rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
When starting with the most
            expensive option makes sense : use and misuse of marginal
            abatement cost curves
This article investigates the use of
            expert-based Marginal Abatement Cost Curves (MACC) to design
            abatement strategies. It shows that introducing inertia, in
            the form of the "cost in time" of available
            options, changes significantly the message from MACCs. With
            an abatement objective in cumulative emissions (e.g.,
            emitting less than 200 GtCO2 in the 2000-2050 period), it
            makes sense to implement some of the more expensive options
            before the potential of the cheapest ones has been
            exhausted. With abatement targets expressed in terms of
            emissions at one point in time (e.g., reducing emissions by
            20 percent in 2020), it can even be preferable to start with
            the implementation of the most expensive options if their
            potential is high and their inertia significant. Also, the
            best strategy to reach a short-term target is different
            depending on whether this target is the ultimate objective
            or there is a longer-term target. The best way to achieve
            Europe's goal of 20 percent reduction in emissions by
            2020 is different if this objective is the ultimate
            objective or if it is only a milestone in a trajectory
            toward a 75 percent reduction in 2050. The cheapest options
            may be sufficient to reach the 2020 target but could create
            a carbon-intensive lock-in and preclude deeper emission
            reductions by 2050. These results show that in a world
            without perfect foresight and perfect credibility of the
            long-term carbon-price signal, a unique carbon price in all
            sectors is not the most efficient approach. Sectoral
            objectives, such as Europe's 20 percent renewable
            energy target in Europe, fuel-economy standards in the auto
            industry, or changes in urban planning, building norms and
            infrastructure design are a critical part of an efficient
            mitigation policy.
School-based management, school
            decision-making and education outcomes in Indonesian primary schools
This paper examines the key aspects of
            the practices of school-based management in Indonesia, and
            its effect on education quality. Using a conceptual
            framework of an accountability system of public service
            delivery, the paper explores the relations among Indonesian
            parents, school committees, schools, and government
            education supervisory bodies from three tenets:
            participation and voice; autonomy; and accountability. Using
            the data from a nationally representative survey of about
            400 public primary schools in Indonesia, the paper finds
            that the level of parental participation and voice in school
            management is extremely low in Indonesia. While the role of
            school committees is still limited to community relations,
            school facilities, and other administrative areas of school
            management, school principals, together with teachers, are
            much more empowered to assert professional control of the
            schools. The accountability system has remained weak in
            Indonesia's school system, which is reflected by
            inadequate information flow to parents, as well as seemingly
            low parental awareness of the need to hold schools
            accountable. The accountability arrangement of the
            Indonesian school system currently puts more emphasis on
            top-down supervision and monitoring by government
            supervisory bodies. The findings show that although the
            scope of school-based management in Indonesia is limited, it
            has begun to help schools make the right decisions on
            allocation of resources and hiring additional (non-civil
            servant) teachers, and to create an enabling environment of
            learning, including increasing teacher attendance rates.
            These aspects are found to have significantly positive
            effects on student learning outcomes.
Burkina Faso's infrastructure :
            a continental perspective
Infrastructure contributed 1.3
            percentage points to Burkina Faso's annual per capita
            gross domestic product (GDP) growth over the past decade,
            much of it due to improvements in information and
            communication technology (ICT). Raising the country's
            infrastructure endowment to that of the region's
            middle-income countries (MICs) could boost annual growth by
            more than 3 percentage points per capita. Burkina Faso has
            made significant progress developing its infrastructure in
            recent years, especially in the ICT sector. The country has
            also moved forward in the areas of road maintenance and
            water and sanitation, but still faces challenges in these
            sectors, as well as in the electricity sector. As of 2007,
            Burkina Faso faced an annual infrastructure funding gap of
            $165 million per year, or 4 percent of GDP. That gap could
            be cut in half by the adoption of more appropriate
            technologies to meet infrastructure targets in the transport
            and the water and sanitation sectors. Even if Burkina Faso
            were unable to increase infrastructure spending or otherwise
            close the infrastructure funding gap, simply by moving from
            a 10- to 18-year horizon the country could address its
            efficiency gap and meet the posited infrastructure targets.
