rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Corruption, business environment,
            and small business fixed investment in India
This paper estimates a structural
            dynamic business investment equation and an error correction
            model of fixed assets growth on a sample of predominantly
            small and mid-size manufacturers in India. The results
            suggest that excessive labor regulation, power shortages,
            and problems of access to finance are all significant
            factors in industrial growth in the country. The estimated
            effects of labor regulation, power shortages and access to
            finance on the rate of business investment all vary by
            states' levels of industrial development and. Perhaps
            more importantly, they also depend on a fourth institutional
            factor, namely, corruption. The rate of fixed investment is
            significantly lower where power shortages are more severe
            and labor regulation is stronger over the full sample, but
            each of these impacts is also greater for businesses
            self-reportedly affected by corruption. Although access to
            finance does not seem to influence the rate of investment
            for most firms, there is evidence that investment decisions
            are constrained by cash flow in enterprises that are
            unaffected by corruption or power shortages. There are
            nuances to this story as we take into account regional
            specificity, but the key result always holds that labor
            regulation, power shortages and access to finance influence
            the rate of fixed investment in ways that depend on the
            incidence of corruption. In interpreting this finding, we
            would like to think of corruption as a proxy for the quality
            of property rights institutions in the sense of Acemoglu and
            Johnson (2005). On the other hand, we regard labor
            regulation and the financial environment of small businesses
            in India as instances of what Acemoglu and Johnson (2005)
            call 'contracting institutions'. The analysis
            finds that the interaction between corruption and other
            aspects of the institutional environment of fixed investment
            decisions could be seen consistent with the Acemoglu-Johnson
            view that the quality of property rights institutions exerts
            more abiding influence on economic outcomes than the quality
            of contracting institutions.
A micro-decomposition analysis of
            the macroeconomic determinants of human development
This paper shows how differences in
            aggregate human development outcomes over time and space can
            be additively decomposed into a pure economic-growth
            component, a component attributed to differences in the
            distribution of income, and components attributed to
            "non-income" factors and differences in the model
            linking outcomes to income or non-income characteristics.
            The income effect at the micro level is modeled
            non-parametrically, so as to flexibly reflect distributional
            changes.  The paper illustrates the decomposition using data
            for Morocco and Vietnam, and the results offer some
            surprising insights into the observed aggregate gains in
            schooling attainments.  A user friendly STATA program is
            available to implement the method in other settings.
Financial development and innovation
            in small firms
This paper uses firm level data from a
            cross-section of 57 countries to study how financial
            development affects innovation in small firms. The analysis
            finds that relative to large firms in the same industry,
            spending on research and development by small firms is more
            likely and sizable in countries at higher levels of
            financial development. The estimates imply that among firms
            doing research and development in a country like Romania,
            which is at the 20th percentile of financial development, a
            1 standard deviation decrease in firm size is associated
            with a decrease of 0.7 standard deviations in research and
            development spending. In contrast, this decrease is only 0.2
            standard deviations in a country like South Africa, which is
            at the 80th percentile of the distribution of financial
            development. Small firms also report producing more
            innovations per unit of research and development spending
            than large firms, and this gap is narrower in countries at
            higher levels of financial development. As a robustness
            check, the author shows that these patterns are stronger in
            industries inherently more reliant on external finance.
Changing norms about gender
            inequality in education : evidence from Bangladesh
Using a recent household survey for two
            cohorts of married women, this paper examines norms about
            gender equality in education for children and adults.  Among
            the main findings are that gender education gap norms have
            changed: younger generations of women are more positive
            about female vs. male education, both as pertaining to child
            and adult education outcomes.  Perhaps the strongest result
            is that Bangladeshi women are more likely to espouse
            attitudes of gender equality in education for their children
            and less so about gender equality among spouses.  It is also
            easier to explain norms regarding children's education
            and more difficult to explain norms about equality in
            marriages.  The authors believe that question on relative
            education of boys and girls captures the value of education
            per se, while the question on educational equality in
            marriage captures the norms regarding marriage and the
            relative worth of husbands and wives.  The effect of
            education in determining norms is significant though
            complex, and spans own and spousal education, as well as
            that of older females in the household.  This indicates
            sharing of education norms effects or externalities arising
            from spousal education in the production of gender education
            gap norms within marriage as well as arising from the
            presence of older educated females in the household.
