rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Nonfarm activity and rural income
            inequality : a case study of two provinces in China
Nonfarm activity plays an increasingly
            important role in rural household income. Based on data from
            the Living Standards Measurement Study in the provinces of
            Hebei and Liaoning, the authors study the distribution of
            nonfarm income in rural China. First, they assume nonfarm
            income as an exogenous transfer to total income to decompose
            the Gini index. Second, they assume nonfarm income as a
            potential substitute for farm income to take household
            choices into account and simulate household income. The
            results show that nonfarm activity reduces rural income
            inequality by raising the income of poor households to a
            larger extent than that of rich households. Improving rural
            infrastructure and implementing universal basic education
            are critical to build up the capacity of households (in
            particular, poor households) to participate in nonfarm
            activity. Strengthening the links between farm activity and
            nonfarm activity is essential to optimize the contribution
            of nonfarm activity to pro-poor rural economic development.
International benchmarking of South
            Africa's infrastructure performance
The paper provides a first systematic,
            comprehensive benchmarking of South Africa's
            infrastructure performance in four major
            sectors--electricity, water and sanitation, information and
            communication technology, and transportation--against the
            relevant group of comparator countries using a new World
            Bank international data base with objective and
            perception-based indicators of infrastructure performance
            from over 200 countries. Specifically, the paper seeks to
            answer a number of relevant questions: How does South Africa
            compare on major indicators of infrastructure sector
            performance against the relevant country groups? What do
            outcome indicators tell us about the relative strengths and
            weaknesses of South Africa's infrastructure compared
            with various income and geographical comparator groups of
            countries? Where are the largest deviations-positive and
            negative-from the benchmarks and other comparators? And how
            does one interpret some of these comparisons to be useful
            for policy purposes?
Does migration reshape expenditures
            in rural households Evidence from Mexico
Migration reshapes rural economies in
            ways that may go beyond the contribution of migrant
            remittances to household income. Consumption and investment
            expenditures by migrant-sending households may transmit some
            of the impacts of migration to others inside and outside the
            rural economy, and they also may shape the potential effects
            of migration within the source household. Numerous studies
            have attempted to quantify the impact of migrant remittances
            on expenditures in migrant-sending households following one
            of two approaches. The first asks how migrant remittances
            are spent. It has the advantage of being simple but the
            significant disadvantage of ignoring the fungibility of
            income from migrant and nonmigrant sources. Remittances
            almost certainly have indirect effects on expenditures by
            way of their contribution to households' total budgets.
            The second uses a regression approach that considers
            remittances as an explanatory variable, in addition to total
            income and other controls, in a household expenditure demand
            system. It has the advantage of enabling one to test whether
            remittances affect expenditures in ways that are independent
            of their contribution to total income. But it does not take
            into account other ways, besides remittances, in which
            migration may influence expenditure patterns in households
            with migrants. It also may suffer from econometric bias
            resulting from the endogeneity of migration and remittance
            receipts. The same variables may simultaneously affect both
            remittances and household expenditures, and unless one
            controls for this, biased estimates may result.
Do regional trade pacts benefit the
            poor An illustration from the Dominican Republic-Central
            American Free Trade Agreement in Nicaragua
The main objective of this paper is to
            provide an ex-ante assessment of the poverty and income
            distribution impacts of the Central American Free Trade Area
            agreement on Nicaragua. The authors use a general
            equilibrium macro model to simulate trade reform scenarios
            and estimate their price effects, while a micro-module maps
            these price changes into real income changes at the
            individual household level. A useful insight from this
            analysis is that even if the final total impact on poverty
            is not too large, its dispersion across households-due to
            their heterogeneity of factor endowments, inputs use,
            commodity production, and consumption preferences-is
            significant and should be taken into account when designing
            compensatory policies. Additionally, growth and
            redistribution decomposition show that, at least in the
            short to medium run, redistribution can be as important as
            growth. The main policy message that emerges from the paper
            is that Nicaragua should consider enlarging its own
            liberalization to countries other than the United States to
            boost trade-induced poverty reductions.
The rise and fall of Brazilian
            inequality, 1981-2004
Measured by the Gini coefficient, income
            inequality in Brazil rose from 0.57 in 1981 to 0.63 in 1989,
            before falling back to 0.56 in 2004. This latest figure
            would lower Brazil's world inequality rank from 2nd (in
            1989) to 10th (in 2004). Poverty incidence also followed an
            inverted U-curve over the past quarter century, rising from