Cameroon's infrastructure : a
            continental perspective
The poor state of Cameroon's
            infrastructure is a key bottleneck to the nation's
            economic growth. From 2000 to 2005, improvements in
            information and communications technology (ICT) boosted
            Cameroon's growth performance by 1.26 percentage points
            per capita, while deficient power infrastructure held growth
            back by 0.28 points per capita. If Cameroon could improve
            its infrastructure to the level of Africa's
            middle-income countries, it could raise its per capita
            economic growth rate by about 3.3 percentage points.
            Cameroon has made significant progress in many aspects of
            infrastructure, implementing institutional reforms across a
            broad range of sectors with a view to attracting
            private-sector participation and finance, which has
            generally led to performance improvements. But the country
            still faces a number of important infrastructure challenges,
            including poor road quality, expensive and unreliable
            electricity, and a stagnating and uncompetitive ICT sector.
            Cameroon currently spends around $930 million per year on
            infrastructure, with $586 million lost to inefficiencies.
            Removing those inefficiencies would leave an infrastructure
            funding gap of $350 million per year. Given Cameroon's
            relatively strong economy and natural-resource base, as well
            as its success in attracting private financing, the country
            should be able to close that gap and meet its infrastructure
            goals within 13 years.
Financial literacy and retirement
            planning : the Russian case
The authors examine the association of
            financial literacy with retirement planning in Russia, a
            country with a relatively old and rapidly aging population,
            large regional disparities, and a rapidly emerging financial
            market. They find that only 36.3 percent of respondents in
            the sample understand interest compounding and only half can
            answer a simple question about inflation. In a country with
            widespread public pension provisions, they find that
            financial literacy is significantly and positively related
            to retirement planning involving private pension funds and
            schemes. Thus, along with encouraging the availability of
            private retirement plans, efforts to improve financial
            literacy could be pivotal to the expansion of the use of
            such schemes.
Patterns of business creation,
            survival and growth : evidence from Africa
The authors study firm dynamics using a
            novel database of all formally registered firms in Cote
            d'Ivoire from 1977 to 1997, which account for about 60
            percent of gross domestic product. First, they examine entry
            and exit patterns and the role of new and exiting firms
            versus incumbents in job creation and destruction. They find
            that while the rate of job creation at new firms is quiet
            high -- at 8 percent on average -- the number of jobs added
            by new firms is small in absolute terms. Next, they examine
            survival rates and find that the probability of survival
            increases monotonically with firm size, but manufacturing
            and foreign-owned firms face higher likelihoods of exit
            compared with service oriented and domestically owned firms.
            They find that higher growth of gross domestic product
            increases the probability of firm survival, but this is a
            broad impact with no firm size disproportionately affected.
            In robustness checks, they find that after 1987 size is no
            longer a significant determinant of firm survival for new
            entrants, suggesting that the operating environment for
            firms changed. Finally, they find that trade and fiscal
            reform episodes raised the probability of firm exit and
            attenuated the survival disadvantages faced by smaller
            firms, but exchange rate revaluation and pro-private sector
            reforms did not significantly lower the likelihood of exit.
Four decades of health economics
            through a bibliometric lens
This paper takes a bibliometric tour of
            the past 40 years of health economics using bibliographic
            "metadata" from EconLit supplemented by citation
            data from Google Scholar and the authors' topical
            classifications. The authors report the growth of health
            economics (33,000 publications since 1969 -- 12,000 more
            than in the economics of education) and list the 300
            most-cited publications broken down by topic. They report
            the changing topical and geographic focus of health
            economics (the topics 'Determinants of health and
            ill-health' and 'Health statistics and
            econometrics' both show an upward trend, and the field
            has expanded appreciably into the developing world). They
            also compare authors, countries, institutions, and journals
            in terms of the volume of publications and their influence
            as measured through various citation-based indices
            (Grossman, the US, Harvard and the JHE emerge close to or at
            the top on a variety of measures).