            Lastly, the authors also find associations between gender
            education gap norms and household poverty, information
            processing and religion, though the evidence here is more mixed.
Cote d'Ivoire :
            competitiveness, Cocoa, and the real exchange rate : Cote
            d'Ivoire : competitiveness, cocoa, and the real
            exchange rate
This paper explores competitiveness of
            Cote d'Ivoire's economy over a long period of
            1960-2003 and its link with cocoa prices.  The main
            conclusions are as follows. First, using four measures of
            real effective exchange rate (REER) for the   1960-2002
            period, we track the evolution of REER and conclude, inter
            alia, that until 2003, REER remained well below its 1994
            level. Second, we find that based on our measure of the
            multilateral REER with dynamic weights, which covers most
            recorded trade, France no longer dominates Cote
            d'Ivoire's trade. Instead, Cote d'Ivoire has
            diversified its set of trading partners. Unfortunately, it
            has also specialized in one export product, raw cocoa. This
            paper aims to contribute to the question to what extent do
            cocoa prices affect Cote d'Ivoire's
            competitiveness in world trade? Third, the answer to this
            question is that cocoa prices are an important determinant
            of Cote d'Ivoire's competitiveness. Similar to the
            case of a classic "Dutch Disease," increases in
            the real world price of a "natural resource"
            (i.e., cocoa) tend to result in the appreciation of the CFA
            franc and a loss in competitiveness. Econometric tests
            further confirm that 1994 was a "break-point" not
            only for growth and productivity (as documented in the two
            related papers) but also for trade competitiveness. Recent
            productivity per worker trends versus wages also seem to
            indicate slow growth in 1996-2000, without major improvement
            in competitiveness.
When do enterprises prefer informal credit
This paper tests the hypothesis that
            enterprises may forgo formal finance in lieu of informal
            credit by choice.  They do so to avoid the additional
            regulatory scrutiny and harassment that engaging with the
            formal financial sector invites.  We test this hypothesis
            using enterprise-level data on 3,564 enterprises in 29
            countries.  In this sample, enterprises finance
            approximately 57 percent of their working capital
            requirements with external finance.  This external finance
            comes from formal sources, such as commercial banks (53
            percent) and informal sources (42 percent), such as trade
            creditors, or family and friends.  In our sample, 14 percent
            of enterprises rely exclusively on informal finance.  We
            find that the likelihood of enterprises preferring to only
            use informal finance is inversely related to the quality of
            the regulatory environment, particularly the quality of tax
            administration and overall governance.  For example, we find
            that when an enterprise has been asked for bribes by tax
            inspectors, it is 17 percent more likely to prefer informal finance.
Local conflict in Indonesia :
            Measuring incidence and identifying patterns
The widespread presence of local
            conflict characterizes many developing countries such as
            Indonesia. Outbreaks of violent conflict not only have
            direct costs for lives, livelihoods, and material property,
            but may also have the potential to escalate further. Recent
            studies on large-scale "headline" conflicts have
            tended to exclude the systematic consideration of local
            conflict, in large part due to the absence of representative
            data at low levels of geographic specification. This paper
            is a first attempt to correct for that. We evaluate a unique
            dataset compiled by the Indonesian government, the periodic
            Village Potential Statistics (PODES), which seeks to map
            conflict across all of Indonesia's 69,000
            villages/neighborhoods. The data confirm that conflict is
            prevalent beyond well publicized "conflict
            regions," and that it can be observed across the
            archipelago. The data report largely violent conflict in 7.1
            percent of Indonesia's lowest administrative tier
            (rural desa and urban kelurahan). Integrating examples from
            qualitative fieldwork, we assess issues in the measurement
            of local conflict for quantitative analysis, and adopt an
            empirical framework to examine potential associations with
            poverty, inequality, shocks, ethnic and religious
            diversity/inequality, and community-level associational and
            security arrangements. The quantitative analysis shows
            positive correlations between local conflict and
            unemployment, inequality, natural disasters, changes in
            sources of incomes, and clustering of ethnic groups within
            villages. The institutional variables indicate that the
            presence of places of worship is associated with less
            conflict, while the presence of religious groups and
            traditional culture (adat) institutions are associated with
            conflict. We conclude by suggesting future areas of
            research, notably on the role of group inequality and
            inference, and suggest ways to improve the measurement of
            conflict in the village census.
