rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
The strategic use and potential
            demand for an HIV vaccine in Southern Africa
HIV prevalence in Southern Africa is the
            highest in the world and the impact of HIV/AIDS in the
            region are devastating at all levels of society, including
            the wider economy. Government response has lagged behind the
            pace of the epidemic, but programs are now beginning to
            focus on a broad range of interventions to combat its
            further spread and to mitigate its impact. The authors
            investigate the issues around the targeting of an eventual
            HIV vaccine. There is at present no vaccine against HIV.
            Although several candidates are in the trial stage, it is
            not likely that a vaccine effective against the sub-type of
            the virus prevalent in Southern Africa will be available for
            10-15 years. When it is, it may be expensive, only partially
            effective, and confer immunity for a limited period only.
            Vaccination programs will need to make the best use of the
            vaccine that is available and effective targeting will be
            essential. The authors identify potential target groups for
            a vaccine, and estimate how many individuals would be in
            need of vaccination. They develop a method for estimating
            how many cases of HIV infection are likely to be avoided for
            each vaccinated individual. The cases avoided are of two
            kinds: primary-the individual case that might have occurred
            in people who are vaccinated, and secondary-the number of
            people that the vaccinated individual would otherwise have
            caused to become infected. Both of these depend on
            assumptions about the efficacy and duration of vaccine
            protection and the extent and nature of sexual risk behavior
            in the population groups. The authors distinguish between
            the HIV cases averted per vaccination and the cases averted
            per 100 recruits into a vaccination program. The cases
            averted per 100 recruits is used to develop a priority
            ranking of the identified population groups for vaccination.
            The authors discuss the issue of ease of access to those
            groups and how the differential costs would affect the
            vaccination strategy. They conclude that an expensive
            vaccine should be administered to commercial sex workers
            first, while an inexpensive vaccine would be better
            administered first to general population groups, in
            particular, schoolchildren. The authors conclude with a
            discussion of current levels of public and private
            expenditure on HIV prevention and treatment, and the
            implications for an assessment of the willingness to pay for
            an eventual HIV vaccine.
Living and dying with hard pegs :
            the rise and fall of Argentina's currency board
The rise and fall of Argentina's
            currency board shows the extent to which the advantages of
            hard pegs have been overstated. The currency board did
            provide nominal stability and boosted financial
            intermediation, at the cost of endogenous financial
            dollarization, but did not foster monetary or fiscal
            discipline. The failure to adequately address the
            currency-growth-debt trap into which Argentina fell at the
            end of the 1990s precipitated a run on the currency and the
            banks, followed by the abandonment of the currency board and
            a sovereign debt default. The crisis can be best interpreted
            as a bad outcome of a high-stakes strategy to overcome a
            weak currency problem. To increase the credibility of the
            hard peg, the government raised its exit costs, which
            deepened the crisis once exit could no longer be avoided.
            But some alternative exit strategies would have been less
            destructive than the one adopted.
Ways out of poverty : diffusing best
            practices and creating capabilities - perspectives on
            policies for poverty reduction
Fundamentally, poverty reduction is
            about bringing growth processes to poor areas. Because poor
            areas can benefit from technical and organizational
            innovations made elsewhere in the world, it is possible
            today to create productive jobs faster and in greater
            quantity than ever before. The puzzle is what helps spread
            such "best practices." Saving, investment,
            education, resources, and new technology are all needed-and
            fairly easy to obtain. What is hard to obtain are the
            institutions that allow these factors of production to be
            combined and translated into productive job creation. Firms
            are the key vehicles that spread best practices and
            productive jobs to areas where poor people live. Because we
            can never be sure which firm will be successful, it is
            necessary that new firms can enter markets, that substandard
            firms are allowed to fail, and that good firms face few
            barriers to growth. This is the definition of competition,
            and competition is what selects good firms and thus drives
            the spread of best practice and productive jobs. Governments
            need to provide the framework in which capable firms can
            emerge. Yet, the right mix of state activity and how it best
            interacts with firms are not fully understood. Some
            selection mechanism, which allows for policy experiments and
            selects successful ones, is valuable for national,
            provincial, and local governments. Thus competition among
            jurisdictions and firms is an integral part of dynamic
            social systems that hold promise for creating wealth and
            ending poverty.
