rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
How China's government and
            state enterprises partitioned property and control rights
In 1980, China's government owned
            and controlled its state enterprises, which were managed
            (inefficiently) by bureaucrats. During the 1980s, the
            government experimented with decentralizing state
            enterprises to boost productivity. By decade's end,
            China's state enterprises had become more
            market-oriented, and the structure of enterprise property
            rights had changed dramatically. The author examines how
            China's government and state enterprises partitioned
            property rights -how the government and enterprises decided
            about incentives, financial arrangements, and control
            rights. The author assumes that the government is
            risk-neutral and the enterprise manager is risk-averse; that
            the government's goal is to increase revenue (or
            profitability), to retain control of the firms (by bailing
            out firms in financial trouble and collective heavier taxes
            on high-performing firms). The enterprise manager and
            employees, on the other hand, have an informational
            advantage over the government that allows them to earn a
            rent; that advantage leads to suboptimal efforts. Among the
            author's findings: (1) The ways the government and
            enterprises partitioned property rights were consistent with
            the prediction of the principal-agent model based on the
            above assumption. (2) Many of the changes in property rights
            reflected the government's attempt to cope with
            managerial informational advantage. (3) The government, in
            striving for equality, rewards inefficient firms while
            penalizing efficient ones (the so-called ratchet effect).
            Efficient firms are unwilling to reveal their true
            efficiency. They pretend to be inefficient by slacking, so
            they can get more transfers. So, there are inherent
            conflicts between two of the government's goals:
            profitability and equality. And the government's desire
            to control state enterprises prevents many of them from
            becoming decentralized and improving their productivity.
Regional economic integration and
            agricultural trade
The author analyzes the economic impact
            of regional integration on agricultural trade. Using a
            simple Krugman-type model with product differentiation, he
            derives two propositions about regionalism's impact on
            trade flows: 1) The higher the degree of pre-integration
            protection, the greater the impact of regional integration.
            2) The lower the degree of product differentiation, the
            greater the impact of regional integration. Taken together,
            the two propositions predict that regionalism has more
            impact on agricultural trade than on manufacturing, because
            the initial level of protection is higher and the degree of
            product differentiation is lower for agricultural products.
            He tests these propositions against actual data for two
            incidents of European Community expansion: Greece's
            admission to the EC in 1981 and that of Spain and Portugal
            in 1986. The data generally support the theory. After the
            theoretical and ex post analysis, the author applies the
            model to examine the possible ex ante impact of the Asia
            Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) free trade agreement on
            Japanese rice imports, an issue on which (despite heated
            emotional debates) there have been no major studies. It is
            the popular belief in Japan that when the Japanese rice
            market is liberalized, Japanese rice production will be
            wiped out. The author's simulation results suggest that
            the impact of partial liberalization of Japan's rice
            market would be relatively minor, but total liberalization
            would have a profound impact on Japanese rice production.
Corporate risk around the world
Weaknesses in the corporate sector have
            increasingly been cited as important factors in financial
            crises in both emerging markets and industrial countries.
            Analysts have pointed to weak corporate performance and
            risky financing patterns as major causes of the East Asian
            financial crisis. And some have argued that company balance
            sheet problems may also have played a role, independent of
            macroeconomic or other weaknesses, including poor corporate
            sector performance. But little is known about the empirical
            importance of firm financing choices in predicting and
            explaining financial instability. Firm financing patterns
            have long been studied by the corporate finance literature.
