rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
growth, while the Philippines experienced a deceleration in the growth of its goods exports. Indonesia, Myanmar and Mongolia focused on commodity exports, reaping benefits from the rise of China’s imports. For most countries, goods exports growth increased relative to services exports growth. One notable exception is the Philippines, which continued its focus on other business services exports.

- After the Great Recession, growth rates in export values throughout the region have been burdened by two situations (Figure 2c): the global trade slowdown and the decline in the commodity prices (particularly accelerated for fuels in 2014 and 2015). As a result, all points on the scatterplot appear closer to the origin. Yet many of the previous patterns remained and some accentuated: manufacturing exports grew faster in Vietnam and Cambodia, diverging significantly from the growth patterns of the old guard (Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia). Export values of Indonesia, Myanmar and Mongolia were hit more severely by the commodity price shock. The Philippines continued to rely on services via other business services, while the services performance of Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar and Lao PDR was tied to tourism.

Figure 1. The aggregate perspective: developing East Asian countries’ goods and services trade performance, 2005‐2016 (Index of trade in current US dollars: 2005=100) <!-- Start of picture text --> b. IMPORTS<br>a. EXPORTS<br>Index dev. EA goods exports dev. EA goods imports Index<br>380 dev. EA services exports dev. EA services imports 20.3 38<br>world goods trade world goods trade<br>world services trade world services trade<br>330 33<br>280 11.5 28<br>230 11.4 23<br>13.4<br>180 18<br>22.8 22.8<br>130 10.9 19.7 13.5 19.7 13<br>80 19.3 19.3 80<br>2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016<br><!-- End of picture text --> Source: World Trade Organization (WTO) and authors’ calculations.

Notes: World trade is represented by the average of exports and imports. Labels indicate services shares in percent.

6
3 The prresent paper also deals with the issue of aggregating growth rates over cc.intries. T issue is important because we often wish to compare the growth performance of countries grouped according to some economic or demographic criteria. For instance, if we are interested in judging the growth performance in Africa, then we need to aggregate the growth rates of all countries in Africa. The World Development Report (WDR) presents such information for a wide range of country classifications. The WDR method has two drawbacks. First, the method depends on exchange rates and it is questionable to equate changes in exchange rates with chaniges in welfare. Second, it gives greater weight to the growth rates of richer countries (not necessarily the most populated ones), which from the welfare poirt of view is highly objectionable. The paper proposes an alternative procedure for calculating aggregate growth rates more suitable for welfare comparisons.3 The methodology developed in the paper is applied to analyze growth rates of per capita GNP of eighty-three developing countries during the 1970-87 period.

# 2. THE LEAST SOUARE GROWTH RATE

Let x1, x2, ..., xn be the values of an economic indicator (such as GDP or GNP per head) given for n periods. These values are in constant prices so that the effect of inflation has been taken into account.4 The question we 3The World Bank extensively uses per capita GNP and its growth rate for its operational purposes which relate to decisions about member countries' eligibility for beneficial borrowing terms and other advantages. Clearly then, the welfare should be the main criterion for assessing the suitability of the procedures used.

4This paper does rot address the issue of measuring the inflation rate which poses complex technical problems, not yet fully and unequivocally resolved.
# **Table 6: Financial Planning**

||(1)|(2)|(3)|(4)|
|---|---|---|---|---|
||Financial Planning<br>Composite Score|Q1: Have a Plan<br>to Achieve a<br>Financial Goal|Q2: Written<br>Financial Plan|Q3: Adhere to<br>Financial Plan|
|Autonomous Trainer Selection (T1)|0.030**|0.031**<br>|0.033*|0.025*|
||(0.013)|(0.015)<br>|(0.017)|(0.015)|
|Fixed Trainer Selection (T2)|0.005|-0.003<br>|0.012|0.006|
||(0.013)|(0.016)<br>|(0.017)|(0.015)|
|R-squared|0.014|0.012<br>|0.009|0.010|
|N|7885|7885<br>|7885|7885|
|Dependent Variable Mean in Control Group|<br>0.567|0.859<br>|0.222|0.622|
|F-test(p-value): T1 = T2|0.065|0.025<br>|0.278|0.228|

This table presents analysis for financial planning using household survey data across two endline rounds. All regressions control for survey round dummies as well as stratification controls. Standard errors, clustered at the SACCO level, are reported in parentheses. Statistically significant p-values are highlighted by: * (10% significance level), ** (5% significance level), and *** (1% significance level).
21 Aiyar, S., A. Berg, and M. Hussain (2005). “The Macroeconomic Challenge of More Aid,” _Finance and Development_ , vol. 42 (3), IMF.