Indoor air quality for poor
            families: new evidence from Bangladesh
Indoor air pollution (IAP) from cooking
            and heating is estimated to kill a million children annually
            in developing countries. To promote a better understanding
            of IAP, the authors investigate the determinants of IAP in
            Bangladesh using the latest air monitoring technology and a
            national household survey. The study concludes that IAP is
            dangerously high for many poor families in Bangladesh.
            Concentrations of respirable airborne particulates(PM10) 300 ug/
Measuring the international mobility
            of skilled workers (1990-2000) : release 1.0
Until recently, there has been no
            systematic empirical assessment of the economic impact of
            the brain drain. Despite many case studies and anecdotal
            evidence, the main reason for this seems to be the lack of
            harmonized international data on migration by country of
            origin and education level. An exception is the paper by
            Carrington and Detragiache (1998), which provided skilled
            migration rates for 61 developing countries in 1990. This
            study relies on a set of tentative assumptions. For example,
            they transpose the skill structure of U.S. immigrants on the
            OECD total immigration stock. In this paper, the authors
            provide new estimates of skilled workers' emigration
            rates for about 190 countries in 2000 and 170 countries in
            1990, in both developing and industrial countries. Using
            various statistical sources, they revisit Carrington and
            Detragiache's measures by incorporating information on
            immigrants' educational attainment and country of
            origin from almost all OECD countries. The set of receiving
            countries is restricted to OECD nations. The authors'
            database covers 92.7 percent of the OECD immigration stock.
            In absolute terms, the authors show that the largest numbers
            of highly educated migrants are from Europe, Southern and
            Eastern Asia, and, to a lesser extent, from Central America.
            Nevertheless, as a proportion of the potential educated
            labor force, the highest brain drain rates are observed in
            the Caribbean, Central America, and Western and Eastern
            Africa. Repeating the exercise for 1990 and 2000 allows the
            authors to evaluate the changes in brain drain intensity.
            Western Africa, Eastern Africa, and Central America
            experienced a remarkable increase in the brain drain during
            the past decade. The database delivers information that is
            rich enough to assess the changes in the international
            distribution of migration rates, to test for the (push and
            pull) determinants per skill group, to evaluate the growth
            effects of migration on source and destination countries,
            and to estimate the relationships between migration, trade,
            foreign research and development, and remittances.
Greco-Roman lessons for public debt
            management and debt market development
Greece and Italy initiated efforts to
            improve public debt management and develop their domestic
            debt markets respectively in the late 1970s and mid-1980s.
            At that time, both countries suffered from large and rapidly
            growing public debt, excessive reliance on short-term bills
            held by commercial banks, a strong preference of households
            to save in bank deposits, and a weak presence of
            institutional investors (pension funds, insurance companies,
            and mutual funds). Continuing large fiscal deficits, high
            levels of interest rates and inflation, and serious policy
            credibility problems impeded the use of long-term
            instruments. The authors provide a detailed analysis of the
            characteristics of the instruments that were used in these
            two countries, their pace of issuance, and their impact on
            the composition of public debt. The authors note that the
            main Greco-Roman lesson for developing and transition
            countries concerns the transition from an excessive reliance
            on short-term Treasury bills, held by captive banks, to a
            liquid market with long-term instruments held, and actively
            traded, by long-term institutional investors. The transition
            required moving gradually to medium-term instruments,
            experimenting with innovation, and targeting households and
            foreign investors, while taking steps to establish policy
            credibility by lowering fiscal deficits and inflation. When
            reliance on captive sources of finance was substantially
            reduced and policy credibility was established, both
            countries focused on developing active money markets and
            liquid secondary markets with benchmark issues of fixed-rate
            long-term securities. They ultimately succeeded in
            developing active professional markets, using modern
            practices, targeting well-established European institutional
            investors, and integrating into the highly sophisticated
            euro markets. However, integration into the euro markets was
            the culmination of a prolonged effort of modernization and
            adaptation and was greatly facilitated by their strong
            political commitment to achieve economic convergence and
            join the euro zone.