            Financing patterns have traditionally been analyzed in the
            Modigliani-Miller framework, expanded to incorporate taxes
            and bankruptcy costs. More recently, asymmetric information
            issues have drawn attention to agency costs and their impact
            on firm financing choices. There is also an important
            literature relating financing patterns to firm performance
            and governance. Several recent studies have focused on
            identifying systematic cross-country differences in firm
            financing patterns - and the effects of these differences on
            financial sector development and economic growth. They have
            also examined the causes of different financing patterns,
            particularly countries' legal and institutional
            environments. The literature has devoted little attention to
            corporate sector risk characteristics, however, aside from
            leverage and debt maturity considerations. Even these
            measures have been the subject of few empirical
            investigations, mainly because of a paucity of data on
            corporate sectors around the world. Building on data that
            have recently become available, the authors try to fill this
            gap in the literature and shed light on the risk
            characteristics of corporate sectors around the world. They
            investigate how corporate sectors' financial and
            operating structures relate to the institutional environment
            in which they operate, using data for more than 11,000 firms
            in 46 countries. They show that: 1) the origins of a
            country's laws, the strength of its equity and creditor
            rights, and the nature of its financial system can account
            for the degree of corporate risk-taking. 2) In particular,
            corporations in common law countries and market-based
            financial systems have less risky financing patterns. 3)
            Stronger protection of equity and creditor rights is also
            associated with less financial risk.
The structure of social disparities
            in education : gender and wealth
Using internationally comparable
            household data sets (Demographic and Health Surveys), the
            author investigates how gender and wealth interact to
            generate within country inequalities in educational
            enrollment and attainment. He carries out multivariate
            analysis to assess the partial relationship between
            educational outcomes and gender, wealth, household
            characteristics (including level of education of adults, in
            the households), and community characteristics (including
            the presence of schools in the community). He finds that: 1)
            women are at a great educational disadvantage in countries
            in South Asia and North, Western, and Central Africa. 2)
            Gender gaps are large in a subset of countries, but wealth
            gaps are large in almost all of the countries studied.
            Moreover, in some countries where there is a heavy female
            disadvantage in enrollment (Egypt, India, Morocco, Niger,
            and Pakistan), wealth interacts with gender to exacerbate
            the gap in the educational outcomes. In India, for example,
            where there is a 2.5 percentage point difference between
            male and female enrollment for children from the richest
            households, the difference is 34 percentage points for
            children from the poorest households. 3) The education level
            of adults in the household has a significant impact on the
            enrollment of children in all the countries studied, even
            after controlling for wealth. The effect of the educational
            level of adult female is larger than that of the education
            level of adult males in some, but not all, of the countries
            studied. 4) The presence of a primary and a secondary school
            in the community has a significant relationship with
            enrollment in some countries only (notably in Western and
            Central Africa). The relationship appears not to
            systematically differ by children's gender.
The political economy of distress in
            East Asian financial institutions
Politics and regulatory capture can play
            an important role in financial institutions' distress.
            East Asia's financial crisis featured many distressed
            and closed financial intermediaries in an environment with
            many links between government, politicians, supervisors, and
            financial institutions. This makes the East Asian financial
            crisis a good event for studying how such connections affect
            the resolution of financial institutions' distress. The
            authors investigate distress and closure decisions for 186
            banks and 97 non-bank financial institutions in Indonesia,
            the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, and
            Thailand. They find that after July 1997, 42 percent of the
            institutions experienced distress (were closed, merged, or
            re-capitalized, or had their operations temporarily
            suspended). By July 1999, 13 percent of all institutions in
            existence in July 1997 had been closed. Using financial data
            for 1996, the authors find that: 1) Traditional CAMEL-type
            variables - returns on assets, loan growth, and the ratio of
            loan loss reserves to capital, of net interest income to
            total income, and of loans to borrowings - help predict
            subsequent distress and closure. 2) None of the
            foreign-controlled institutions were closed, and foreign
            portfolio ownership lowered an institution's
            probability of distress. 3) "Connections" - with
            industrial groups of influential families - increased the
            probability of distress, suggesting that supervisors had
            granted forbearance from regulations. Connections also made
            closure more, not less, likely - suggesting that the closure
            processes themselves were transparent. 4) But larger
            institutions, although more likely to be distressed, were
            less likely to be closed, while (smaller) non-bank financial
            institutions were more likely to be closed. This suggests a
            "too big to fail" policy. 5) These policies,
            together with the fact that resolution processes were late
            and not necessarily comprehensive, may have added to the
            overall uncertainty and loss of confidence in the East Asian
            countries, aggravating the financial crisis.