            0.30 in 1981 to 0.33 in 1993, before falling to 0.22 in
            2004. Using standard decomposition techniques, this paper
            presents a preliminary investigation of the determinants of
            Brazil's distributional reversal over this period. The
            rise in inequality in the 1980s appears to have been driven
            by increases in the educational attainment of the population
            in a context of convex returns, and by high and accelerating
            inflation. While the secular decline in inequality, which
            began in 1993, is associated with declining inflation, it
            also appears to have been driven by four structural and
            policy changes which have so far not attracted sufficient
            attention in the literature, namely sharp declines in the
            returns to education; pronounced rural-urban convergence;
            increases in social assistance transfers targeted to the
            poor; and a possible decline in racial inequality. Although
            poverty dynamics since the Real Plan of 1994 have been
            driven primarily by economic growth, the decline in
            inequality has also made a substantial contribution to
            poverty reduction.
Propensity score matching and policy
            impact analysis - a demonstration in EViews
Effective development policymaking
            creates a need for reliable methods of assessing
            effectiveness. There should be, therefore, an intimate
            relationship between effective policymaking and impact
            analysis. The goal of a development intervention defines the
            metric by which to assess its impact, while impact
            evaluation can produce reliable information on which
            policymakers may base decisions to modify or cancel
            ineffective programs and thus make the most of limited
            resources. This paper reviews the logic of propensity score
            matching (PSM) and, using data on the National Support Work
            Demonstration, compares that approach with other evaluation
            methods such as double difference, instrumental variable,
            and Heckman's method of selection bias correction. In
            addition, it demonstrates how to implement nearest-neighbor
            and kernel-based methods, and plot program incidence curves
            in E-Views. In the end, the plausibility of an evaluation
            method hinges critically on the correctness of the
            socioeconomic model underlying program design and
            implementation, and on the quality and quantity of available
            data. In any case, PSM can act as an effective adjuvant to
            other methods.
Promoting access to primary equity
            markets : a legal and regulatory approach
This paper examines legal and regulatory
            measures that can be taken to promote access to the primary
            market in emerging market economies. While capital market
            development depends on many factors including, primarily, a
            favorable macroeconomic environment, an appropriately
            designed and effective legal and regulatory framework can
            help to encourage market growth and to increase access to
            finance for all companies, including small- and medium-sized
            enterprises. In this paper we identify the basic necessities
            that underpin a regulatory regime that is cost effective and
            strikes an appropriate balance between, on the one hand,
            laws and regulations that may be too restrictive to achieve
            a supply of capital and, on the other, those that may be so
            relaxed that investors feel that there is an unacceptable
            level of risk and do not care to venture into the market. We
            explore the legal foundations for the successful operation
            of a primary market for securities and identify disclosure
            and effective monitoring and enforcement as essential
            elements of legal protection. We then examine different
            legal and regulatory approaches for improving access to
            finance. We discuss measures that can be used by traditional
            stock exchanges to attract smaller enterprises to their
            lists as well as recent initiatives to create second boards
            or divide the main board into different market segments. We
            also discuss different mechanisms for companies to raise
            funds outside of a formal stock market listing, including
            private placements and private equity. Finally, we propose
            some recommendations for a simple legal and regulatory
            framework that will help promote access to primary equity
            markets, via both the traditional exchange as well as other alternatives.
The World Trade Organization's
            Doha cotton initiative : a tale of two issues
Four West African nations have demanded
            that the World Trade Organization's Doha Development
            Agenda include a Cotton Initiative that involves two issues:
            cutting cotton subsidies and tariffs, and assisting farm
            productivity growth in Africa. The authors provide estimates
            of the potential economic impacts of (1) complete or partial
            removal of cotton subsidies and import tariffs globally, and
            (2) cotton productivity growth through the adoption of
            genetically modified (GM) cotton varieties. They use the
            latest version of the GTAP database and model. Their results
            confirm that-unlike for other agricultural subsidies and
            tariffs-for cotton it is subsidy reductions rather than
            tariff cuts that would make by far the largest impact. For
            Sub-Saharan Africa the potential gains are huge relative to
            the effects on that region of reforming other merchandise
            trade policies. And they could be more than doubled if that
            reform provided the cash for farmers to take advantage of
            the biotechnology revolution and adopt GM cotton varieties.
            But those potential gains, and the affordability of
            switching to costly GM seed, depend crucially on the extent
            to which high-income countries are willing to lower domestic
            support to their cotton farmers.
The World Trade Organization's
            Doha cotton initiative : a tale of two issues
WPS3918

