rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Fiscal policy in Colombia : tapping
            its potential for a more equitable society
Colombia has the seventh highest Gini
            coefficient of income inequality in the world. The Santos
            Administration is aware of this challenge and is taking
            important measures to reduce disparities. The government is
            also aspiring to join the OECD, which exhibits much lower
            income disparities, mainly as a result of effective policies
            of fiscal redistribution. In Colombia, meanwhile, direct
            taxes, indirect taxes, and monetary transfers hardly dent
            the high Gini coefficient. To reduce income inequality,
            Colombian policy makers could consider introducing a more
            progressive tax-transfer system. This paper ranks
            alternative inequality-reducing fiscal policy options based
            on their effectiveness. It argues that there are potentially
            important redistributive potential gains available from tax
            reforms if combined with good spending decisions. It
            presents an illustrative reform package that would be
            sufficient for Colombia to reach levels of inequality
            similar to Chile or Costa Rica in a fiscally neutral manner.
            Nonetheless, further analysis is needed to explore all
            available policy options and identify those best suited for Colombia.
Revising commitments : field
            evidence on the adjustment of prior choices
The very poor in developing countries
            often make intertemporal choices that seem at odds with
            their individual self-interest. There are many possible
            reasons why. This paper investigates several of these
            reasons with a lab-in-the-field experiment in rural Malawi
            involving large stakes. It makes two contributions. First,
            it constructs a new dependent variable: revisions of prior
            choices regarding the allocation of future income. This
            allows us to directly examine intertemporal choice revision
            and its determinants. In particular, this dependent variable
            permits a novel test for the existence of self-control
            problems. It turns out revisions of money allocations toward
            the present are positively associated with measures of
            present-bias from an earlier baseline survey, as well as the
            (randomly assigned) closeness in time to the first possible
            date of money disbursement. Second, the paper investigates
            other potential determinants of revision, aside from
            self-control problems. It finds little evidence that
            revisions of money allocations toward the present are
            associated with spousal preferences for such revision,
            household shocks or the financial sophistication of respondents.
Why don't banks lend to
            Egypt's private sector
Bank credit to Egypt's private
            sector decreased over the last decade, despite a
            recapitalized banking system and high rates of economic
            growth. Recent macro-economic turmoil has reinforced the
            trend. This paper explains the decrease based on credit
            supply and demand considerations by 1) presenting stylized
            facts regarding the evolution of the banks' sources and
            fund use in 2005 to 2011, noting two different cycles of
            external capital flows, and 2) estimating private credit
            supply and demand equations using quarterly data from 1998
            to 2011. The system of simultaneous equations is estimated
            both assuming continuous market clearing and allowing for
            transitory price rigidity entailing market disequilibrium.
            The main results are robust to the market clearing
            assumption. During the global financial crisis, a
            significant capital outflow stalled bank deposit growth,
            which in turn affected the private sector's credit
            supply. At the same time, the banking sector increased
            credit to the government.  Both factors reduced the private
            sector's credit supply during the period under study.
            After the trough of the global crisis, capital flowed back
            into Egypt and deposit growth stopped being a drag on the
            supply side, but bank credit to the government continued to
            drive the decrease in the private sector's credit
            supply. Beginning in the final quarter of 2010, capital
            flows reversed in tandem with global capital markets, and in
            January 2011 the popular uprising that ousted President
            Hosni Mubarak added an Egypt-specific shock that accentuated
            the outflow. Lending capacity dragged again, accounting for
            10 percent of the estimated fall in private credit. Credit
            to the government continued to drain resources, accounting
            for 70 - 80 percent of the estimated total decline. Reduced
            economic activity contributed around 15 percent of the total
            fall in credit. The relative importance of these factors
            contrasts with that of the preceding capital inflow period,
            when credit to the government accounted for 54 percent of
            the estimated fall, while demand factors accounted for a
            similar percentage.