Productivity growth, capital
            accumulation, and the banking sector - some lessons from Malaysia
How did the East Asian miracle turn into
            one of the worst financial crisis of the century? The
            authors address the question using Malaysia as a case study.
            Many discussions of the East Asian crisis address proximate
            and short-run causes of the crisis, such as the current
            account deficit, exchange rate misalignment, and
            disproportionate short-run external debt relative to foreign
            exchange reserves. These indicators of vulnerability are
            themselves endogenous outcomes of deeper institutional
            features. The authors argue that some long-term features of
            the development strategy that helped sustain high growth in
            the first place also contributed to the economy's
            increasing vulnerability. High output growth was driven by
            rapid growth in capital stock, for example. The banking
            sector played a critical role in transforming (and
            accelerating the transformation of) large savings into
            capital accumulation. But the banking sector may not have
            been allocating capital efficiency. The authors find that
            the rapid growth in bank lending in Malaysia is negatively
            associated with total factor productivity growth. On the
            other hand, the economy's other structural strengths,
            such as openness to foreign direct investment and
            technology, helped improve productivity growth.
            Malaysia's exceptional growth record over the past
            quarter century was driven largely by the growth in physical
            capital stock. Total factor productivity growth may have
            slowed in the late 1990s, and sustaining high output growth
            will require greater emphasis on productivity improvements.
            Policies that encouraged the flow of foreign direct
            investment and better access to imported capital goods
            contributed to productivity growth. But rapid growth in bank
            lending relative to GDP may have slowed it. How policymakers
            can best slow the growth of credit is a question that
            remains unanswered.
How land registration affects
            financial development and economic growth in Thailand
Using an economy-wide conceptual
            framework, the author analyzes how land registration affects
            financial development and economic growth in Thailand. He
            uses contemporary techniques, such as error correction and
            co-integration, to deal with such problems as time-series
            data not being stationary. He also uses the auto-regressive
            distributed lag model to analyze long lags in output
            response to changes in land registration. His key findings:
            1) Land titling has significant positive long-run effects on
            financial development. 2) Economic growth responds to land
            titling following a J curve, by first registering a fall and
            recovering gradually, thereafter to post a long, strong
            rally. 3) The quality of land registration services, as
            measured by public spending on land registration, has
            strongly positive and significant long-run effects on
            economic growth.
The effects of land registration on
            financial development and economic growth - a theoretical
            and conceptual framework
The author develops a theoretical
            framework to guide empirical analysis of how land
            registration affects financial development and economic
            growth. Most conceptual approaches investigate the effects
            of land registration on only one sector, nut land
            registration is commonly observed to affect not only other
            sectors but the economy as a whole. The author builds on the
            well-tested link between secure land ownership and farm
            productivity, adding to the framework theory about positive
            information and transaction costs. To map the relationship
            between land registration and financial development and
            economic growth, the framework links: 1) Land tenure
            security and investment incentives. 2) Land title,
            collateral, and credit. 3) Land markets, transactions, and
            efficiency. 4) Labor mobility and efficiency. 5) Land
            liquidity, deposit mobilization, and investment. Empirical
            results from applying the framework to a single case study -
            of Thailand, described in a separate paper - suggest that
            the framework is sound.
Will the Euro create a bonanza for Africa
In considering how the euro will affect
            Sub-Saharan Africa, the authors examine the transmission
            channels through which the euro could affect economies in
            the region. They examine the risks and opportunities the
            euro presents for Sub-Saharan African countries. They
            especially examine the effects from the trade channel,
            through changes in European economic activity and the real
            exchange rate. Because of the relatively low income
            elasticity for primary commodities - which is what
            Sub-Saharan Africa mainly exports - an increase in activity
            in Europe is considered to have a marginal impact on Africa.