Options for financing lifelong learning
How should lifelong learning be
            financed? The author attempts to answer the question by
            creating a framework for analyzing different education
            financing mechanisms in light of particular characteristics
            of lifelong learning. The framework compares the different
            financing alternatives on four dimensions: (1) who
            ultimately pays for the education, (2) who finances its
            immediate costs, (3) how payments are made, and (4) who
            collects the payments. The author uses specific
            characteristics of lifelong learning to determine which
            among the financing alternatives are most useful. The
            characteristics are that the individual should decide what
            and where to study, carry a significant part of the
            financial burden, and be encouraged to continue learning
            through all life stages. The author analyzes the financing
            alternatives according to who ultimately pays for the
            education. Hence, the alternatives are classified either as
            cost-recovery or cost-subsidization alternatives.
            Cost-recovery alternatives include traditional loans, a
            graduate tax, human capital contracts, and income-contingent
            loans. Subsidization alternatives are those in which the
            state directly subsidizes institutions or in which the state
            gives vouchers to students. The author concludes that
            combining income-contingent loans and human capital
            contracts with vouchers is the most efficient and equitable
            method for financing lifelong learning. The author discusses
            the role of governments and multilateral organizations in
            improving the financing of lifelong learning. He assesses
            shifting toward cost-recovery alternatives, focusing on
            collection of payments, and aiming for the involvement of
            private capital as key issues that should be addressed to
            ensure that lifelong learning will be available for all
            equitably and efficiently.
Tenure security and land-related
            investment - evidence from Ethiopia
The authors use a large data set from
            Ethiopia that differentiates tenure security and
            transferability to explore determinants of different types
            of land-related investment and its possible impact on
            productivity. While they find some support for endogeneity
            of investment in trees, this is not the case for terraces.
            Transfer rights are unambiguously investment-enhancing. The
            large productivity effect of terracing implies that, even
            where households undertake investments to increase their
            tenure security, this may not be socially efficient. In
            Ethiopia, government action to increase tenure security and
            transferability of land rights can significantly enhance
            rural investment and productivity.
Institutions, trade, and growth :
            revisiting the evidence
Several recent papers have attempted to
            identify the partial effects of trade integration and
            institutional quality on long-run growth using the
            geographical determinants of trade and the historical
            determinants of institutions as instruments. The authors
            show that many of the specifications in these papers are
            weakly identified despite the apparently good performance of
            the instruments in first-stage regressions. Consequently,
            they argue that the cross-country variation in institutions,
            trade, and their geographical and historical determinants is
            not very informative about the partial effects of these
            variables on long-run growth.
Vouchers for basic education in
            developing countries : a principal-agent perspective
Voucher programs consist of three
            simultaneous reforms: (1) allowing parents to choose
            schools, (2) creating intense incentives for schools to
            increase enrollment, and (3) granting schools management
            autonomy to respond to demand. As a result, voucher
            advocates and critics tend to talk past each other. A
            principal-agent framework clarifies the argument for
            education vouchers. Central findings from the literature,
            including issues related to variance in the performance
            measure, risk aversion, the productivity of more effort,
            multiple tasks, and the value of monitoring are found
            relevant for an analysis of vouchers. An assessment of
            findings on voucher programs in industrial countries, as
            well as a review of voucher or quasi-voucher experiences in
            Bangladesh, Chile, Colombia, Cote d'Ivoire, and the
            Czech Republic support the usefulness of the analytic
            framework. The authors conclude that vouchers for basic
            education in developing countries can enhance outcomes when
            they are limited to modest numbers of poor students in urban
            settings, particularly in conjunction with existing private
            schools with surplus capacity. The success of more ambitious
            voucher programs depends on an institutional infrastructure
            challenging to industrial and developing countries alike.
