rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Biodiversity and national accounting
Biodiversity, a property of natural
            areas, provides a range of benefits to the economy including
            bioprospecting rents, knowledge and insurance, ecotourism
            fees, and ecosystem services. Many of these values can be
            broken out in the System of National Accounts, leading to
            better estimates of the economic losses when natural areas
            are degraded or destroyed. Developing countries harbor the
            great majority of biodiversity, and this diversity provides
            benefits, including knowledge and carbon sequestration, to
            the whole world. However, protecting biodiversity is
            particularly costly for developing countries: the
            opportunity cost of foregoing development of natural areas
            exceeds 1 percent of gross domestic product in 58 developing
            countries, versus only four OECD countries. The Global
            Environment Facility can offset these costs through grant
            finance, but annual Global Environment Facility finance and
            co-finance averages only 8 percent of the opportunity costs
            faced by low-income countries.
Bank competition, concentration, and
            credit reporting
This paper explores the empirical
            relationship between bank competition, bank concentration,
            and the emergence of credit reporting institutions. The
            authors find that countries with lower entry barriers into
            the banking market (that is, a greater threat of
            competition) are less likely to have a credit bureau,
            presumably because banks are less willing to share
            proprietary information when the threat of market entry is
            high. In addition, a credit bureau is significantly less
            likely to emerge in economies characterized by a high degree
            of bank concentration. The authors argue that the reason for
            this finding is that large banks stand to lose more monopoly
            rents from sharing their extensive information with smaller
            players. In contrast, the data show no significant
            relationship between bank competition or concentration and
            the emergence of a public credit registry, where banks'
            participation is mandatory. The results highlight that
            policies designed to promote the voluntary creation of a
            credit bureau need to take into account banks'
            incentives to extract monopoly rents from proprietary credit information.
Productivity growth in Europe
This paper tests whether structural or
            firm-specific characteristics contributed more to (labor)
            productivity growth in the European Union between 2003 and
            2008. It combines the Amadeus firm-level data on
            productivity and firm characteristics with country-level
            data describing regulatory environments from the World
            Bank's Doing Business surveys, foreign direct
            investment data from Eurostat, infrastructure quality
            assessments from the Global Competitiveness Report, and
            credit availability from the World Development Indicators.
            It finds that among the 12 newest members of the European
            Union, country characteristics are most important for firm
            productivity growth, particularly the stock of inward
            foreign direct investment and the availability of credit. By
            contrast, among the more developed 15 elder European Union
            member countries, firm-level characteristics, such as
            industry, size, and international affiliation, are most
            important for growth. The quality of the regulatory
            environment, measured by Doing Business indicators, is
            importantly correlated with productivity growth in all
            cases. This finding suggests that European Union nations can
            realize significant benefits from improving regulations and
            encouraging inward and outward foreign direct investment.
Water hauling and girls' school
            attendance : some new evidence from Ghana
In large parts of the world, a lack of
            home tap water burdens households as the water must be
            brought to the house from outside, at great expense in terms
            of effort and time. This paper studies how such costs affect
            girls' schooling in Ghana, with an analysis based on
            four rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys. Using
            Global Positioning System coordinates, it builds an
            artificial panel of clusters, identifying the closest
            neighbors within each round. The results indicate a
            significant negative relation between girls' school
            attendance and water hauling activity, as a halving of water
            fetching time increases girls' school attendance by 2.4
            percentage points on average, with stronger impacts in rural
            communities. The results seem to be the first definitive
            documentation of such a relationship in Africa. They
            document some of the multiple and wide population benefits
            of increased tap water access, in Africa and elsewhere.
Conducting ethical economic
            research: complications from the field
This essay discusses practical issues
            confronted when conducting surveys as well as designing
            appropriate field trials. First, it looks at the challenge
            of ensuring transparency while maintaining confidentiality.
            Second, it explores the role of trust in light of asymmetric
            information held by the surveyor and by the respondents as
            well as the latter's expectations as to what their
            participation will set in motion. The authors present case
            studies relevant to both of these issues. Finally, they
            discuss the role of ethical review from the perspective of
            research conducted through the World Bank.
