rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
The process of financial development
            : a statistical view from the FSAP program
This paper uses a simple statistical
            approach to exploit some of the wealth of information
            contained in FSAP reports. The authors classify and count
            FSAP recommendations along a logical grid that reflects the
            fabric of financial activity and the ways in which states
            organize their policies in support of financial development.
            With some caveats reflecting the inherent limitations of the
            exercise, this analysis provides a simple monitoring tool to
            help understand the nature and evolution of the FSAP
            program. At the same time, it throws light on the nuts and
            bolts of the process of financial development and its
            inter-linkages with economic development. While many of the
            findings conform well to what one would expect, others are
            more surprising and also potentially more useful for
            understanding the inner workings of financial development.
Empowering parents to improve
            education : evidence from rural Mexico
Mexico's compensatory education
            program provides extra resources to primary schools that
            enroll disadvantaged students in highly disadvantaged rural
            communities. One of the most important components of the
            program is the school-based management intervention known as
            AGEs. The impact of the AGEs is assessed on intermediate
            school quality indicators (failure, repetition and dropout),
            controlling for the presence of the conditional cash
            transfer program. Results prove that school-based management
            is an effective measure for improving outcomes, based on an
            over time difference-in-difference evaluation. Complementary
            qualitative evidence corroborates the veracity of such findings.
Empowering parents to improve
            education : evidence from rural Mexico
WPS3935-IE

## **IMPACT EVALUATION SERIES NO. 4**

# **EMPOWERING PARENTS TO IMPROVE EDUCATION:**

# **EVIDENCE FROM RURAL MEXICO**

## Paul Gertler

Harry Patrinos

## Marta Rubio-Codina<sup>†</sup>

_The authors examine a program that involves parents directly in the management of schools located in highly disadvantaged rural communities. The program, known as AGE, finances parent associations and motivates parental participation by involving them in the management of the school grants. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, we show that the AGE greatly increased the participation of parents in monitoring school performance and decision-making. Further, the authors find that AGE improved intermediate school quality indicators, namely grade failure and grade repetition, controlling for the presence of a conditional cash transfer program and other educational interventions._

## JEL Codes: I20, I21, I28

## Keywords: School-based management, impact evaluation, Mexico

World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3935, Revised May 2008 _The Impact Evaluation Series has been established in recognition of the importance of impact evaluation studies for World Bank operations and for development in general. The series serves as a vehicle for the dissemination of findings of those studies. Papers in this series are part of the Bank’s Policy Research Working Paper Series. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent_ .