Foreign aid, conditionality, and
            ghost of the financing gap - a forgotten aspect of the aid debate
Assessing Aid: What Works, What
            Doesn't, and Why (The World Bank, 1998) generated a new
            wave of controversy about foreign aid and policy
            conditionality that had seen several decades of intense
            debate. Much of the recent debate has focused on the
            aid-growth relationship and the role of "good"
            policies. While a great deal has been said about qualitative
            aspects of aid effectiveness (that is, fungibility, among
            other things), little attention has been paid so far to some
            important quantitative aspects. The author draws attention
            to this neglected aspect of the aid debate to show that the
            level of aid requirements of a country is an equally
            important and integral part of aid and aid effectiveness.
            The author compares the World Bank/IMF approaches to
            estimation of external assistance requirements of a country
            in quantitative terms with an alternative model, the
            "balance of payments constrained growth model"
            (based on the Harrod trade multiplier). He finds that the
            latter model is not a real alternative as it is an
            incomplete model. More important, he shows that
            international financial institutions use these quantitative
            frameworks in a very flexible and pragmatic way to carry on
            a meaningful policy dialogue with both donors and recipient
            countries, which has an important bearing on aid effectiveness.
Research and development (R&D)
            and development
Lederman and Maloney trace the evolution
            of research and development (R&D) expenditures along the
            development process using a new global panel data set. They
            show that R&D effort measured as a share of GDP rises
            with development at an increasing rate. The authors examine
            how four groups of countries from Latin America, Asia,
            advanced manufacturing exporters, and advanced natural
            resource-abundant countries fare relative to the predicted
            development trajectory. Latin America generally
            underperforms as do some countries in Asia and Europe, but
            their striking finding is that some-Finland, Israel, the
            Republic of Korea, and Taiwan (China)-have radically
            deviated from the predicted trajectory and displayed
            impressive R&D takeoffs. The authors ask whether these
            countries overinvest in R&D but find that the high
            estimates of the social rates of return probably justify
            this effort. Moreover, the returns to R&D decline with
            per capita GDP. The authors attempt to explain why rich
            countries invest more in R&D than poor countries. They
            conclude that financial depth, protection of intellectual
            property rights, government capacity to mobilize resources,
            and the quality of research institutions are the main
            reasons why R&D efforts rise with the level of development.
Trade structure and growth
Lederman and Maloney examine the
            empirical relationships between trade structure and economic
            growth, particularly the influence of natural resource
            abundance, export concentration, and intra-industry trade.
            They test the robustness of these relationships across
            proxies, control variables, and estimation techniques. The
            authors find trade variables to be important determinants of
            growth, especially natural resource abundance and export
            concentration. In contrast with much of the recent
            literature, natural resource abundance appears to have a
            positive effect on growth, whereas export concentration
            hampers growth, even after controlling for physical and
            human capital accumulation, among other factors.
Does a country need a promotion
            agency to attract foreign direct investment : a small
            analytical model applied to 58 countries
Establishing an investment promotion
            agency has become a central part of most countries'
            development strategies. Today there are more than 150
            investment promotion agencies worldwide. Yet very little is
            known about what these agencies have been really doing,
            notably in emerging countries, and whether they have been
            effective in influencing investors' decisions. Using
            data from a new survey on 58 countries, Morisset shows that
            greater investment promotion is associated with higher
            cross-country foreign direct investment (FDI) flows, on top
            of the influence of the country's investment climate
            and market size. But this result has to be qualified on
            several counts. First, the effectiveness of the agency
            depends on the country's environment in which it
            operates. An agency in a poor investment climate is less
            effective at attracting investment. Second, the scope of
            activities that an agency undertakes influences its
            performance. Morisset's empirical analysis indicates
            that agencies devoting more resources on policy advocacy are
            more effective because such activity is not only beneficial
            to foreign investors but also to domestic investors. In
            contrast, investment generation or targeting strategies
            appear expensive and risky, especially in countries with
            poor investment climates. Finally, certain internal
            characteristics of the agencies are associated with greater
            effectiveness. The agencies that have established reporting
            mechanisms to the country's highest policymakers (the
            president or prime minister) or to the private sector have
            been systematically more efficient at attracting foreign
            direct investment. Such institutional links are crucial
            because they contribute to strengthen the government's
            commitment as well as reinforce the agency's
            credibility and visibility in the business community.
