rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Assessing the global economic and
            poverty effects of antimicrobial resistance
This paper assesses the potential impact
            of antimicrobial resistance on global economic growth and
            poverty. The analysis uses a global computable general
            equilibrium model and a microsimulation framework that
            together capture impact channels related to health,
            mortality, labor productivity, health care financing, and
            production in the livestock and other sectors. The effects
            spread across countries via trade flows that may be affected
            by new trade restrictions. Relative to a world without
            antimicrobial resistance, the losses during 2015–50 may sum
            to $85 trillion in gross domestic product and $23 trillion
            in global trade (in present value). By 2050, the cost in
            global gross domestic product could range from 1.1 percent
            (low case) to 3.8 percent (high case). Antimicrobial
            resistance is expected to make it more difficult to
            eliminate extreme poverty. Under the high antimicrobial
            resistance scenario, by 2030, an additional 24.1 million
            people would be extremely poor, of whom 18.7 million live in
            low-income countries. In general, developing countries will
            be hurt the most, especially those with the lowest incomes.
Assessing the global economic and
            poverty effects of antimicrobial resistance
WPS8133 Policy Research Working Paper 8133 Assessing the Global Economic and Poverty Effects of Antimicrobial Resistance _Syud Amer Ahmed Enis Barış Delfin S. Go Hans Lofgren Israel Osorio-Rodarte Karen Thierfelder_ Development Economics Development Prospects Group & Health Nutrition and Population Global Practice Group June 2017
Land productivity and plot size : is
            measurement error driving the inverse relationship
This paper revisits the decades-old
            puzzle of the inverse plot-size productivity relationship,
            which states that land productivity decreases as plot size
            increases. Existing empirical studies on the inverse
            plot-size productivity relationship define land productivity
            or yields as self-reported production divided by plot size.
            This paper considers an alternative approach to estimating
            yields based on crop cuts. The crop-cut method entails
            measuring and harvesting randomly selected subplots by
            trained technicians, and is recommended by the Food and
            Agriculture Organization for the accurate measurement of
            crop production. Using data representative of rural
            Ethiopia, the analysis indicates that the inverse
            relationship is strong when based on self-reported
            production, but disappears when based on crop-cut estimates.
            The inference from these findings is that the inverse
            relationship is an artifact of systematic overreporting of
            production by farmers on small plots, and underreporting on
            larger plots. The paper also discusses how rejecting the
            inverse plot-size productivity relationship has significant
            implications for the inverse farm-size productivity relationship.
Global inequality in a more educated world
In developing countries, younger and
            better-educated cohorts are entering the workforce. This
            developing world-led education wave is altering the skill
            composition of the global labor supply, and impacting income
            distribution, at the national and global levels. This paper
            analyzes how this education wave reshapes global inequality
            over the long run using a general-equilibrium macro-micro
            simulation framework that covers harmonized household
            surveys representing almost 90 percent of the world
            population. The findings under alternative assumptions
            suggest that global income inequality will likely decrease
            by 2030. This increasing educated labor force will
            contribute to the closing of the gap in average incomes
            between developing and high income countries. The
            forthcoming education wave would also minimize, mainly for
            developing countries, potential further increases of
            within-country inequality.
Pension funds, capital markets, and
            the power of diversification
The potential for pension funds to
            contribute to capital markets and thereby economic growth
            has been argued on a theoretical basis and demonstrated
            empirically. However, reforms fostering the development of
            funded pension systems have not had the economic impact
            hoped for in some countries. Pension fund portfolios in some
            cases have remained highly exposed to shorter-term assets,
            such as bank deposits and shorter-term government bonds.
            This, in turn, has led to relatively low investment returns,
            thereby potentially affecting income adequacy in retirement.
            This paper looks at the potential regulatory hurdles to
            long-term investment by pension funds, while also proposing
            international diversification and the creation of domestic
            investment opportunities to help portfolio diversification
            and ultimately improve the delivery of secure, adequate pensions.