† Contact information: Paul Gertler, Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley; <u>pgertler@worldbank.org, Harry Patrinos, The World Bank; hpatrinos@worldbank.org, Marta Rubio-Codina,</u> University College of London and the Institute for Fiscal Studies; <u>m.rubio-codina@ucl.ac.uk.</u> The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily of the institutions they represent. We thank Thomas Cook, Pierre Dubois, Halsey Rogers and participants at the World Bank AAA decision meetings and at the World Bank School-Based Management workshop for useful comments and suggestions. Previous versions of the paper have also benefit from comments by participants at the LACEA meetings at ITAM, the first Impact Evaluation meetings in Los Andes (Bogotá) and the NEUDC Meetings at Harvard University. For providing data and institutional knowledge, we are grateful to Felipe Cuellar, Narciso Esquivel, José Carlos Flores, Alejandra Macías, Miguel Ángel Vargas and Iliana Yaschine. All errors are our own.
Economic partnership agreements and
            the export competitiveness of Africa
Trade can be a key driver of growth for
            African countries, as it has been for those countries,
            particularly in East Asia, that have experienced high and
            sustained rates of growth. Economic partnership agreements
            with the European Union could be instrumental in a
            competitiveness framework, but to do so they would have to
            be designed carefully in a way that supports integration
            into the global economy and is consistent with national
            development strategies. Interim agreements have focused on
            reciprocal tariff removal and less restrictive rules of
            origin. To be fully effective, economic partnership
            agreements will have to address constraints to regional
            integration, including both tariff and non-tariff barriers;
            improve trade facilitation; and define appropriate most
            favored nation services liberalization. At the same time,
            African countries will need to reduce external tariff peak
            barriers on a most favored nation basis to ensure that when
            preferences for the European Union are implemented after
            transitional periods, they do not lead to substantial losses
            from trade diversion. This entails an ambitious agenda of
            policy reform that must be backed up by development
            assistance in the form of "aid for trade."
The anatomy of China's export growth
Decomposing China's real export
            growth, of over 500 percent since 1992, reveals a number of
            interesting findings. First, China's export structure
            changed dramatically, with growing export shares in
            electronics and machinery and a decline in agriculture and
            apparel. Second, despite the shift into these more
            sophisticated products, the skill content of China's
            manufacturing exports remained unchanged, once processing
            trade is excluded. Third, export growth was accompanied by
            increasing specialization and was mainly accounted for by
            high export growth of existing products (the intensive
            margin) rather than in new varieties (the extensive margin).
            Fourth, consistent with an increased world supply of
            existing varieties, China's export prices to the United
            States fell by an average of 1.5 percent per year between
            1997 and 2005, while export prices of these products from
            the rest of the world to the United States increased by 0.4
            percent annually over the same period.
Microfinance meets the market
Microfinance institutions have proved
            the possibility of providing reliable banking services to
            poor customers. Their second aim is to do so in a
            commercially-viable way. This paper analyzes the tensions
            and opportunities of microfinance as it embraces the market,
            drawing on a data set that includes 346 of the world's
            leading microfinance institutions and covers nearly 18
            million active borrowers.  The data show remarkable
            successes in maintaining high rates of loan repayment, but
            the data also suggest that profit-maximizing investors would
            have limited interest in most of the institutions that are
            focusing on the poorest customers and women. Those
            institutions, as a group, charge their customers the highest
            fees in the sample but also face particularly high
            transaction costs, in part due to small transaction sizes.
            Innovations to overcome the well-known problems of
            asymmetric information in financial markets were a triumph,
            but further innovation is needed to overcome the challenges
            of high costs.
Public expenditure and consumption volatility
Recent estimates of the welfare cost of
            consumption volatility find that it is significant in
            developing nations, where it may reach an equivalent of
            reducing consumption by 10 percent per year. Hence,
            examining the determinants of consumption volatility is of
            utmost relevance. Based on cross-country data for the period
            1960-2005, the paper explains consumption volatility using
            three sets of variables:  one refers to the volatility of
            income and the persistence of income shocks; the second set
            of variables refers to policy volatility, considering the
            volatility of public spending and the size of government;
            while the third set captures the ability of agents to smooth
            shocks, and includes the depth of the domestic financial
            markets as well as the degree of integration to
            international capital markets. To allow for potential
            endogenous regressors, in particular the volatility of
            fiscal policy and the size of government, the system is
            estimated using the instrumental variables method. The
            results indicate that, besides income volatility, the
            variables with the largest and most robust impact on
            consumption volatility are government size and the
