            net gain from both increasing the access rate and reducing
            power outages in rural India is estimated to be US$11
            billion a year. Moreover, India's rural electrification
            policy appears to be progressive because lower-income
            households benefit more from access to electricity than
            higher-income households during the sample period.
Shedding light : understanding
            energy efficiency and electricity reliability
Overloaded electrical systems are a
            major source of unreliable power (outages) in developing
            countries. Using a randomized saturation design, we estimate
            the impact of energy efficient lightbulbs on household
            electricity consumption and local electricity reliability in
            the Kyrgyz Republic. Receiving compact fluorescent lamps
            (CFLs) significantly reduced household electricity
            consumption. Estimates not controlling for spillovers in
            take-up underestimate the impacts of the CFLs, as control
            households near the treated are likely to take-up CFLs
            themselves. Greater saturation of CFLs within a transformer
            leads to aggregate reliability impacts of two fewer days per
            month without electricity due to unplanned outages relative
            to pure controls. Increased electricity reliability permits
            households to consume more electricity services, suggesting
            that CFL treatment results in technological externalities.
            The spillovers in take-up and technological externalities
            may provide an additional explanation for the gap between
            empirical and engineering estimates of the impacts of energy
            efficient technologies.
Grow, invest, insure : a game plan
            to end extreme poverty by 2030
As global extreme poverty has fallen --
            by one measure, from close to 2 billion people in 1990 to
            about 700 million today -- the world has learned about
            antipoverty strategies that work. These experiences should
            inform the final push to end extreme poverty. In the 1960s
            and 1970s, when close to half of the world was living in
            extreme poverty, the approach that worked best consisted of
            two sets of complementary measures: encouraging broad-based
            growth that is labor using, and investing in education,
            health, and family planning. When extreme poverty rates came
            down—first in East Asia and then in other parts of the
            developing world—it became clear that the two-point strategy
            to make economies grow and enable people to invest in human
            capital needed a social assistance supplement to help people
            with disadvantages so severe that they could not benefit
            from economic opportunities and better social services. This
            two-and-a-half-point strategy has been working well over the
            past quarter century, and the end of extreme poverty is in
            sight. But more people are now at risk of slipping back into
            poverty because of economic, natural, and health-related
            hazards. To end extreme poverty by 2030, the approach now
            needs three complementary components: economic growth,
            investments in people, and measures to insure against
            setbacks to families, nations, and regions due to
            disabilities, recessions, disasters, and disease. In
            countries that have reduced poverty a lot and those that
            could do a lot better, a winning game plan for putting a
            quick end to extreme poverty should be based on a
            three-point strategy: grow, invest, and insure.
Heterogeneous returns to income
            diversification : evidence from Nigeria
This paper investigates the impact of
            income diversification on farming households' welfare
            in Nigeria on two rounds of the Nigeria General Household
            Survey-Panel, namely the 2010/2011 and 2012/2013. The study
            finds that income diversification is the norm in Nigeria,
            with about 60 percent of farmers diversifying away from
            subsistence farming into non-farm activities and cash crops.
            In addition, using the panel of farmers interviewed before
            and after a severe drought that hit Northern Nigeria in
            particular in 2011, the study finds that diversification
            increased throughout Nigeria from 60 to 64 percent and in
            the North from 58 to 63 percent. The study postulates the
            existence of heterogeneous returns on diversification as a
            consequence of the drought, and estimates the returns
            through a non-parametric selection model using a local
            instrumental variable. The choice of this model is dictated
            by the necessity to account for both heterogeneous effects
            of diversification and selection bias related to
            households' decision to diversify. Overall, it is found
            that diversification positively affects consumption in
            Nigeria. However, who benefits the most is crucially
            determined by the initial conditions under which
            diversification is undertaken and the specific agro-climatic
            context in which households operate.