# **The World Trade Organization’s Doha Cotton Initiative: A Tale of Two Issues**

Kym Anderson and Ernesto Valenzuela Development Research Group World Bank, Washington DC <u>kanderson@worldbank.org evalenzuela1@worldbank.org</u>

## World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3918, May 2006

_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._ This is a product of the World Bank’s projects on _Agricultural Trade Reform and the Doha Development Agenda_ and _Distortions to Agricultural Incentives_ . The authors are grateful for discussions with John Baffes and helpful comments from seminar participants including Larry Hinkle, Elke Kreuzwieser, Will Masters and Maurice Schiff, and for funding from the UK’s Department for International Development and the Bank-Netherlands Partnership Program.
Mexico : two decades of the
            evolution of education and inequality
Mexico experienced a pronounced increase
            in the degree of inequality and earnings inequality over the
            1980s and mid 1990s. Contrary to the trend in the
            distribution of total income inequality, there has been an
            improvement in the distribution of earnings inequality since
            1996. This paper shows the following results. First,
            education has the highest gross contribution in explaining
            changes in earnings distribution. Second, both changes in
            the distribution of education and in the relative earnings
            among educational groups have always been in phase with the
            alterations in the earnings distribution. Specifically, when
            the income profile effect related to education became
            steeper and the inequality of education increased, the
            earnings distribution worsened (as in the 1988-96 period).
            Third, changes in the relative earnings among educational
            groups are always the leading force behind changes in inequality.
The rise and fall of training and
            visit extension : an Asian mini-drama with an African epilogue
The paper reviews the origins and
            evolution of the Training and Visit (T&V) extension
            system, which was promoted by the World Bank in 1975-98 in
            over 50 developing countries. The discussion seeks to
            clarify the context within which the approach was
            implemented, and to analyze the causes for its lack of
            sustainability and its ultimate abandonment. The paper
            identifies some of the challenges faced by the T&V
            approach as being typical of a large public extension
            system, where issues of scale, interaction with the
            agricultural research systems, inability to attribute
            benefits, weak accountability, and lack of political support
            tend to lead to incentive problems among staff and managers
            of extension, and limited budgetary resources. The different
            incentives and outlook of domestic stakeholders and external
            donor agencies are also reviewed. The main cause of the
            T&V system's disappearance is attributed to the
            incompatibility of its high recurrent costs with the limited
            budgets available domestically, leading to fiscal
            unsustainability. The paper concludes with some lessons that
            apply to donor-driven public extension initiatives, and more
            generally to rural development fads. The role of timely,
            independent, and rigorous evaluative studies is specifically highlighted.
Searching for the economic gradient
            in self-assessed health
Can self-assessed health be relied on to
            identify the true socioeconomic gradients in health status?
            The self-assessed health of Russian adults in 2002 shows
            remarkably little gradient with respect to economic welfare.
            The authors document this finding and assess its robustness
            to the assumptions routinely made in measuring health and
            welfare. They find that the expected economic gradient only
            emerges once one focuses on the component of self-assessed
            health that is explicable in terms of age and more objective
            health indicators and one allows for broader dimensions of
            economic welfare than captured by standard income-based
            measures. The results point to the need for caution in
            analyzing and interpreting self-assessed health data.
Searching for the economic gradient
            in self-assessed health
WPS3698

# Searching for the Economic Gradient in Self-Assessed Health

## Michael Lokshin and Martin Ravallion<sup>1</sup>

_Development Research Group, World Bank 1818 H Street NW, Washington DC, 20433 USA_

**Abstract:** Can self-assessments of health reveal the true health differentials between “rich” and “poor”?  The potential sources of bias include psychological adaptation to ill-health, socioeconomic covariates of health reporting errors and income measurement errors.  We propose an estimation method to reduce the bias, by isolating the component of self-assessed health that is explicable in terms of objective health indicators and allowing for broader dimensions of economic welfare than captured by current incomes.  On applying our method to survey data for Russia we find a pronounced (nonlinear) economic gradient in health status that is not evident in the raw data.  This is largely attributable to the health effects of age, education and location.

**JEL:** D63, I12, I31

**Keywords:** Self-assessed health, subjective welfare, gradient, measurement errors, Russia **Correspondence:** M. Ravallion, World Bank, 1818 H Street NW, Washington DC, 20433 USA. mravallion@worldbank.org

World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3698, September 2005; Revised July 2006 _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 The authors are grateful to Mingshan Lu, Vassilis Hajivassilou and participants at the Fifth World Congress of the International Health Economics Association for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Growth is good for the poor
When average income rises, the average
            incomes of the poorest fifth of society rise
            proportionately. This is a consequence of the strong
            empirical regularity that the share of income accruing to
            the bottom quintile does not vary systematically with
            average income. The authors document this empirical
            regularity in a sample of 92 countries spanning the past
            four decades and show that it holds across regions, periods,
            income levels, and growth rates. The authors next ask
            whether the factors that explain cross-country differences
            in the growth rates of average incomes have differential
            effects on the poorest fifth of society. They find that
            several determinants of growth--such as good rule of law,
            opennness to international trade, and developed financial
            markets--have little systematic effect on the share of
            income that accrues to the bottom quintile. Consequently,
            these factors benefit the poorest fifth of society as much
            as everyone else. Thee is some weak evidence that
            stabilization from high inflation and reductions in the
            overall size of government not only increase growth but also
            increase the income share of the poorest fifth in society.
            Finally, the authors examine several factors commonly
            thought to disproportionately benefit the poorest in
            society, but find little evidence of their effects. The
            absence of robust findings emphasizes that relatively little
            is known about the broad forces that account for the
            cross-country and intertemporal variation in the share of
            income accruing to the poorest fifth of society.