Arellano, M., and O. Bover (1995). “Another Look at the Instrumental-Variable Estimation of Error-Components Models.” _Journal of Econometrics_ 68(1): 29-52.

Baffes, J., I..A. Elbadawi, and S.A. O'Connell. (1999). "Single-Equation Estimation of the Equilibrium Real Exchange Rate." in _Exchange Rates Misalignment: Concepts and Measurement for Developing Countries_ . L. Hinkle and P. Montiel (eds). World Bank, Policy Research Department, Washington, DC.

Barder, O. (2006). “Are the planned increases in aid too much of a good thing?,” Working Papers 90, _Center for Global Development_ .

Bayoumi, T., P. Clark, S. Symansky, and M. Taylor (1994). “The Robustness of Equilibrium Exchange Rate Calculations to Alternative Assumptions and Methodologies,” in J. Williamson (ed.), _Estimating Equilibrium Exchange Rate_ s, Washington, D.C.: Institute for International Economics.

Blundell, R. and S. Bond (1997). “Initial Conditions and Moment Restrictions in Dynamic Panel Data Models”. University College London Discussion Papers in Economics: 97/07, July.

Burnside, C. and D. Dollar (2000). “Aid, Policies, and Growth.” American Economic Review, Vol. 90(4): 847.

Chinn, M. (1997): “Sectoral Productivity, Government Spending, and Real Exchange Rates: Empirical Evidence for OECD countries.” NBER Working Paper Series 6017.

Clark, P. and R. MacDonald (1999)., “Exchange Rates and Economic Fundamentals: A Methodological Comparison of BEERs and FEERs.” in J. Stein and R. MacDonald Clements, M., S. Radelet and R. Bhavnani (2004). “Counting Chickens when they Hatch: The Short-Term Effect of Aid on Growth,” Center for Global Development Working Paper No. 44.

> Collier, P. and D. Dollar (2002). “Aid Allocation and Poverty Reduction.” _European Economic Review_ . Vol. 46(8): 1475-1500.

Collier, P and A. Hoeffler (2002). “Aid, Policy, and Growth in Post-conflict Societies.” Policy Research Paper Series, The World Bank: 2902.

Collier, Paul (1999), “On the Economics Consequences of Civil War.” Oxford Economic Papers, vol. 51: 168-83.
Table 2. Descriptive <u>statistics from educational administrative records</u>

||Pre (2018|-2019)<br>|Post (2020|-2021)<br>|
|---|---|---|---|---|
||Mean|(SD)|Mean|(SD)|
|_Outcomes_|||||
|Dropout|0.086|(0.281)|0.102|(0.302)|
|Effective promotion|0.802|(0.398)|0.823|(0.381)|
|Switched to public school|0.010|(0.098)|0.011|(0.103)|
|Switched to private school|0.032|(0.176)|0.023|(0.149)|
|_Student attributes_|||||
|Male|0.516|(0.500)|0.513|(0.500)|
|Age|10.722|(4.145)|10.953|(4.409)|
|Lives in urban area|0.414|(0.493)|0.407|(0.491)|
|Graduating|0.041|(0.198)|0.041|(0.199)|
|_Educational level_|||||
|Initial|0.146|(0.353)|0.148|(0.355)|
|Primary|0.570|(0.495)|0.576|(0.494)|
|Lower secondary|0.186|(0.389)|0.179|(0.383)|
|Upper secondary|0.098|(0.297)|0.097|(0.295)|
|_School attributes_|||||
|Bilingual instruction|0.245|(0.430)|0.251|(0.433)|
|Private institution|0.228|(0.420)|0.221|(0.415)|
|_Municipality attributes_|||||
|COVID-19 positivity rate|0.000|-|18.837|(5.028)|
|Observations|8,199,383||8,259,519||

_Source_ : Authors’ calculations from Guatemalan educational administrative records.