            Exchange rate regimes and geographical trade patterns point
            to large differences in exposure to changes in the real
            exchange rate. Capital flows to Sub-Saharan Africa can be
            affected through portfolio shifts or through changes in
            foreign direct investment. Changes in competitiveness in
            Europe are not expected to influence foreign direct
            investment, so the euro is not expected to affect foreign
            direct investment significantly. Portfolio diversification
            could increase greatly. But Sub-Saharan Africa is not
            expected to realize the increased potential from portfolio
            diversification because of its severely underdeveloped
            domestic capital markets. It is vitally important that
            Sub-Saharan African countries strengthen their financial
            integration into global markets. How the euro will affect
            such parts of the financial system as banks and debt and
            reserve management varies across countries. Generally the
            effect is expected to be limited.
Beyond capital ideals : restoring
            banking stability
The authors examine why emerging
            markets, in particular, are susceptible to and affected by
            financial difficulties. They show that these difficulties
            have a richer, more complex structure than they are
            sometimes believed to have - with marked information
            asymmetries and substantial volatility. The sources of
            heightened regulatory failure in emerging markets in recent
            years include the volatility of real and nominal shocks, the
            difficulty of operating in uncharted territory after
            financial liberalization and other changes in regime, and
            the political pressures that can inhibit the enforcement of
            prudential regulation. The authors discuss what stronger
            regulation can and cannot accomplish, as well as options to
            improve the incentive structure for bankers, regulators, and
            other market participants. They probe the shortcomings of a
            regulatory paradigm that relies mainly on supervised capital
            adequacy and discuss the possible intermittent application
            of supplementary "blunt instruments" as an interim
            solution while longer-term reforms are being put in place.
            Certain well-worn messages remain valid, but are respected
            more in theory than in practice. There would be fewer
            problems, the authors say, if there were: 1) more
            diversification; 2) more balanced financial structures (for
            example, as between debt and equity); 3) more foreign banks
            in emerging markets' financial systems; and 4) better
            enforcement of both contracts and regulations. Participants
            in the financial sector will constantly try to get around
            rules that limit their profitability, so regulation must be
            seen as an evolutionary struggle. Prevention of financial
            failure is not costless, and a heavy repressive hand is not
            warranted. But a richer regulatory palette can be used to
            protect financial systems more successfully against crisis
            while preserving the systems' growth-enhancing effectiveness.
Reforming tax systems - the World
            Bank record in the 1990s
The main constraint on world Bank
            operations in tax and customs administration is the
            Bank's inadequate institutional framework for
            accumulating knowledge from loan operations, concludes this
            review of the Bank's record on reform of tax systems in
            the 1990s. The Bank's theoretical basis for reforming
            tax and customs administration is still rudimentary. Recent
            theories stress the importance of institutions that harness
            voice and improve transparency and contestability, but there
            is little evidence that reform of these factors alone makes
            tax administration more effective. Improvements are needed
            in pre-project diagnosis and project design, especially for
            examining accountability, administration costs, managerial
            autonomy, performance incentives for staff, taxpayer equity
            and services, and environmental factors. Pre-project work
            could draw more systematically on lessons from previous
            experience. Institutional components of project design have
            been biased toward organization, manpower upgrading, and
            procedures related to information technology. Too little
            attention has been paid to improving accountability,
            administrative cost-effectiveness, and anticorruption
            institution-building. Projects have made inadequate use of
            different kinds of performance indicators, with little
            uniformity in those applied. Methods used to evaluate
            project outcomes could be better and more uniform.
            Suggestions for future Bank operations: 1) doing better
            background work and articulating a strategy and
            comprehensive framework for Bank involvement in reform of
            tax administration. 2) Possibly supporting and strengthening
            regional tax administration associations, which could serve
            as catalysts for change. 3) Strengthening partnering and
            supporting private sector consultant organizations, so they
            can manage major components of administrative reform. 4)
            Institutionalizing the accumulation of knowledge about tax
            administration (which might require changing staff
            recruitment, the mix of staff skills, and training plans).
            The authors provide recommendations for improving project
            diagnosis, design, performance indicators, and appraisal, as
            well as a short list of projects that serve as guides to
            good practice.