            volatility of public spending. Results also show that deeper
            and more stable domestic financial markets reduce the
            volatility of consumption, and that more integrated
            financial markets to the international capital markets are
            associated with lower volatility of consumption.
HIV/AIDS, climate change and
            disaster management : challenges for institutions in Malawi
Southern African institutions involved
            in disaster management face two major new threats:  the
            HIV/AIDS pandemic (eroding organizational capacity and
            increasing vulnerability of the population), and climate
            change (higher risk of extreme events and disasters).
            Analyzing the combined effects of these two threats on six
            disaster-related institutions in Malawi, the authors find
            evidence of a growing gap between demand for their services
            and capacity to satisfy that demand. HIV/AIDS leads to staff
            attrition, high vacancy rates, absenteeism, increased
            workload and other negative effects enhanced by human
            resources policies and financial limitations. Many necessary
            tasks cannot be carried out adequately with constraints such
            as the 42 percent  vacancy rate in the Department of Poverty
            and Disaster Management Affairs, or the reduction of
            rainfall stations operated by the Meteorological Service
            from over 800 in 1988 to just 135 in 2006. The authors
            highlight implications of declining organizational capacity
            for climate change adaptation, and formulate recommendations.
Who are the microenterprise owners
            Evidence from Sri Lanka on Tokman v. de Soto
Is the vast army of the self-employed in
            low income countries a source of employment generation? This
            paper uses data from surveys in Sri Lanka to compare the
            characteristics of own account workers (non-employers) with
            wage workers and with owners of larger firms. The authors
            use a rich set of measures of background, ability, and
            attitudes, including lottery experiments measuring risk
            attitudes. Consistent with the International Labor
            Organization's views of the self employed (represented
            by Tokman), the analysis finds that two-thirds to
            three-quarters of the own account workers have
            characteristics which are more like wage workers than larger
            firm owners. This suggests the majority of the own account
            workers are unlikely to become employers. Using a two and a
            half year panel of enterprises, the authors show that the
            minority of own account workers who are more like larger
            firm owners are more likely to expand by adding paid
            employees. The results suggest that finance is not the sole
            constraint to growth of microenterprises, and provides an
            explanation for the low rates of growth of enterprises
            supported by microlending.
Who are the microenterprise owners
            Evidence from Sri Lanka on Tokman v. de Soto
WPS4635 Policy ReseaRch WoRking PaPeR 4635 Who Are the Microenterprise Owners? Evidence from Sri Lanka on Tokman v. de Soto _Suresh de Mel David McKenzie Christopher Woodruff_ The World Bank Development Research Group Trade Team May 2008
Who benefits from promoting small
            and medium scale enterprises some empirical evidence from Ethiopia
The Addis Ababa Integrated Housing
            Development Program aims to tackle the housing shortage and
            unemployment that prevail in Addis Ababa by deploying and
            supporting small and medium scale enterprises to construct
            low-cost housing using technologies novel for Ethiopia. The
            motivation for such support is predicated on the view that
            small firms create more jobs per unit of investment by
            virtue of being more labor intensive and that the jobs so
            created are concentrated among the low-skilled and hence the
            poor. To assess whether the program has succeeded in biasing
            technology adoption in favor of labor and thereby
            contributed to poverty reduction, the impact of the program
            on technology usage, labor intensity, and earnings is
            investigated using a unique matched workers-firms dataset,
            the Addis Ababa Construction Enterprise Survey. The data are
            representative of all registered construction firms in Addis
            and were collected specifically for the purpose of analyzing
            the impact of the program. The authors find that program
            firms do not adopt different technologies and are not more
            labor intensive than non-program firms. There is an earnings
            premium for program participants, who tend to be relatively
            well-educated, which is heterogeneous and highest for those
            at the bottom of the earnings distribution.
Oil intensities and oil prices :
            evidence for Latin America
Crude oil prices have dramatically
            increased over the past years and are now at a historical
            maximum in nominal terms and very close to it in real terms.
            It is difficult to argue, at least for net oil importers,
            that higher oil prices have a positive impact on welfare. In
            fact, the negative relationship between oil prices and
            economic activity has been well documented in the
            literature. Yet, to the extent that higher oil prices lead
            to lower oil consumption, it would be possible to argue that
            not all the effects of a price increase are negative.
            Climate change concerns have been on the rise in recent
            years and fossil fuel consumption is generally viewed as one
            of the main causes behind it. Thus this paper explores
            whether higher oil prices contribute to lowering oil
            intensities (that is, oil consumption per unit of gross
            domestic product). The findings show that following an
            increase in oil prices, OECD countries tend to reduce oil
            intensity. However, the same result does not hold for Latin
            America (and more generally for middle-income countries)