_Notes_ : This table shows pre- and post-COVID averages for students and their standard deviation in parentheses.

# **4. Identification strategy and empirical approach**

Given the available data, we estimate results using a difference-in-difference approach with twoway fixed effects. Since we have two measures of the intensity of COVID-19 exposure, we propose two forms of estimation. The first uses the average warning index for the municipality in each year as the main explanatory variable and the second uses the amount of the year spent in different color categories, mainly orange and red. Therefore, the base category is green and yellow. Figure 3 shows the distribution of the warning index in post-COVID-19 years (2020 and 2021) and the
use created by land pricing. In the first years of land leasing, before the regulatory framework was clarified, SOEs tried to capture all the proceeds of land leasing sales for themselves through direct transactions with developers. Municipalities fought successfully for control of the supply of land-leasing rights and land revenues. Such transactions must now proceed through the municipal Land Resource Center, subject to municipal decision-making, and with the municipal government receiving a prescribed share of sales revenue.

Municipalities can expand the urbanized area by acquiring land from rural communes and converting it to urban use. The municipality’s sale price for leasing land for urban use has vastly exceeded the purchase price it pays farmers, often by a factor as large as 100 times.<sup>5</sup> The scramble by municipalities to acquire land for urbanization—dubbed China’s version of the “enclosure movement”—has led municipalities to stockpile land by taking advantage of (and abusing) exceptions to urban land-use limitations in their authorized development plans. One exception involves land acquired for approved economic development zones and industrial parks. The Ministry of Land and Resources found in 2004 that 6,015 development zones had been established by municipalities, of which only 1,251 had received the requisite approval of the State Council or provincial governments. In total, these municipalities had declared development zones and industrial parks covering an astounding 35,400 square kilometers of formerly rural land, most of which was serving as a land reserve for potential future development and municipal land leasing. (China Daily 2004b) A municipality or its development agency also can designate centrally located areas of rundown housing or small-scale businesses for re-development and acquire land from traditional users under a plan that involves mandatory resettlement. The municipality upgrades infrastructure, then sells land-leasing rights for re-development.

Perhaps the most novel form of freeing up land for re-sale involves moving city hall and all of the municipality’s administrative buildings to a new location, outside the urban center, then auctioning off the vacated central land to developers. As a strategy for generating land-leasing revenues and infrastructure investment, this approach has twin advantages. It creates a new urban center where municipal offices re-locate, enhancing the value of surrounding land, which the municipality can lease, while it frees up for competitive leasing and commercial re-development very highly valued land at the existing urban center. All six of the municipalities examined in

> 5 The minimum price that municipalities have to pay for rural land has been calculated as a multiple of a commune’s actual annual income from agriculture, not “market” value.  In reality, there is no land market for farmers since they cannot own or lease land individually and the commune cannot sell land-use rights directly to developers or others.

8
- ii

# Problem: Scarcity of Skills Solution: Mass Valuation

vi. The task of converting visible property characteristics to an estimate of market value is one that potentially requires a sophisticated knowledge of property markets, and leaves considerable discretion to individual property valuers. Local governments in many developing countries have difficulty attracting competent staff for this task, and have found that discretion invites corruption. Brazil has successfully responded to this problem through the widespread use of a highly simplified form of mass appraisal. The technique is based upon a few readily observable, measurable characteristics of each property. No skills, other than the ability to measure and write, are required of the valuer in the field.