Telecommunications reform in Malawi
In 1998 the Government of Malawi decided
            to reform its telecommunications sector. Although the reform
            was ambitious in some ways, it was modest when compared with
            the most ambitious reforms adopted elsewhere in Sub-Saharan
            Africa. The two main accomplishments were splitting the
            incumbent fixed line monopoly, the Malawi Post and
            Telecommunications Corporation, into two companies-Malawi
            Telecommunications Limited (MTL) and Malawi Post Corporation
            (MPC)-and issuing two new cellular licenses to two new
            private entrants. In addition, the Government also
            established a new regulator which was separate from, but
            heavily dependent on, the Ministry of Information and
            liberalized entry in value-added and Internet services.
            However, the Government had neither privatized the
            fixed-line telecommunications operator nor introduced
            competition in fixed-line services by the end of 2002.
            Clarke, Gebreab, and Mgombelo discuss sector performance
            before reform, details of the reform, the political
            motivation for reform, and events in the five years
            following the reform. The reform yielded mixed results.
            Although cellular penetration and Internet use expanded
            dramatically following reform, prices increased, especially
            for cellular calls, and fixed-line penetration remains low
            by regional standards.
Regulation and private sector
            investment in infrastructure - evidence from Latin America
The author assesses the importance of
            the regulatory framework as a determinant of private sector
            investment in infrastructure. She uses recently compiled
            data on private and public sector investment in the water,
            power, telecommunications, railroads, and roads sectors
            between 1980 and 1998 in nine countries in Latin America.
            The author finds that the most significant institutional
            determinant of private investment volumes is the passage of
            legislation liberalizing the investment regime. This is
            important because it indicates that the legal basis for
            reform is probably more critical in determining the quality
            of the investment climate than specific aspects of the
            institutional framework governing private sector
            participation. In accordance with intuition, the
            author's results indicate that government action to
            increase regulatory certainty and minimize the perceived
            risk of expropriation through the establishment of
            independent regulatory bodies is a critical determinant of
            the volume of private investment flows. She also finds that
            the general relationship of private to public investment is
            one of substitutability.
Scaling up community-driven
            development : theoretical underpinnings and program design implications
Community-driven development boasts many
            islands of success, but these have not scaled up to cover
            entire countries. Binswanger and Aiyar examine the possible
            obstacles to scaling up, and possible solutions. They
            consider the theoretical case for community-driven
            development and case studies of success in both sectoral and
            multisectoral programs. Obstacles to scaling up include high
            economic and fiscal costs, adverse institutional barriers,
            problems associated with the co-production of outputs by
            different actors on the basis of subsidiarity, lack of
            adaptation to the local context using field-tested manuals,
            and lack of scaling-up logistics. The authors consider ways
            of reducing economic and fiscal costs, overcoming hostile
            institutional barriers, overcoming problems of
            co-production, adapting to the local context with field
            testing, and providing scaling-up logistics. Detailed
            annexes and checklists provide a guide to program design,
            diagnostics, and tools.
The mini-integrated macroeconomic
            model for poverty analysis : a framework for analyzing the
            unemployment and poverty effects of fiscal and labor market reforms
The author describes a specialized and
            less data-intensive version of the Integrated Macroeconomic
            Model for Poverty Analysis (IMMPA) developed by Ag�or,
            Izquierdo, and Fofack (2003) and Ag�or, Fernandes, Haddad,
            and van der Mensbrugghe (2002). The mini-IMMPA focuses only
            on the "real" side but it offers a more detailed
            treatment of the labor market (by accounting, for instance,
            for public education, employment subsidies, and job security
            provisions) and the tax structure. Simulations of a cut in
            payroll taxes on unskilled labor show the importance of
            accounting for the fiscal implications of labor market
            reforms when assessing their effects on unemployment and poverty.