rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Long-term impacts of an
            unanticipated risk event : the 2007/08 food price crisis and
            child growth in Indonesia
Unanticipated spikes in food prices can
            increase malnutrition among the poor, with lasting
            consequences; however, livelihood strategies that include
            producing food for home consumption are expected to offer a
            measure of protection. Using anthropometric and consumption
            data from Indonesia collected before and after the 2007/08
            food price crisis, this paper finds evidence of both
            effects. Based on standardized height and weight measures,
            the results indicate that soaring food prices had a
            significant and negative impact on child growth among
            non-farming households. A corresponding effect was
            undetectable for food-producing households. The results
            remain robust when income effects from increased commercial
            sales and possible attritions through migration and
            fostering are considered. Further, local food price changes
            were uncorrelated with the share of non-farming village
            households and the initial average child nutrition status in
            the village, suggesting that the observed outcomes are
            directly attributable to market events and livelihood
            strategies. Interestingly, gender differences were not
            detected. The findings imply that the food price crises can
            have negative impacts on children, potentially leading to
            lifelong income inequality among those affected at a
            vulnerable stage of life.
Global migration revisited :
            short-term pains, long-term gains, and the potential of
            south-south migration
This paper re-examines the development
            implications of international migration focusing on two
            issues: how the costs and benefits of migration change over
            time, and the significance of South-South migration for
            development. First, the analysis finds that although greater
            migration could push down the wages of native workers of
            advanced countries in the short run, these wages eventually
            recover. This pattern would be mostly caused by the
            beneficial effect of additional labor on the real returns on
            capital and fostering faster capital formation. Additional
            South-North migration could favor capital income recipients
            and reduces labor income in host regions in the short run.
            In contrast, in sending countries, capital owners could
            experience lower incomes while wages rise. Globally, the
            welfare gains of new migrants could be expected to exceed
            the losses of old migrants by a wide margin. The remaining
            natives in sending countries could enjoy a net increase in
            remittances as well as an increase in labor income, although
            income from capital might decline. Second, in a hypothetical
            scenario with lower South-South migration, the implied
            losses of remittance income could lead to substantially
            lower welfare in developing countries. Although the wage
            differentials among developing countries tend to be smaller
            relative to their wage differentials with high-income
            countries, South-South migrants make substantial
            contributions to remittances.
Capturing the co-benefits of
            disaster risk management on the private sector side
In most countries, the private sector
            owns the vast majority of the buildings and a considerable
            portion of the infrastructure at risk. However, most
            investment in disaster risk management is made by the public
            sector, with the private sector lagging far behind. The
            situation represents missed opportunities for businesses to
            capture not only higher levels of the direct benefits of
            disaster risk management, but also a broader set of
            co-benefits to themselves and society as a whole. These
            co-benefits include ways of lowering production costs,
            improving the health of workers, and contributing to general
            economic stability. Ironically, many of these co-benefits
            are more tangible and immediate than ordinary disaster risk
            management benefits, which may not appear until a disaster
            has struck many years after the investment has been made.
            This study analyzes several important facets of private
            sector investment in disaster risk management, primarily
            from an economic perspective. It is intended as a first step
            toward promoting greater investment in disaster risk
            management by identifying potential co-benefits, explaining
            why they are not always pursued, and suggesting ways to
            integrate them into private sector decision-making. The
            latter includes government incentives, justified on the
            grounds that many private sector investments have extensive
            co-benefits, many of which pay dividends to society as a whole.
What type of finance matters for
            growth Bayesian model averaging evidence
This paper examines the effect of
            finance on long-term economic growth using Bayesian model
            averaging to address model uncertainty in cross-country
            growth regressions. The literature largely focuses on
            financial indicators that assess the financial depth of
            banks and stock markets. These indicators are examined
            jointly with newly developed indicators that assess the
            stability and efficiency of financial markets. Once the
            finance-growth regressions are subjected to model
            uncertainty,the results suggest that commonly used
            indicators of financial development are not robustly related
            to long-term growth. However, the findings from the global
            sample indicate that one newly developed indicator -- the
            efficiency of financial intermediaries -- is robustly
            related to long-term growth.