# Problem: Inaccessible Market Data

# Solution: Land Value "Commissions" and Use of Cionstruction Data

vii. Accurate data on market prices is essential to the production of defensible valuations. It is rarely available through official sources. Prices of real estate transactions are frequently understated to avoid real estate transfer taxes. Rental data is often erroneously reported, due to the widespread presence--and evasion--of rent controls. Brazil has an acceptable approach to the calculation of unit costs for buildings: the municipalities use construction cost data, derived from industry sources. Brazil has not found an accurate source of data on land prices, and relies instead upon the options of speciallyconstituted "valuation commissions." Problem: Inflation Solution: Indexation viii. In any country with significant inflation, existing valuations rapidly become obsolete. The buoyancy of tax revenues cannot be maintained without regularly adjusting valuations and unit costs, or compensatory increases in the nominal tax rate. Brazil has coped with inflation through the widespread use of indexation.

Problem: Disputed Liability Solution: Broad Legal Definition ix. Collection enforcement depends upon the ability to identify the person liable for paying the tax. While property is visible and easily defined, tax liability is not. Records of ownership or tenancy agreements may be inaccessible to the taxing authority. In Brazil, liability effectively extends to any person in beneficial occupation of the property. In employing this broad definition, the municipalities are successfully relieved of any legal obligation to prove legal ownership before imposing the tax.

Problem: Slow Judicial Procedures Solution: Tax Clearances x. Enforcement also depends upon the government's ability to impose penalties swiftly and consistently. The judicial processes for collecting civil
Deaton, A., and A. Heston. 2010. “Understanding PPPs and PPP-based National Accounts.” _American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics_ 2 (4): 1–35.

- Deaton, A., and J. Muellbauer. 1980. “An Almost Ideal Demand System.” _American Economic Review_ 70 (3): 312–326.

- Deaton, A., and S. Zaidi. 2002. “Guidelines for Constructing Consumption Aggregates for Welfare Analysis.” Living Standards Measurement Study Working Paper 135.

- Diewert, W. E. 1976. “Exact and Superlative Index Numbers and Consistency in Aggregation.” _Journal of Econometrics_ 4: 115–45.

- ———. 2003. “The Treatment of Owner Occupied Housing and Other Durables in a Consumer Price Index.” Discussion Paper 03-09, Economics Department, University of British Columbia.

- ———. 2005. “Weighted Country Product Dummy Variable Regressions and Index Number Formulae.” _Review of Income and Wealth_ 51 (4): 561–570.

- ———. 2009. “Durables and Owner-Occupied Housing in a Consumer Price Index.” In _Price Index Concepts and Measurements_ , edited by W. E. Diewert, J. S. Greenlees, and C. R. Hulten. University of Chicago Press.

- Dikhanov, Y., N. Hamadeh, W. Vigil-Oliver, T. B. Degefu, and I. Song. 2017. “Poverty-specific Purchasing Power Parities in Africa.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 8150.

- Dikhanov, Y., C. Palanyandy, and E. Capilit. 2011. “Subnational Purchasing Power Parities toward Integration of International Comparison Program and Consumer Price Index: The Case of the Philippines.” Asian Development Bank (ADB) Economics Working Paper Series.

- Feenstra, R. C., R. Inklaar, and M. P. Timmer. 2015. “The Next Generation of the Penn World Table.” _American Economic Review_ 105 (1): 3150–3182.

- Feenstra, R. C., M. Xu, and A. Antoniades. 2017. “What Is the Price of Tea in China? Towards the Relative Cost of Living in Chinese and U.S. Cities.” National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Working Paper 23161.

- Ferreira, F. H. G., S. Chen, A. Dabalen, Y. Dikhanov, N. Hamadeh, D. Jolliffe, A. Narayan, E. B. Prydz, A. Revenga, P. Sangraula, U. Serajuddin, and N. Yoshida. 2016. “A Global Count of the Extreme Poor in 2012: Data Issues, Methodology and Initial Results.” _Journal of Economic Inequality_ 14 (2): 141–172.

- Gaddis, I. 2016. “Prices for Poverty Analysis in Africa.” World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 7652.

Gibson, J. n.d. “A Guide to Using Prices in Poverty Analysis.”

- Gibson, J., and B. Kim. 2015. “Hicksian Separability Does Not Hold over Space: Implications for the Design of Household Surveys and Price Questionnaires.” _Journal of Development Economics_ 114: 34–40.