How liberal is Nepal's liberal
            grade promotion policy
This paper estimates the magnitude of
            liberal grade promotion in public schools in Nepal by
            comparing the pass rate in internally administered exams
            with the pass rate in the district-exam whose scores
            determine grade transition. The pass rate in the year-end
            exam is three and a half times as high as the pass rate in
            the internal exams. The difference is not explained by an
            increase in student effort and it is not due to the
            financial incentives for which students in a random subset
            of schools were eligible. The paper concludes with a
            discussion of the policy implications of the findings on the
            student assessment system in Nepal.
Pro-growth equity : a policy
            framework for the twin goals
Growth is an important channel for
            poverty reduction. Policies to make growth more
            "inclusive" have permeated the development debate
            and "pro-poor growth" has been the subject of a
            wide range of papers in the literature, including issues
            related to measurement, modeling, and policy. However, the
            analytical and particularly empirical literature to support
            the idea that equity-enhancing policies have a positive
            effect on growth is more scarce and limited, especially on
            the potential policy links. This paper proposes a simple
            conceptual framework to identify the main elements that
            contribute to the income generation of households, building
            on the notion that growth can be seen partly as the
            aggregate outcome of the income generation capacity of
            households. The framework relies on an asset-based approach,
            and offers insights on how a more equitable distribution of
            assets and opportunities for their productive use can feed
            back into higher growth in the long term. Using this
            framework, the paper links the World Bank's twin goals
            to specific policy channels that have direct impacts on the
            income generation capacity of households, with a particular
            focus on households at the bottom of the income
            distribution. The four key policy channels include (i)
            implementing equitable, efficient and sustainable fiscal
            policy and macroeconomic management, (ii) strengthening fair
            and transparent institutions capable of delivering quality
            basic services, (iii) enabling well-functioning markets, and
            (iv) establishing adequate risk management instruments at
            the macro and household levels.
Food prices and poverty
Do higher food prices help or hinder
            poverty reduction? Despite much debate, existing research
            has almost solely relied on simulation models to address
            this question. In this paper World Bank poverty estimates
            are used to systematically test the relationship between
            changes in poverty and exogenous changes in real domestic
            food prices. The paper uncovers indicative evidence that
            increases in food prices are associated with reductions in
            poverty, not increases. A likely empirical explanation is
            the relatively strong agricultural supply and wage responses
            to food price increases, and the fact that the majority of
            the world's poor still heavily rely on agriculture or
            agriculture-related activities to earn a living.
Housing finance and inclusive growth
            in Africa : benchmarking, determinants, and effects
Using a partially constructed panel
            database of 48 Sub-Saharan African countries from 2000 to
            2013, this paper analyzes the structure of housing finance
            in Africa, its determinants, and its impact on inclusive
            growth. The findings show that market capitalization and
            urbanization are key positive determinants of housing
            finance, and the post-conflict environment is conductive to
            greater housing finance development. This result suggests
            that housing finance is driven by standard market forces of
            demand and supply. In addition, the analysis finds that
            housing finance development in Africa is not yet an
            effective tool for reducing economic inequality, at its
            current, very early stage. However, the paper shows that
            above a given threshold, housing finance could be efficient
            at reducing inequality. Finally, there is a slightly
            positive relationship between housing finance and greater
            economic development in Africa. All these findings suggest
            that policies to boost housing finance development in Africa
            would be fruitful in the medium to long terms.
Matchmaking in Nairobi : the role of
            land use
Well-functioning cities reduce the
            economic distance between people and economic opportunities.
            Cities thrive because they enable matchmaking -- among
            people, among firms, and between people and job
            opportunities. This paper examines employment accessibility
            in Nairobi, Kenya and evaluates whether modification of land
            use patterns can contribute to increases in aggregate
            accessibility. The assessment is based on simulation of
            counterfactual scenarios of the location of jobs and
            households throughout the city without new investments in
            housing or transport infrastructure. The analysis finds that
            modifications to the spatial layout of Nairobi that
            encourage land use clustering can increase the share of
            overall opportunities that can be accessed within a given
            time-frame. When commuters travel by foot or using the
            minibus network, the share of accessible economic
            opportunities within an hour doubles from 11 to 21 percent
            and from 20 to 42 percent respectively. The analysis also
            finds that spatial layouts that maximize the number of
            households that have access to a minimum share of jobs,
            through a more even jobs-housing balance, come at the
            expense of average accessibility. This result is interpreted
            as a trade-off between inclusive and efficient labor markets.