Drawing a roadmap for oil pricing reform
In 2011, the median oil imports rose to
            5 percent of gross domestic product for net importers. In
            the past several years, many governments have not passed
            through the world oil price increases to consumers fully. As
            a sign of divergent pricing policies, the retail prices of
            gasoline, diesel, and cooking gas in January 2013 varied by
            a factor of 190, 250, and 70, respectively, across
            developing countries. Policies to keep oil product prices
            low to benefit the economy and protect the poor have had a
            number of unintended negative consequences, including
            flourishing corruption in the oil sector and entrenchment of
            monopoly operators or inefficient firms through which
            subsidies are channeled, stifling competition and raising
            costs. The path to market-based pricing depends on the
            starting conditions: the gap between current and
            market-based price levels, the level of public awareness
            about the extent of departure from market prices, the degree
            of market concentration and competition in downstream oil,
            the subsidy delivery mechanism where subsidies are provided,
            the robustness of social service delivery, and the perceived
            credibility of the government. The evidence presented in
            this paper suggests that pricing reform often does not have
            a clear end and should instead be viewed as a continuous
            process of adjustment and search for mechanisms that take
            into account the country's institutions and political
            system, and the oil sector's market structure,
            infrastructure, and history.
The effect of biodiesel policies on
            world oilseed markets and developing countries
Using an empirical model, this study
            provides some insights into the functioning of the
            oilseed-biodiesel-diesel market complex in a large country
            that determines the biodiesel price, reflecting market
            equilibrium changes resulting from volatility in the crude
            oil price. Oilseed crushing produces joint products -- oil
            and meal -- and this weakens the link between the biodiesel
            and oilseed feedstock prices. Higher crude oil prices
            increase biodiesel prices if biofuel benefits from a fuel
            tax exemption, but lower them with a blending mandate
            (minimum biofuel content requirement in marketed fuel). When
            both canola and soybeans are used to produce biodiesel, an
            increase in the crude oil price leads to higher canola
            prices, but the effect on soybean prices is ambiguous and
            depends on relative elasticities of meal demand and canola
            supply because canola produces more oil than soybeans. An
            oil price shock with a blending mandate results in a smaller
            change in oilseed prices compared with a fuel tax exemption.
            Jumps in world crude oil prices have differential impacts on
            commodity prices and welfare in developing countries,
            depending on which policy determines the biodiesel price in
            OECD countries.
The exceptional persistence of
            India's unorganized sector
The transformation of India's
            unorganized sector is important to its modernization,
            growth, and attainment of regional economic equality. This
            paper documents several key facts about India's
            unorganized sector in manufacturing and services. First, the
            unorganized sector is large, accounting for more than 99
            percent of establishments and 80 percent of employment in
            manufacturing. Second, the unorganized sector is stubbornly
            persistent -- it accounted for 81 percent of manufacturing
            employment in 1989 and 2005. Third, this persistence is not
            due to particular subsets of industries or states, as most
            industries and states show limited change in unorganized
            sector employment shares. Fourth, the degree to which
            localized unorganized activity exists is important as it is
            associated with weaker production functions for
            manufacturing firms. Building from these facts, the paper
            investigates conditions promoting transformation by
            state-industry. Decomposition exercises find that both
            within and between adjustments for state-industries weakly
            reduce unorganized sector shares. The aggregate persistence
            instead comes from the covariance term, where fast-growing
            state-industries witness rising unorganized sector activity.
            Regressions quantify that growth in the organized sector by
            state-industry reduces the unorganized sector employment
            share, but only marginally reduces employment levels in
            unorganized activity. Analysis of the establishment size
            distribution highlights that entrepreneurship and larger
            organized sector plants are most important for transitions
            in the manufacturing sector, while small establishments play
            a key role in the services sector.
Structural change, dualism and
            economic development : the role of the vulnerable poor on
            marginal lands
Empirical evidence indicates that in
            many developing regions, the extreme poor in more marginal
            land areas form a "residual" pool of rural labor.