Mission impossible exploring the
            promise of multiple imputation for predicting missing
            GPS-based land area measures in household surveys
Methodological research has showcased
            GPS technology as the new gold-standard in land area
            measurement in large-scale household surveys. Nonetheless,
            facing budget constraints, survey agencies continue to
            measure with GPS only plots within sampled enumeration areas
            or a given radius of dwelling locations. It is,
            subsequently, common for significant shares of plots not to
            be measured, and research has demonstrated that the
            incomplete datasets are subject to selection bias. This
            study relies on nationally-representative survey data from
            Malawi and Ethiopia that exhibit near-negligible missingness
            in GPS-based plot areas and uses these datasets to gauge the
            limits to the accuracy of a Multiple Imputation (MI)
            application for predicting GPS-based areas for plots that
            would typically be considered out-of-scope. The analysis (i)
            artificially creates missingness in area measures, ranging
            from 1 to 100 percent, among the plots that are beyond two
            operationally-relevant distance thresholds with respect to
            the dwellings; (ii) multiply-imputes "missing"
            values in each dataset created by a distance
            threshold-missingness combination; and (iii) compares the
            distributions of the imputed plot-level outcomes with the
            distributions of their true, observed counterparts. In
            Malawi, the multiply-imputed distribution of plot-level land
            productivity is statistically indistinguishable from the
            true distribution in each imputed dataset with up to 82
            percent missingness in GPS-based plot areas that are more
            than 1 kilometer away from the associated dwellings. The
            comparable figure in Ethiopia is 56 percent. The study
            highlights the promise of MI for simulating missing area
            measures and provides recommendations for optimizing
            fieldwork to capture the minimum required data.
Distributional impact analysis:
            toolkit and illustrations of impacts beyond the average
            treatment effect
Program evaluations often focus on
            average treatment effects. However, average treatment
            effects miss important aspects of policy evaluation, such as
            the impact on inequality and whether treatment harms some
            individuals. A growing literature develops methods to
            evaluate such issues by examining the distributional impacts
            of programs and policies. This toolkit reviews methods to do
            so, focusing on their application to randomized control
            trials. The paper emphasizes two strands of the literature:
            estimation of impacts on outcome distributions and
            estimation of the distribution of treatment impacts. The
            article then discusses extensions to conditional treatment
            effect heterogeneity, that is, to analyses of how treatment
            impacts vary with observed characteristics. The paper offers
            advice on inference, testing, and power calculations, which
            are important when implementing distributional analyses in
            practice. Finally, the paper illustrates select methods
            using data from two randomized evaluations.
Evidence for a presource curse oil
            discoveries, elevated expectations, and growth disappointments
Oil discoveries can constitute a major
            positive and exogenous shock to economic activity, but the
            resource curse hypothesis would suggest they might also be
            detrimental to growth over the long run. This paper utilizes
            a new methodology for estimating growth underperformance to
            examine the extent to which discoveries depress the growth
            path of a country following a discovery and prior to
            production starting. The study finds causal evidence of a
            significant negative effect on short-run growth and growth
            relative to counterfactual forecast growth in countries with
            weak institutions, creating growth disappointments prior to
            private and public resource windfalls. This effect is termed
            the presource curse. For a giant oil or gas discovery in
            1988-2010, the study estimates an average growth
            disappointment effect of 0.83 percentage points, measured as
            the average annual gap between forecast and actual growth
            over the five years following a discovery. Further, the
            estimated effect varies by the size of the discovery,
            increasing to a 1.77 percentage points gap in the case of
            super giant discoveries. The estimated effect is inversely
            related to the quality of political institutions, and driven
            by countries with lower institutional quality at the time of
            the discovery, consistent with the similar long-run results
            documented in the resource curse literature. For countries
            with below-threshold institutional quality, the growth
            disappointment effect is larger, measured as 1.35 percentage
            points in annual terms. There is no measured growth
            disappointment effect for countries with strong
            institutions. Using the synthetic control method, we confirm
            our findings for a selection of countries above and below
            the institutional quality threshold. The findings suggest
            that studies of the resource curse that focus only on the
            effects of resource exploitation or examine only long-run
            growth effects may overlook important short-run growth
            disappointments following discoveries, and the way countries
            respond to news shocks.