The experience with macro-prudential
            policies of the central bank of the republic of Turkey in
            response to the global financial crisis
This brief country case study on Turkey
            aims to summarize the fundamental developments in the
            banking sector, which represents almost 90 percent of the
            financial sector in the country. The brief has two parts.
            The first covers the 2001 financial crisis and the
            developments until end of 2007, the year before the global
            financial crisis of 2008 started. The second part focuses on
            the macro-prudential policies applied by the Central Bank of
            the Republic of Turkey in response to the global financial
            crisis in three phases: (i) full liquidity support after
            Lehman Brothers' collapse (September 2008), (ii) the
            exit strategy (April 2010), and (iii) the new policy mix
            (final quarter of 2010).
The role of macro-prudential
            policies in the boom and adjustment phase of the credit
            cycle in Estonia
The Estonian economy experienced an
            unusually long business and credit cycle during the first
            decade of the 21st century. The magnitude of the cycle
            tested what can be achieved by traditional policy tools and
            the limits of macro-prudential policies. The country's
            financial sector, almost fully consisting of foreign banks,
            displayed the complexities of cross-border regulation and
            supervision. Capital and liquidity requirements that were
            stricter than international minimums, as well as the
            build-up of fiscal buffers, were instrumental to engineering
            an orderly adjustment. Openness and integration, including
            well-advanced cross-border cooperation, were equally
            important in maintaining financial stability throughout the
            global financial crisis.
Home high above and home deep down
            below -- lending in Hungary
In Hungary in the pre-crisis period, the
            bank sector-initiated private credit boom significantly
            contributed to the accumulation of economic imbalances.
            Nevertheless, before the 2008 crisis no special regulatory
            measure was taken to mitigate the foreign exchange lending
            to unhedged borrowers, which was a main moving force of the
            credit boom. Depreciation of forint-denominated subsidized
            housing loans and the increased risk premium significantly
            deteriorated customers' positions and resulted in
            rocketing nonperforming loans. A recession, deteriorating
            portfolios, and lack of efficient workout. The introduction
            of strict regulation froze banking activity and the danger
            of recovery without lending emerged. This paper compares the
            pre- and post-crisis lending activity and analyzes the lack
            of regulation in the pre-crisis period and the inefficient
            regulation in the post-crisis period.
Debt overhang in emerging Europe
This paper assesses the extent to which
            debt overhang poses a constraint to economic activity in
            Emerging Europe, as the region emerges from the recent
            financial and economic crisis. At the macroeconomic level,
            it finds that the external imbalance problem for Emerging
            Europe has been in most cases more one of flows (high
            current account deficits in the pre-crisis years) rather
            than large stocks of external debt. A high reliance on
            equity funding means that net external debt is far lower
            than net external liabilities. Domestic balance sheets have
            expanded quite rapidly but sector liabilities remain
            relatively low compared with advanced economies. With the
            important exception of Hungary, public debt levels also
            remain relatively low in Emerging Europe. At the
            microeconomic level, the potential for debt overhang in the
            corporate sector is limited to a few countries: Latvia,
            Lithuania, Estonia, and Slovenia. Due to the low incidence
            of household debt, hardly any country, except Estonia, seems
            to face a threat of debt overhang in the household sector.
            The strong increase in non-performing loans compared with
            pre-crisis bank profitability suggests that debt overhang in
            the banking sector is a threat in Ukraine, Latvia,
            Lithuania, Hungary, Georgia, and Albania. Financial
            integration of Emerging Europe seems to have contributed to
            the transmission of the crisis to the region. At the same
            time, this integration is helping the region in managing the
            crisis by concerted actions of the major players.