Poverty alleviation through
            geographic targeting : how much does disaggregation help
Using recently completed "poverty
            maps" for Cambodia, Ecuador, and Madagascar, the
            authors simulate the impact on poverty of transferring an
            exogenously given budget to geographically defined subgroups
            of the population according to their relative poverty
            status. They find large gains from targeting smaller
            administrative units, such as districts or villages. But
            these gains are still far from the poverty reduction that
            would be possible had the planners had access to information
            on household level income or consumption. The results
            suggest that a useful way forward might be to combine fine
            geographic targeting using a poverty map with
            within-community targeting mechanisms.
Poverty alleviation through
            geographic targeting : how much does disaggregation help
# Poverty Alleviation through Geographic Targeting: How Much Does Disaggregation Help?

## Chris Elbers, Tomoki Fujii, Peter Lanjouw, Berk Özler, and Wesley Yin<sup>1</sup>

In this paper, using recently completed “poverty maps” for Cambodia, Ecuador, and Madagascar, we simulate the impact on poverty of transferring an exogenously given budget to geographically defined sub-groups of the population according to their relative poverty status. We find large gains from targeting smaller administrative units, such as districts or villages. However, these gains are still far from the poverty reduction that would be possible had the planners had access to information on household level income or consumption. Our results suggest that a useful way forward might be to combine fine geographic targeting using a poverty map with within-community targeting mechanisms.

**Key Words:** Targeting, Poverty, Poverty Maps.

**JEL Classification Numbers:** C15, I32, H53.

### World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3419, October 2004

_The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the view of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent. Policy Research Working Papers are available online at http://econ.worldbank.org._ 1 Elbers is with Free University, Amsterdam; Fujii is with University of California, Berkeley; Lanjouw and Özler are with the World Bank; and Yin is with Princeton University. The authors are grateful to Martin Ravallion, Norbert Schady, and participants in the “Poverty and Applied Microeconomics” seminar series at the World Bank for useful discussions and comments. Corresponding author: Berk Özler, World Bank, 1818 H St., NW, Washington, DC 20433, telephone: 202-458-5861, fax: 202-5221153, email: <u>bozler@worldbank.org.</u> 1
Who suffers from indoor air
            pollution evidence from Bangladesh
In this paper the authors investigate
            individuals' exposure to indoor air pollution. Using
            new survey data from Bangladesh, they analyze exposure at
            two levels-differences within households attributable to
            family roles, and differences across households attributable
            to income and education. Within households, they relate
            individuals' exposure to pollution in different
            locations during their daily round of activity. The authors
            find high levels of exposure for children and adolescents of
            both sexes, with particularly serious exposure for children
            under 5. Among prime-age adults, they find that men have
            half the exposure of women (whose exposure is similar to
            that of children and adolescents). They also find that
            elderly men have significantly lower exposure than elderly
            women. Across households, they draw on results from their
            previous paper (Dasgupta et al, 2004), which relate
            pollution variation across households to choices of cooking
            fuel, cooking locations, construction materials, and
            ventilation practices. They find that these choices are
            significantly affected by family income and adult education
            levels (particularly for women). Overall, the authors find
            that the poorest, least-educated households have twice the
            pollution levels of relatively high-income households with
            highly-educated adults. For children in a typical household,
            pollution exposure can be halved by adopting two simple
            measures-increasing their outdoor time from 3 to 5 or 6
            hours a day, and concentrating outdoor time during peak
            cooking periods. The authors recognize that weather and
            other factors may intervene occasionally, and that child
            supervision outdoors may be difficult for some households.
            However, the potential benefits are so great that neighbors
            might well agree to pool outdoor supervision once they
            became aware of the implications for their children's health.