            where oil intensities appear to be unaffected by oil prices.
            The paper also explores why this is so.
Good, bad, and ugly colonial
            activities : studying development across the Americas
Levels of economic development vary
            widely within countries in the Americas. This paper argues
            that part of this variation has its roots in the colonial
            era. Colonizers engaged in different economic activities in
            different regions of a country, depending on local
            conditions. Some activities were "bad" in the
            sense that they depended heavily on the exploitation of
            labor and created extractive institutions, while
            "good" activities created inclusive institutions.
            The authors show that areas with bad colonial activities
            have lower gross domestic product per capita today than
            areas with good colonial activities. Areas with high
            pre-colonial population density also do worse today. In
            particular, the positive effect of "good"
            activities goes away in areas with high pre-colonial
            population density. The analysis attributes this to the
            "ugly" fact that colonizers used the pre-colonial
            population as an exploitable resource. The intermediating
            factor between history and current development appears to be
            institutional differences across regions and not income
            inequality or the current ethnic composition of the population.
Are low food prices pro-poor net
            food buyers and sellers in low-income countries
There is a general consensus that most
            of the poor in developing countries are net food buyers and
            food price increases are bad for the poor. This could be
            expected of urban poor, but it is also often attributed to
            the rural poor. Recent food price increases have increased
            the importance of this issue, and the possible policy
            responses to these price increases. This paper examines the
            characteristics of net food sellers and buyers in nine
            low-income countries. Although the largest share of poor
            households are found to be net food buyers, almost 50
            percent of net food buyers are marginal net food buyers who
            would not be significantly affected by food price increases.
            Only three of the nine countries examined exhibited a
            substantial proportion of vulnerable households. The average
            incomes (as measured by expenditure) of net food buyers were
            found to be higher than net food sellers in eight of the
            nine countries examined. Thus, food price increases, ceteris
            paribus, would transfer income from generally higher income
            net food buyers to poorer net food sellers. The analysis
            also finds that the occupations and income sources of net
            sellers and buyers in rural areas are significantly
            different. In rural areas where food production is the main
            activity and where there are limited non-food activities,
            the incomes of net buyers might depend on the incomes and
            farming activities of net food sellers. These results
            suggest the need for reevaluation of the consensus on the
            impact of food prices on food needs. Further work on the
            regional differences, and more important, on the second
            order effects, are necessary to answer these questions more
            precisely. Only on the basis of further analysis can we
            start generating better policy responses.
Bank regulations are changing : for
            better or worse
This paper presents new and official
            survey information on bank regulations in 142 countries and
            makes comparisons with two earlier surveys. The data do not
            suggest that countries have primarily reformed their bank
            regulations for the better over the last decade. Following
            Basel guidelines many countries strengthened capital
            regulations and official supervisory agencies, but existing
            evidence suggests that these reforms will not improve bank
            stability or efficiency. While some countries have empowered
            private monitoring of banks, consistent with the third
            pillar of Basel II, there are many exceptions and reversals
            along this dimension.
India shining and Bharat drowning:
            comparing two Indian states to the worldwide distribution in
            mathematics achievement
This paper uses student answers to
            publicly released questions from an international testing
            agency together with statistical methods from Item Response
            Theory to place secondary students from two Indian states
            -Orissa and Rajasthan -on a worldwide distribution of
            mathematics achievement. These two states fall below 43 of
            the 51 countries for which data exist. The bottom 5 percent
            of children rank higher than the bottom 5 percent in only
            three countries-South Africa, Ghana and Saudi Arabia. But
            not all students test poorly. Inequality in the test-score
            distribution for both states is next only to South Africa in
            the worldwide ranking exercise. Consequently, and to the
            extent that these two states can represent India, the two
            statements "for every ten top performers in the United
            States there are four in India" and "for every ten
            low performers in the United States there are two hundred in
            India" are both consistent with the data. The
            combination of India's size and large variance in
            achievement give both the perceptions that India is shining
            even as Bharat, the vernacular for India, is drowning.
            Comparable estimates of inequalities in learning are the
            building blocks for substantive research on the correlates
            of earnings inequality in India and other low-income
            countries; the methods proposed here allow for independent
            testing exercises to build up such data by linking scores to
            internationally comparable tests.