The evolving importance of banks and
            securities markets
This paper examines the evolving
            importance of banks and securities markets during the
            process of economic development. As economies develop, they
            increase their demand for the services provided by
            securities markets relative to those provided by banks, such
            that securities markets become increasingly important for
            future economic development. Some exploratory evidence
            further suggests that deviations of a countrys actual
            financial structure -- the mixture of banks and markets
            operating in an economy -- from the estimated optimal
            structure are associated with lower levels of economic activity.
Vulnerability and livelihoods before
            and after the Haiti earthquake
This paper examines the dynamics of
            poverty and vulnerability in Haiti using various data sets.
            As living conditions survey data are not comparable in this
            country, we first propose to use the three rounds of the
            Demographic Health Survey (DHS) available before the
            earthquake. Decomposing household assets changes into age
            and cohort effects, we use repeated cross-section data to
            identify and estimate the variance of shocks on assets and
            to simulate the probability of being poor in the future.
            Poverty and vulnerability profiles are drawn from these
            estimates. Second, we decompose vulnerability to poverty
            into various sources using a unique survey conducted in 2007
            in rural areas. Using two-level modelling of
            consumption/income, we assess the impact of both observable
            and unobservable idiosyncratic and covariate shocks on
            households' economic well-being. Empirical findings
            show that idiosyncratic shocks, in particular health-related
            shocks, have larger impact on vulnerability to poverty than
            covariate shocks. Third, asset-wealth is characterized for
            households after the 2010 earthquake based on a survey
            designed to provide a rapid assessment of food insecurity in
            Haiti after the quake. Whereas it is not possible to confirm
            the existence of poverty trap, it seems that those
            households who have lost the most due to the earthquake
            succeeded in recovering more rapidly from the shock,
            regardless of the effects of assistance, and probably more
            in line with coping strategies that are specific to households.
Botswana's infrastructure : a
            continental perspective
Infrastructure made a net contribution
            of just over two percentage points to Botswana's
            improved per capita growth performance in recent years.
            Raising the countrys infrastructure endowment to that of
            the region's middle-income countries could boost annual
            growth by about 1.2 percentage points. Botswana has made
            significant infrastructure progress in recent years,
            spanning the transport, water and sanitation, power, and
            mobile telephony sectors. But the country still faces a
            number of important infrastructure challenges. The most
            pressing is in the power sector, where the country is
            economically and financially exposed to a lack of generation
            capacity and insufficient power supply, leaving the economy
            vulnerable to power price shocks and load shedding.
            Botswana's international transport connections and
            Internet connectivity also lag behind those of comparable
            countries. Botswana's overall resource envelope of $800
            million per year surpasses its $785 million needs estimate.
            Nevertheless, it loses $68 million a year to inefficiencies
            and faces a funding gap of $305 million per year, entirely
            in the power sector, traceable to the quality of spending
            decisions. Botswana will be in a good position to meet its
            infrastructure goals if it can reduce inefficiencies,
            increase public-sector receipts, and attract more public funding.
Explaining local manufacturing
            growth in Chile : the advantages of sectoral diversity
This paper investigates whether the
            agglomeration of economic activity in regional clusters
            affects long-run manufacturing total factor productivity
            growth in an emerging market context. It explores a large
            firm-level panel dataset for Chile during a period
            characterized by high growth rates and rising regional
            income inequality (1992-2004). The findings are clear-cut.
            Locations with greater concentration of a particular sector
            did not experience faster growth in total factor
            productivity during this period. Rather, local sector
            diversity was associated with higher long-run growth in
            total factor productivity. However, there is no evidence
            that the diversity effect was driven by the local
            interaction with a set of suppliers and/or clients. The
            authors interpret this as evidence that agglomeration
            economies are driven by other factors, such as the sharing
            of access to specialized inputs not provided solely by a
            single sector, such as skills or financing.