The Role of Skills and Gender Norms
            in Sector Switches : Experimental Evidence from a Job
            Training Program in Nigeria
Industrialization and structural change
            entails shifting workers from low skill to high skill
            occupations, and in emerging economies a number of
            constraints may impede sectoral switches among workers,
            including skill and spatial mismatches, and social norms
            related to gender in the workplace. This study uses a job
            training experiment across five cities in Nigeria to
            estimate the overall effect of training on sectoral switches
            into the information and communications technology and
            business process outsourcing sector, and to examine the role
            of various factors that might constrain switching. After two
            years the treatment group was 26 percent more likely to work
            in the ICT-enabled service sector, although they were no
            more likely to be employed than the control group. Sector
            switches were higher among those with sector-relevant
            skills, and training magnified the skills premium in
            switching. Switches were also higher in some cities, despite
            large improvements in skills in all cities. Women who were
            implicitly biased against associating women with
            professional attributes were two times more likely to switch
            into ICT than unbiased women, suggesting that training
            helped overcome self-defeating social norms among female
            applicants of the program. These results suggest that
            training can be an effective strategy for inducing sector
            switches and overcoming social norms that hamper female
            mobility in the labor market, but that addressing spatial
            mismatches in labor demand and labor supply may require
            additional interventions.
Predicting school dropout with
            administrative data: new evidence from Guatemala and Honduras
Across Latin America, school dropout is
            a growing concern, because of its negative social and
            economic consequences. Although a wide range of
            interventions hold potential to reduce dropout rates, policy
            makers in many countries must first address the basic
            question of how to target limited resources effectively for
            such interventions. Identifying who is most likely to drop
            out and, therefore, who should be prioritized for targeting,
            is a prediction problem that has been addressed in a rich
            set of research in countries with strong education system
            data. This paper makes use of newly established
            administrative data systems in Guatemala and Honduras, to
            estimate some of the first dropout prediction models for
            lower-middle-income countries. These models can correctly
            identify 80 percent of sixth grade students who will drop
            out in the transition to lower secondary school, performing
            as well as models used in the United States and providing
            more accurate results than other commonly used targeting approaches.
Pension funds and the impact of
            switching regulation on long-term investment
This paper looks at the impact of
            members' ability to switch pension fund provider and
            /or portfolio on the allocation of pension funds to
            long-term investments. The level of annual turnover in
            pension fund portfolios was compared with the amount of
            short-term investments (using government treasury bills and
            bank deposits as proxy). The investment regulations around
            switching and other market conduct were then considered. The
            paper finds that greater movements between pension fund
            providers and between portfolios is linked to increased
            holdings of short-term and more liquid assets. Switching
            appears to be driven by competition, market structure, and
            investment advice, and, unfortunately, frequently results in
            poor investment returns for members. The paper makes six
            recommends for regulators. First, use administrative
            controls to prevent fraudulent switching between pension
            providers. Second, provide clear performance and cost
            comparisons to inform members' choice of provider/fund
            and encourage informed decision making, which is beneficial
            for members and the system. Third, supervise and control
            advertising and marketing (including reporting of
            performance periods) carefully, to avoid switches based on
            misleading advice. Fourth, control financial incentives for
            sales agents, so that switching advice is given in
            members' interest and not for commercial gain. Fifth,
            concentrate issuance in government securities, to create
            more liquid instruments. And sixth, conduct further research
            on the concept of a central liquidity pool to manage
            unexpected outflows.
Arm's-length trade : a source
            of post-crisis trade weakness
Trade growth has slowed sharply since
            the global financial crisis. U.S. trade data highlights that
            arm's-length trade —trade between unaffiliated
            firms—accounts disproportionately for the overall
            post-crisis trade slowdown. This is partly because
            arm's-length trade depends more heavily than intra-firm
            trade on emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs),
            where output growth has slowed sharply from elevated
            pre-crisis rates, and on sectors with rapid pre-crisis
            growth that boosted arm's-length trade pre-crisis but
            that have languished post-crisis. Compounding such
            compositional effects, arm's-length trade is also more
            sensitive to changes in demand and real exchange rates. For
            example, the income elasticity of arm's-length exports
            is about one-fifth higher than that of intra-firm exports.
            Hence, post-crisis global growth weakness has weighed more
            on arm's-length trade than on intra-firm trade.