- ———. 2019. “Quality, Quantity, and Spatial Variation of Price: Back to the Bog.” _Journal of Development Economics_ 137: 66–77.

- Gibson, J., and T. Le. 2018. “Improved Modeling of Spatial Cost of Living Differences in Developing Countries: A Comparison of Expert Knowledge and Traditional Price Surveys.” Working Paper in Economics 8/18.

25
To summarize the sectoral breakdown of the effectiveness of government policy, our analysis confirms the intuition that government support has helped manufacturers of textiles and garments (in El Salvador) and hotels and restaurants (in Georgia). Less intuitively, food manufacturers in El Salvador appear to have benefited from government support through avoiding changes in permanent full-time workforce, though the same effect in Georgia is opposite but not statistically significant (perhaps due to the composition of food manufacturers within each country, with supply chains leading towards hotels or restaurants as opposed to grocery stores). We also find evidence of counter-productive effects of government policy in some sectors. In particular, government support was found counter-productive in Georgia for food retailers and pharmacies across two of our four outcome variables. Overall, the outcome variables on the incidence of decreased total hours of operations and expectations of falling in arrears offer a number of counterintuitive findings. The former is likely attributed to the conflict between perceived health safety, which likely forced firms to reduce hours of operations, and the business objective of staying open to keep earning revenue. As for the expectations of falling in arrears, we conclude that this variable is rather noisy in general, perhaps pointing to an unprecedented uncertainty that firms were facing during the pandemic, complicating the formation of logical and grounded expectations about the near future.

# **7. Summary and Conclusions**

In this paper, we used firm-level data collected before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (ES and COV-ES) in El Salvador and Georgia to estimate the effectiveness of government support to the private sector in terms of firms’ workforce, operations, and expectations. While ES and COVES data cover 44 countries, we focus on just two because, in most of the other countries, the government support was available only to the firms whose experience during the pandemic was at or worse than the set thresholds, such as a drop in revenue or workforce, etc. Such selection criteria, coupled with the fact that this information is not normally contained in data, make a valid estimation of the effectiveness of support nearly impossible. We also excluded countries that had fewer than around 150 firms reporting having received government support in COV-ES data.

We apply matching and panel estimation techniques. To match firms that received support with those that did not, we use a long list of firm characteristics from the pre-pandemic ES and some variables measuring firms’ experience during the pandemic. For panel analysis, we use two 28
Finally we check the validity of our results using a variable that captures the efficiency of the legal system. Our purpose is to show that even the efficiency of the government in solving disputes between private agents affects conflict. The methodology of these data is described in Djankov et al (2003). Table 11 lists the ranking of countries with the lowest and the highest index of efficiency of the judicial (or administrative) system in the collection of overdue debt. The index has been standardized between 0 and 100. Column 1 indicates the number of procedures mandated by law or court regulation that demand interaction between the parties, or between them and the judge (or administrator) or court officer, which are recorded. Twelve of the 15 less efficient countries had a civil war during the 1960-05 period. On the other hand, only five of the 15 countries with the most efficient legal system suffered conflict.

In table 12 we perform the basic analysis using the efficiency of the legal system as the institutional variable. In the first four columns we perform the logit analysis done in tables 4 and 5, and from columns 4 to 8 we perform the IV analysis using the specification of table 7. In columns 1 and 2 we use the whole sample of countries, and in columns 3 and 4 we use the sample of excolonies. The index has been standardized between 0 and 1. The results indicate that the less efficient the legal system, the higher the probability of conflict. Once we include this index together with the core variables, we find that per capita income, together with population and regulation have a significant effect on conflict. The only result which is different from the results when using the protection against expropriation risks and law and order, is that per capita income is significant when included together with the variable that captures contracting institutions, although this result is not robust once we take into account the reverse causality between economic institutions and civil wars (columns 5 to 8). When using the efficiency of the legal system as our institutional variable, we use the legal origin instead of the colonial origin following Djankov et al (2003) who 16