Who benefits most from rural
            electrification evidence in India
This paper applies an econometric
            analysis to estimate the average and distribution benefits
            of rural electrification using rich household survey data
            from India. The results support that rural electrification
            helps to reduce time allocated to fuelwood collection by
            household members and increases time allocated to studying
            by boys and girls. Rural electrification also increases the
            labor supply of men and women, schooling of boys and girls,
            and household per capita income and expenditure.
            Electrification also helps reduce poverty. But the larger
            share of benefits accrues to wealthier rural households,
            with poorer ones having more limited use of electricity. The
            analysis also shows that restricted supply of electricity,
            due to frequent power outages, negatively affects both
            household electricity connection and its consumption,
            thereby reducing the expected benefits of rural electrification.
Causes and implications of credit
            rationing in rural Ethiopia : the importance of spatial variation
This paper uses Ethiopian data to
            explore credit rationing in semi-formal credit markets and
            its effects on farmers' resource allocation and crop
            productivity. Credit rationing -- both voluntarily and
            involuntarily -- is found to be widespread in the sampled
            rural villages, largely because of risk-related factors.
            Political and social networks emerge as key determinants of
            access to credit among smallholder, peasant farmers.
            Significant regional variation emerges as well. In
            high-potential, surplus producing areas where credit is
            largely used for agricultural production, eliminating credit
            constraints is estimated to increase productivity by roughly
            11 percentage points. By contrast, in low-productivity,
            drought prone areas where loans were rarely used to acquire
            inputs for crop production, the authors find no relationship
            between credit rationing and agricultural productivity. To
            be effective, efforts to improve agricultural productivity
            not only need to increase credit supply, but also explore
            the reasons for credit rationing and the availability of
            productive opportunities.
Government spending multipliers in
            developing countries : evidence from lending by official creditors
This paper uses a novel loan-level
            dataset covering lending by official creditors to developing
            country governments to construct an instrument for public
            spending that can be used to estimate government spending
            multipliers. Loans from official creditors (primarily
            multilateral development banks and bilateral aid agencies)
            are a major source of financing for government spending in
            developing countries. These loans typically finance public
            spending projects that take several years to implement, with
            multiple disbursements linked to the stages of project
            implementation. The long disbursement periods for these
            loans imply that the bulk of government spending financed by
            official creditors in a given year reflects loan approval
            decisions made in many previous years, before current-year
            macroeconomic shocks are known. Loan-level commitment and
            disbursement transactions from the World Bank's Debtor
            Reporting System database are used to isolate a
            predetermined component of government spending associated
            with past loan approvals. This can be used as an instrument
            to estimate spending multipliers for a large sample of 102
            developing countries. The one-year government spending
            multiplier is reasonably-precisely estimated to be around
            0.4, and there is some suggestive evidence that multipliers
            are larger in recessions, in countries less exposed to
            international trade, and in countries with flexible exchange
            rate regimes.
Overdraft facility policy and firm
            performance : an empirical analysis in eastern European
            Union industrial firms
This article evaluates the effect of the
            overdraft facility (or line of credit) policy by comparing a
            large sample of overdraft facilitated firms and matched
            non-overdraft facilitated firms from Eastern Europe at the
            sector level. The sample firms are compared with respect to
            rates of different performance indicators including:
            technical efficiency (a Data Envelopment Analysis approach
            is applied to estimate the technical efficiency level for
            individual sectors), production workers trained,
            expenditures on research and development, and export
            activity. In order to avoid the selectivity problem,
            propensity score matching methodologies are adopted. The
            results suggest that a certain level of overdraft facility
            provided to firms would be needed to stimulate investment in
            research and development, which will eventually result in
            increased growth in productivity.
Greening China's rural energy :
            new insights on the potential of smallholder biogas
Clean, safe energy for rural areas is an
            important component of green growth and sustainable
            development. Biogas could be an important contributor, if
            its record in reality lives up to its expected potential.