            Structural transformation in such developing economies
            depends crucially on labor and land use decisions of these
            most-vulnerable populations located on abundant but marginal
            agricultural land. Although the modern sector may be the
            source of dynamic growth through learning-by-doing and
            knowledge spillovers, patterns of labor, land and other
            natural resources use in the rural economy matter in the
            overall dynamics of structural change. The concentration of
            the rural poor on marginal lands is essentially a barometer
            of economy-wide development. As long as there are abundant
            marginal lands for cultivation, they serve to absorb rural
            migrants, increased population, and displaced unskilled
            labor from elsewhere in the economy. Moreover, the economy
            is vulnerable to the "Dutch disease" effects of a
            booming primary products sector. As a consequence,
            productivity increases and expansion in the commercial
            primary production sector will cause manufacturing
            employment and output to contract, until complete
            specialization occurs. Avoiding such an outcome and
            combating the inherent dualism of the economy requires both
            targeted polices for the modern sector and traditional
            agriculture on marginal lands.
The poverty impact of climate change
            in Mexico
This paper examines the effects of
            climate change on poverty through the relationship between
            indicators of climate change (temperature and rainfall
            change) and municipal level gross domestic product, and
            subsequently between gross domestic product and poverty. The
            evidence suggests that climate change could have a negative
            impact on poverty by 2030. The paper proposes a two-stage
            least squares regression where it first regresses
            temperature and rainfall (along with geographic controls and
            state and year fixed effects) on municipal gross domestic
            product per capita for 2000 and 2005 The resulting gross
            domestic product per capita is used in a second equation to
            estimate municipal poverty on the same years. The authors
            then incorporate projections of temperature and rainfall
            changes by 2030 into the estimated climate-gross domestic
            product coefficients to assess the effects of climate change
            in economic activity and how this in turn will influence
            poverty. At the same time, they account for the potential
            adaptive capacity of municipalities through higher
            population densities and economic growth. Both would reduce
            poverty by 31.72 percentage points between 2005 and 2030
            with changing climate. However, poverty could have been
            reduced up to 34.15 percentage points over the same period
            had there been no climate change. This suggests that climate
            change slows down the pace of poverty reduction. An
            alternative reading is that poverty is expected to increase
            from 15.25 percent (without climate change) to 17.68 percent
            (with climate change) by 2030. Given the existing population
            projections for 2030, this represents 2,902,868 people
            remaining in poverty as a result of climate change.
Developing country trade policies
            and market access issues : 1990-2012
The study presents a comprehensive
            review of developing country trade policies and market
            access issues as they evolved over the period 1990-2012. The
            main findings are, first, that applied tariffs as well as
            traditional core non-tariff measures have declined
            significantly over time in both developed and developing
            countries. Second, the instruments of protection used by
            developed and developing countries are becoming increasingly
            similar: trade remedies, especially anti-dumping are the
            instruments of choice for all except low-income developing
            countries. Third, agriculture is the main sector where
            developing countries face access problems in OECD markets.
            Fourth, regional and other preferential trade agreements are
            both a result and a cause of the lack of progress in
            multilateral trade negotiations. They violate the basic
            World Trade Organization tenet of most favored nation and
            thus pose a potential threat to the multilateral system and
            a potential stimulus to further multilateral collaboration.
            Fifth, sanitary and phytosanitary and technical barriers to
            trade are being increasingly used by both developed and
            developing countries but their protective intent is
            difficult to gauge. There is a need for increased vigilance,
            transparency, and reporting to ensure that they are not
            being used as a means of protection of economic interests.
            Sixth, the service sectors are the most promising area where
            efforts for further liberalization are needed and may
            produce significant benefits. And seventh, far less
            additional protection has been put in place following the
            2008 financial crisis compared with what had been feared or
            what had happened in earlier crises.