Decomposing response errors in food
            consumption measurement : implications for survey design
            from a survey experiment in Tanzania
There is wide variation in how
            consumption is measured in household surveys both across
            countries and over time. This variation may confound welfare
            comparisons in part because these alternative survey designs
            produce consumption estimates that are differentially
            influenced by contrasting types of survey response error.
            Although previous studies have documented the extent of net
            error in alternative survey designs, little is known about
            the relative influence of the different response errors that
            underpin a survey estimate. This study leverages a recent
            randomized food consumption survey experiment in Tanzania to
            shed light on the relative influence of these various error
            types. The observed deviation of measured household
            consumption from a benchmark is decomposed into
            item-specific consumption incidence and consumption value so
            as to investigate effects related to (a) the omission of any
            consumption and then (b) the error in value reporting
            conditional on positive consumption. The results show that
            various survey designs exhibit widely differing error
            decompositions, and hence a simple summary comparison of the
            total recorded consumption across surveys will obscure
            specific error patterns and inhibit the lessons for improved
            consumption survey design. In light of these findings, the
            relative performance of common survey designs is discussed,
            and design lessons are drawn to enhance the accuracy of
            item-specific consumption reporting and, consequently, the
            measures of total household food consumption.
Effects of fiscal policy shocks in
            an open economy : evidence from Canada
What is the impact of fiscal policy
            shocks on key macroeconomic variables in Canada? This
            question triggered renewed interest in the aftermath of the
            2008-09 Great Recession. Indeed, as in many advanced
            economies, fiscal policy in Canada following the recession
            started with an expansionary phase to boost domestic demand.
            It progressed to an adjustment phase to reduce public debt
            and ensure long-term fiscal sustainability and sustained
            growth. This paper analyzes the effects of fiscal policy
            shocks on the Canadian economy, building on the
            sign-restrictions-VAR approach. Unlike previous studies,
            this paper explicitly accounts for spillovers from the U.S.,
            Canada's main trading partner, and for oil price
            fluctuations. The findings show that the size and sign of
            the spending and tax revenue multipliers depend on whether
            the analysis controls for the exogenous factors. The tax-cut
            multiplier varies between 0.2 and 0.5, while the spending
            multiplier ranges between 0.2 and 1.1; the spending
            multiplier tends to be larger than the tax-cut multiplier
            over the past two decades.
The role of training programs for
            youth employment in Nepal : impact evaluation report on the
            employment fund
The youth unemployment rate is
            exceptionally high in developing countries. Because the
            quality of education is arguably one of the most important
            determinants of youth's labor force participation,
            governments worldwide have responded by creating job
            training and placement services programs. Despite the rapid
            expansion of skill-enhancement employment programs across
            the world and the long history of training program
            evaluations, debates about the causal impact of
            training-based labor market policies on employment outcomes
            still persist. Using a quasi-experimental approach, this
            report presents the short-run effects of skills training and
            employment placement services in Nepal. Launched in 2009,
            the intervention provided skills training and employment
            placement services for more than 40,000 Nepalese youth over
            a three-year period, including a specialized adolescent
            girls' initiative that reached 4,410 women ages 16 to
            24. The report finds that after three years of the program,
            the Employment Fund intervention positively improved
            employment outcomes. Participation in the Employment Fund
            training program generated an increase in non-farm
            employment of 15 to 16 percentage points for an overall gain
            of about 50 percent. The program also generated an average
            monthly earnings gain of about 72 percent. The report finds
            significantly larger employment impacts for women than for
            men, but younger women ages 16 to 24 experienced the same
            improvements as older females. These employment estimates
            are comparable, although somewhat higher, than other recent
            experimental interventions in developing countries.