Mining and economic development :
            did China's WTO accession affect African local economic development
This paper investigates China's
            influence on local economic development in 37 African
            countries between 1997 and 2007. The analysis compares the
            average changes in economic growth, migration, spatial
            inequality, and welfare for mineral-rich districts, pre- and
            post-accession, to the corresponding changes in districts
            without any mineral endowment. Using this exogenous
            variation, the paper shows that over 2002-07, mining
            activities in response to the global commodity price boom
            increased welfare as measured by spatial Sen Index but were
            insignificant for local economic growth, migration, and
            spatial inequality. The findings suggest that policy needs
            to do more to improve the local benefits of positive
            external shocks (such as China's World Trade
            Organization accession): it is not enough to assume, given
            Africa's high spatial inequality, that local economies
            will automatically benefit from higher national growth.
CPI bias and its implications for
            poverty reduction in Africa
International poverty estimates for
            countries in Africa commonly rely on national consumer price
            indexes to adjust trends in nominal consumption over time
            for changes in the cost of living. However, the consumer
            price index is subject to various types of measurement bias.
            This paper uses Engel curve estimations to assess bias in
            the consumer price index and its implications for estimated
            poverty trends. The results suggest that in 11 of 16
            Sub-Saharan African countries in this study, poverty
            reduction may be understated because of consumer price index
            bias. With correction of consumer price index bias, poverty
            in these countries could fall between 0.8 and 5.7 percentage
            points per year faster than currently thought. For two
            countries, however, the paper finds the opposite trend.
            There is no statistically significant change in poverty
            patterns after adjusting for consumer price index bias for
            the other three countries.
Financial constraints and
            girls' secondary education: evidence from school fee
            elimination in the Gambia
This study analyzes the impact of
            large-scale fee elimination for secondary school girls in
            The Gambia on the quantity, composition, and achievement of
            students. The gradual rollout of the program across
            geographic regions provides identifying variation in the
            policy. The program increased the number of girls taking the
            high school exit exam by 55 percent. The share of older test
            takers increased in poorer districts, expanding access for
            students who began school late, repeated grades, or whose
            studies had been interrupted. Despite these changes in the
            quantity and composition of students, there are robustly
            positive point estimates of the program on test scores, with
            suggestive evidence of gains for several subgroups of both
            girls and boys. Absence of learning declines is notable in a
            setting where expanded access could strain limited resources
            and reduce school quality. The findings suggest that
            financial constraints remain serious barriers to
            post-primary education, and that efforts to expand access to
            secondary education need not come at the expense of learning
            in low-income countries like The Gambia.
Optimal allocation of natural
            resource surpluses in a dynamic macroeconomic framework : a
            DSGE analysis with evidence from Uganda
In low-income, capital-scarce economies
            that face financial and fiscal constraints, managing
            revenues from newly found natural resources can be a
            daunting challenge. The policy debate is how to scale up
            public investment to meet huge needs in infrastructure
            without generating a higher public deficit, and avoid the
            Dutch disease. This paper uses an open economy dynamic
            stochastic general equilibrium model that is compatible with
            low-income economies and calibrated on Ugandan's data
            to tackle this problem. The paper explores macroeconomic
            dynamics under three stylized fiscal policy approaches for
            managing resource windfalls: investing all in public
            capital, saving all in a sovereign wealth fund, and a
            sustainable-investing approach that proposes a constant
            share of resource revenues to finance public investment and
            the rest to be saved. The analysis finds that a gradual
            scaling-up of public investment yields the best outcome, as
            it minimizes macroeconomic volatility. The analysis then
            investigates the optimal oil share to use for public
            investment; the criterion minimizes a loss function that
            accounts for households' welfare and macroeconomic
            stability in an environment featuring oil price volatility.
            The findings show that, depending on the policy maker's
            preference for stability, 55 to 85 percent of oil windfalls
            should be invested.