            This paper provides a preliminary assessment of biogas use
            by smallholder farmers in rural China, using data collected
            from 2,700 households in five provinces. The authors find
            that user satisfaction is high, and environmental and
            economic benefits appear tangible. There are strong
            indications of reduced use of wood and crop residues for
            fuel. Less time is spent on collecting fuel wood and
            cooking, which is especially beneficial  to women. Adopters
            also save on fertilizers, because of the use of biogas
            residues. Moreover, problems with suspension of biogas use,
            whether due to technical or human factors, remained limited.
            However, few tangible benefits to respiratory health were
            detected. Overall, these findings are grounds for optimism
            about the potential for of smallholder biogas to contribute
            to more sustainable development, in China and beyond.
Using performance incentives to
            improve health outcomes
This study examines the effect of
            performance incentives for health care providers to provide
            more and higher quality care in Rwanda on child health
            outcomes. The authors find that the incentives had a large
            and significant effect on the weight-for-age of children
            0-11 months and on the height-for-age of children 24-49
            months. They attribute this improvement to increases in the
            use and quality of prenatal and postnatal care. Consistent
            with theory, They find larger effects of incentives on
            services where monetary rewards and the marginal return to
            effort are higher. The also find that incentives reduced the
            gap between provider knowledge and practice of appropriate
            clinical procedures by 20 percent, implying a large gain in
            efficiency. Finally, they find evidence of a strong
            complementarity between performance incentives and provider skill.
Financial literacy around the world
            : an overview of the evidence with practical suggestions for
            the way forward
Financial literacy programs are fast
            becoming a key ingredient in financial policy reform
            worldwide. Yet, what is financial literacy exactly and what
            do we know of its effectiveness? This paper collects
            insights from the literature thus far and summarizes global
            evidence on financial literacy, its correlates, and existing
            and upcoming causal investigations. The authors conclude
            with a synthesis of policy advice and practical suggestions
            for the way forward in this fast growing area of research.
Guide to the services trade
            restrictions database
A new Services Trade Restrictions
            Database collects and makes publicly available information
            on services trade policy assembled in a comparable manner
            across 103 countries, five sectors (telecommunications,
            finance, transportation, retail and professional services)
            and the key modes of service supply. It contains richly
            textured policy information as well as a preliminary
            quantification of policy measures. This paper is a guide to
            the database, and provides a description of the data, how it
            was collected, how policy information was quantified, and
            how the data are presented in the publicly available,
            interactive Web database. The database is best seen as a
            first response to the strong demand for better information
            from policy-makers, negotiators, researchers and the private
            sector. Even in its present version, the database can play
            an important role in advancing policy reform by facilitating
            the analysis of services policies, informing international
            negotiations by providing data on actual policies, and
            provoking dialogue and refinements by making information on
            policies publicly available. Through feedback from various
            interested parties, the database may evolve into a
            collectively created public good.
Bank ownership and credit over the
            business cycle : is lending by state banks less procyclical
This paper finds that lending by state
            banks is less procyclical than lending by private banks,
            especially in countries with good governance. Lending by
            state banks in high-income countries is even
            countercyclical. On the liability side, state banks expand
            potentially unstable non-deposit liabilities relatively
            little during booms, especially in countries with good
            governance. Public banks also report loan non-performance
            more evenly over the business cycle. Overall the results of
            the analysis suggest that state banks can play a useful role
            in stabilizing credit over the business cycle as well as
            during periods of financial instability. However, the track
            record of state banks in credit allocation remains quite
            poor, questioning the wisdom of using state banks as a
            short-term countercyclical tool.
Finance, comparative advantage, and
            resource allocation
The authors show that exported products
            exit the US market sooner if they violate the
            Heckscher-Ohlin notion of comparative advantage. Crucially,
            this pattern is stronger when exporting country has a
            well-developed banking system, measured by a high ratio of
            bank credit over the GDP. Banks thus push firms away from
            exports that are facing an uphill battle on a competitive
            foreign market due to a suboptimal use of the domestic
            factor endowment. The results imply a disciplining role for
            bank credit in terminating inefficient trade flows. This
            constitutes a new channel through which finance improves
            resource allocation in the real economy.