How does the sensitivity of
            consumption to income vary over time international evidence
This paper studies how the sensitivity
            of consumption to income has changed over time as the degree
            of financial integration has risen. In standard theory,
            greater financial integration facilitates international
            borrowing and lending, helping to reduce the sensitivity of
            consumption growth to fluctuations in income. The paper
            examines the empirical validity of this prediction using an
            array of indicators of financial integration for a large
            sample of advanced and developing countries over the period
            1960-2011. Two main results are reported. First, the
            sensitivity of consumption to income has declined over time
            as the degree of financial integration has risen. The
            decline has been more pronounced in advanced economies than
            in developing ones. Second, the regression analysis
            indicates that a higher degree of financial integration is
            associated with a lower sensitivity of consumption to
            income. This finding is robust to the use of a wide range of
            empirical specifications, country-specific characteristics,
            and other controls, such as interest rates and outcome-based
            measures of financial integration. The paper also discusses
            other potential sources of the temporal changes in the
            sensitivity of consumption to income.
The impact of business support
            services for small and medium enterprises on firm
            performance in low- and middle-income countries : a meta-analysis
Interventions designed to support small
            and medium enterprises are popular among policy makers,
            given the role small and medium enterprises play in job
            creation around the world. Business support interventions in
            low- and middle-income countries are often based on the
            assumption that market failures and institutional
            constraints impede the growth of small and medium
            enterprises. Significant resources from governments and
            international organizations are directed to small and medium
            enterprises to maximize their socioeconomic impact.
            Business-support interventions for small and medium
            enterprises in low- and middle-income countries most often
            relate to formalization and business environments, exports,
            value chains and clusters, training and technical
            assistance, and access to credit and innovation. Very little
            is known about the impact of such interventions despite the
            abundance of resources directed to small and medium
            enterprise business-support services. This paper
            systematically reviews and summarizes 40 rigorous
            evaluations of small and medium enterprise support services
            in low- and middle-income countries, and presents evidence
            to help inform policy debates. The study found indicative
            evidence that overall business-support interventions help
            improve firm performance and create jobs. However, little is
            still known about which interventions work best for small
            and medium enterprises and why. More rigorous impact
            evaluations are needed to fill the large knowledge gap in
            the field.
Assessing socioeconomic resilience
            to floods in 90 countries
This paper presents a model to assess
            the socioeconomic resilience to natural disasters of an
            economy, defined as its capacity to mitigate the impact of
            disaster-related asset losses on welfare, and a tool to help
            decision makers identify the most promising policy options
            to reduce welfare losses due to floods. Calibrated with
            household surveys, the model suggests that welfare losses
            from the July 2005 floods in Mumbai were almost double the
            asset losses, because losses were concentrated on poor and
            vulnerable populations. Applied to river floods in 90
            countries, the model provides estimates of country-level
            socioeconomic resilience. Because floods disproportionally
            affect poor people, each $1 of global flood asset loss is
            equivalent to a $1.6 reduction in the affected
            country's national income, on average. The model also
            assesses and ranks policy levers to reduce flood losses in
            each country. It shows that considering asset losses is
            insufficient to assess disaster risk management policies.
            The same reduction in asset losses results in different
            welfare gains depending on who benefits. And some policies,
            such as adaptive social protection, do not reduce asset
            losses, but still reduce welfare losses. Asset and welfare
            losses can even move in opposite directions: increasing by
            one percentage point the share of income of the bottom 20
            percent in the 90 countries would increase asset losses by
            0.6 percent, since more wealth would be at risk. But it
            would also reduce the impact of income losses on wellbeing,
            and ultimately reduce welfare losses by 3.4 percent.