            Unaffiliated firms may also have been hindered more than
            multinational firms by constrained access to finance during
            the crisis, heightened policy uncertainty, and their typical
            firm-level characteristics.
Productivity in the non-oil sector
            in Nigeria : firm-level evidence
This paper examines the determinants of
            the productivity of Nigerian firms, using three waves of
            Enterprise Surveys from 2007, 2009, and 2014 and 7,670
            firms. The paper uses three alternative measures of
            productivity, which are found to be highly correlated: labor
            productivity, value added per worker, and total factor
            productivity. The more notable trends in the data show: a
            rise in productivity, with the output of exporting firms
            decreasing; increasing concentration of production,
            reflected in the rise of the Herfindahl-Hirschman index by a
            factor of three; increasing costs of crime, power outages,
            lack of security, and bribery; significant heterogeneity of
            these costs along several dimensions, such as firm size,
            age, location, and the exporting or domestic nature of the
            market it serves. These costs are inversely related with
            investment. Regardless of the measure of productivity, its
            main determinants are the education of the worker, size of
            the firm, availability of credit, and business climate
            variables. When labor productivity is used, the stock of
            capital is also a major determinant of productivity. Within
            the investment climate variables, power outages and the
            corruption index are the more significant ones. Power
            outages are negatively associated with productivity. Bribery
            is positively related, supporting the "greasing the
            wheels" hypothesis of bribery as a factor that reduces
            transaction costs. The impact is nonlinear, as it decreases
            with firm size. The results also show a positive association
            between productivity and exporting, but the causality is
            reversed when the analysis controls for endogeneity:
            productivity is a weak determinant of the likelihood of a
            firm becoming an exporter.
Regulating water and sanitation
            network services accounting for institutional and
            informational constraints
The main purpose of this paper is to
            argue that the optimal design of regulation of water and
            sanitation monopolies should be the outcome of a detailed
            diagnostic of the institutional constraints impacting the
            ability of the operator -- whether public or private -- to
            deliver the services. Tailoring the regulatory processes and
            instruments to account for institutional and informational
            weaknesses stands a better chance of improving the
            performance of the sector than the adoption of imported
            standardized or pre-packaged regulatory tools.
Poverty-specific purchasing power
            parities in Africa
The paper revisits the issue of
            poverty-specific purchasing power parities (PPPs), using the
            most recent (2011) International Comparison Program (ICP)
            results. The World Bank's global poverty count uses a
            common international poverty line -- currently $1.90 at 2011
            international prices—based on the ICP PPPs for consumption.
            The use of these PPPs is often criticized for two reasons.
            First, the ICP PPPs are based on patterns of aggregate
            household consumption, not the consumption of the poor.
            Second, the basket of goods and services used for collecting
            prices for the ICP is not poverty specific. On the first
            issue, using data from 28 African countries, the paper
            concludes that the poverty-specific PPPs estimated with
            household expenditure survey weights are very similar to the
            ICP PPPs. On the second issue, poverty-specific PPPs were
            estimated after removing items deemed to be irrelevant for
            the poor. The overall effect of removing these items from
            consumption PPPs is shown to be negligible.
A proximity-based approach to labor
            mobility in CGE models with an application to Sub-Saharan Africa
The ease with which workers can move
            between sectors has a strong impact on the effects on labor
            markets  of shocks such as changes in world prices or
            migration flows. This paper introduces an approach to labor
            mobility with frictions under which worker capabilities
            (their efficiencies in different sectors) depend on their
            sector affiliation. If workers in sector a move to sector
            a', their efficiency shortfall due to a capability
            misfit compared to what is needed in a' (and possessed
            by workers already in a') is measured by a proximity
            parameter, 0 ≤ proxa,a' ≤ 1. If proxa,a' < 1,
            the efficient quantity reaching a' is below the
            physical quantity. In this setting, profit-maximizing
            producers are willing to pay the same wage per efficiency
            unit irrespective of worker origin and thus pay less
            efficient workers a lower wage per physical unit. This
            approach to labor mobility is tested in a static CGE model
            that is applied to an illustrative sub-Saharan African
            dataset with sector proximities defined using the approach
            of the product-space literature. Simulations of positive
            export price shocks show that, the higher the proximities,
            the stronger the labor reallocation and the welfare gains.