Regionalizing infrastructure for
            deepening market integration: the case of East Africa
The East African Community has long
            recognized that regional economic integration can yield
            significant welfare gains to its member states.  To that
            end, the community has been making steady progress towards
            the removal of tariffs and quantitative restrictions to
            trade.  Moreover, in recent years, there has been an
            increasing recognition that: (a) even greater welfare gains
            could be realized through deeper forms of regional
            integration which entail harmonization of legal, regulatory
            and institutional frameworks; and (b) reforms that reduce
            cross-border transaction costs and improve the performance
            of "backbone" infrastructure services are arguably
            even more important for the creation of an open, unified
            regional economic space than trade policy reforms narrowly
            defined.  Disparities of regulatory treatment across borders
            can introduce distortions that hinder both cross-border
            trade and the aggregate flows of investment on a regional
            basis.  Regulatory harmonization and infrastructure
            regionalization could make a significant contribution to the
            region's economic development by promoting a more
            efficient utilization of its human and physical resources,
            enhancing connectivity, reducing the costs of trade, and
            facilitating the integration of the continent with the
            global economy.
More relatively-poor people in a
            less absolutely-poor world
Relative deprivation, shame and social
            exclusion can matter to the welfare of people everywhere.
            The authors argue that such social effects on welfare call
            for a reconsideration of how we assess global poverty, but
            they do not support standard measures of relative poverty.
            The paper argues instead for using a weakly-relative measure
            as the upper-bound complement to the lower-bound provided by
            a standard absolute measure. New estimates of global poverty
            are presented, drawing on 850 household surveys spanning 125
            countries over 1981-2008. The absolute line is $1.25 a day
            at 2005 prices, while the relative line rises with the mean,
            at a gradient of 1:2 above $1.25 a day. The authors show
            that these parameter choices are consistent with
            cross-country data on national poverty lines. The results
            indicate that the incidence of both absolute and
            weakly-relative poverty in the developing world has been
            falling since the 1990s, but more slowly for the relative
            measure. While the number of absolutely poor has fallen, the
            number of relatively poor has changed little since the
            1990s, and is higher in 2008 than 1981.
Universal health care and informal
            labor markets : the case of Thailand
This paper explores the possibility that
            universal health coverage may inadvertently result in
            distorted labor market choices, with workers preferring
            informal employment over formal employment, leading to
            negative effects on investment and growth, as well as
            reduced protection against non-health risks and the income
            risks associated with ill health. It explores this
            hypothesis in the context of the Thai universal coverage
            scheme, which was rolled out in four waves over a 12-month
            period starting in April 2001. It identifies the effects of
            universal coverage through the staggered rollout, and gains
            statistical power by using no less than 68 consecutive labor
            force surveys, each containing an average of 62,000
            respondents. The analysis finds that universal coverage
            appears to have encouraged employment especially among
            married women, to have reduced formal-sector employment
            among married men but not among other groups, and to have
            increased informal-sector employment especially among
            married women. The largest positive informal-sector
            employment effects are found in the agricultural sector.
Economic analysis of projects in a
            greenhouse world
Recent carbon market prices are
            substantially lower than mean or median estimates of the
            social cost of carbon in the literature. Intuition would
            therefore suggest that 'investment errors' are
            being made, in the sense that markets favor higher
            carbon-emitting projects, while global welfare would be
            larger with lower carbon-emitting projects. This intuition
            is correct in specific circumstances, but not others. For
            any comparison of two alternative projects, there is a
            carbon switching price that equalizes their net social
            benefits. From the perspective of maximizing global welfare,
            investment errors only occur when this switching price lies
            between the carbon market price and the social cost of
            carbon. Data on the costs of high-carbon and low-carbon
            electric generation projects suggest that there is no
            financing gap using mean or median published figures, but
            for precautionary (95th percentile) choices of the social
            cost of carbon, there is a financing gap between carbon
            market prices and the switching price that would trigger
            investment in the global welfare-maximizing low-carbon
            project. A global carbon fund to finance this gap could be
            conceived, but stricter emission caps and reforms of carbon
            markets are likely to be a more efficient solution to the problem.