Learning, Prices, and firm dynamics
This paper documents new facts about the
            joint evolution of firm performance and prices in
            international markets and proposes a theory of firm dynamics
            emphasizing the interaction between learning about demand
            and quality choice to explain the observed patterns. Using
            data from the Portuguese manufacturing sector, the paper
            documents that: (1) within narrow product categories, firms
            with longer spells of activity in export destinations tend
            to ship larger quantities at similar prices, thus obtaining
            larger export revenue; (2) older exporters tend to import
            more expensive inputs; and (3) revenue growth within
            destinations (conditional on initial size) tends to decline
            with market experience. The authors develop a model of
            endogenous input and output quality choices in a learning
            environment that is able to quantitatively account for these
            patterns. Counterfactual simulations reveal that minimum
            quality standards on exports reduce welfare by lowering
            entry in export markets and reallocating resources from old
            and large toward young and small firms.
Prioritizing infrastructure
            investment : a framework for government decision making
Governments must decide how to allocate
            limited resources for infrastructure development,
            particularly since financing gaps have been projected for
            the coming decades. Social cost-benefit analysis provides
            sound project appraisal and, when systematically applied, a
            basis for prioritization. In some instances, however,
            capacity and resource limitations make extensive economic
            analyses across all projects unfeasible in the immediate
            term. This paper responds to a need for expanding the
            available set of tools for project selection by proposing an
            alternative prioritization approach that is systematic and
            feasible within the current resource means of government.
            The Infrastructure Prioritization Framework is a
            multi-criteria decision support tool that considers project
            outcomes along two dimensions, social-environmental and
            financial-economic. When large sets of small- to
            medium-sized projects are proposed, resources are limited,
            and basic project appraisal data (but not full social
            cost-benefit analysis) are available, the Infrastructure
            Prioritization Framework can inform project selection by
            combining selection criteria into social-environmental and
            financial-economic indexes. These indexes are used to plot
            projects on a Cartesian plane, and the sector budget is
            imposed to create a project map for comparison along each
            dimension. The Infrastructure Prioritization Framework is
            structured to accommodate multiple policy objectives, attend
            to social and environmental factors, provide an intuitive
            platform for displaying results, and take advantage of
            available data while promoting capacity building and data
            collection for more sophisticated appraisal methods and
            selection frameworks. Decision criteria, weighting, and
            sensitivity analysis should be decided and made transparent
            in advance of selection, and analysis should be made
            publicly available and open to third-party review.
Commercialization and mission drift
            : evidence from a large Chinese microfinance institution
Front-line loan officers of microfinance
            institutions are important in acquiring information on
            potential borrowers and selecting them in accordance with
            the microfinance institution's mission. This study uses
            a unique data set on loan officers and their loan portfolios
            from China's largest nongovernmental organization
            microfinance institution to test whether officers'
            personal characteristics affect the size and quality of
            their loans. The analysis uses a period in which the
            institution shifted from reliance on government donations
            and subsidies to commercial sources of funding. Imposing
            more commercial incentives on loan officers could affect how
            they balance potentially competing objectives to serve the
            poor and pursue profitability. The paper finds that loan
            officers who were formerly farmers or worked in local
            government were better able to maintain lending to poorer
            borrowers, without incurring substantially lower repayment
            rates on their loans. In short, it appears that the career
            backgrounds of loan officers did play a role in preventing
            mission drift.
Inflation targeting and exchange
            rate volatility in emerging markets
The paper investigates the relevance of
            the exchange rate on the reaction function of the central
            banks of 24 emerging market economies for the period 2000Q1
            to 2015Q2. This is done by first employing fixed-effects
            ordinary least squares and then system generalized method of
            the moments techniques. Under fixed effects, the exchange
            rate is found to be an important determinant in the reaction
            function of emerging market economies. Allowing for the
            endogeneity of inflation, output gap, and exchange rate, the
            exchange rate remains a positive and significant
            determinant, but less quantitatively relevant across
            inflation-targeting countries. When the sample is
            partitioned into targeting and nontargeting countries, the
            exchange rate remains relevant in the reaction function of
            the latter group. The results remain robust to splitting the
            sample at the time of the financial crisis of 2007–09 and
            suggest that, after the crisis, the central banks of
            emerging market economies responded only to inflation
            movements in the interest rate reaction function.