Estimating quarterly poverty rates
            using labor force surveys : a primer
The paper shows how Labor Force Surveys
            can be used effectively to estimate poverty rates using
            Household Expenditure Surveys and cross-survey imputation
            methods. With only two rounds of Household Expenditure
            Survey data for Morocco (2001 and 2007), the paper estimates
            quarterly poverty rates for the period 2001-2010 by imputing
            household expenditures into the Labor Force Surveys. The
            results are encouraging. The methodology is able to
            accurately reproduce official poverty statistics by
            combining current Labor Force Surveys with previous period
            Household Expenditure Surveys, and vice versa. Although the
            focus is on head-count poverty, the method can be applied to
            any welfare indicator that is a function of household income
            or expenditure, such as the poverty gap or the Gini index of
            inequality. The newly produced time-series of poverty rates
            can help researchers and policy makers to: (a) study the
            determinants of poverty reduction or use poverty as an
            explanatory factor in cross-section and panel models; (b)
            forecast poverty rates based on a time-series model fitted
            to the data; and (c) explore the linkages between labor
            market conditions and poverty and simulate the effects of
            policy reforms or economic shocks. This is a promising
            research agenda that can expand significantly the tool-kit
            of the welfare economist.
Social protection, poverty and the
            post-2015 agenda
Social protection is absent from the
            Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and only recently has
            gained some prominence in the post-2015 discourse. In the
            past quarter century, however, rising inequality has often
            accompanied economic growth. At the same time, the growing
            importance of risk and vulnerability on the wellbeing of the
            poor has been recognized. Further, there is now a consensus
            on adopting more ambitious goals on poverty reduction.
            Defining social protection as a collection of programs that
            address risk, vulnerability, inequality and poverty through
            a system of transfers in cash or in kind, this paper argues
            that social protection needs to be on the post-2015 agenda
            as a key element of the discourse. It provides an empirical
            overview of social protection around the world based on the
            World Bank's Atlas of Social Protection: Indicators of
            Resilience and Equity (ASPIRE) data set. Focusing on the
            goal of ending poverty, the paper estimates that social
            protection programs are currently preventing 150 million
            people from falling into poverty.  Based on the data set,
            the paper develops, tentatively and for discussion, a set of
            candidate goals, indicators and targets for the acceleration
            of poverty reduction through social protection. The authors
            ask what it would take for social protection programs to
            contribute to halving the poverty gap in a country. They
            show that if all countries could achieve the actual poverty
            reduction efficiency already observed in the top quartile of
            countries, then 70 percent of the countries in the sample
            could achieve this goal. However, for 30 percent of the
            countries, even reaching the top quartile on efficiency will
            not be enough -- for these countries, the issue is one of
            budgetary adequacy.
Political determinants of fossil
            fuel pricing
This paper provides an empirical
            analysis of economic and political determinants of gasoline
            and diesel prices for about 200 countries over the period
            1991-2010. A range of both political and economic variables
            are found to systematically influence fuel prices, and in
            ways that differ systematically with countries per-capita
            income levels. For democracies, the analysis finds that fuel
            prices correlate positively with both duration of democracy
            and tenure of democratic leaders. In non-democratic
            societies there is more often no such relationship or it is
            the opposite of that for democracies. Regime switches --
            transitions from non-democratic to democratic government, or
            vice versa -- reduce fuel prices. Fuel prices are also lower
            for more corrupt, or more centralized, governments. Higher
            levels of gross domestic product per capita lead to higher
            fuel prices, while export income from selling fossil fuels
            reduces these prices dramatically. Higher motor fuel
            consumption also appears to reduce fuel prices, most for
            gasoline. Absolute "pass-through" of crude oil
            price changes to fuel prices is found to be high on average.
Calculating the carbon footprint
            from different classes of air travel
This paper develops a new methodology
            for calculating the "carbon footprint" of air
            travel whereby emissions from travel in premium (business
            and first) classes depend heavily on the average
            class-specific occupied floor space. Unlike methods
            currently used for the purpose, the approach properly
            accounts for the fact that the relative number of passenger
            seats in economy and premium classes is endogenous in the
            longer term, so adding one additional premium trip crowds
            out more than one economy trip on any particular flight. It
            also shows how these differences in carbon attributable to
            different classes of travel in a carbon footprint
            calculation correspond to how carbon surcharges on different
            classes of travel would differ if carbon emissions from
            international aviation were taxed given a competitive
            aviation sector globally. The paper shows how this approach
            affects carbon footprint calculations by applying it to
            World Bank staff travel for calendar year 2009.