rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Estimating the health effects of air
            pollutants : a method with an application to Jakarta
To develop efficient strategies for
            pollution control, it is essential to assess both the costs
            of control and the benefits that may result. These benefits
            will often included improvements in public health, including
            reductions in both morbidity and premature mortality. Until
            recently, there has been little guidance about how to
            calculate the benefits of air pollution controls and how to
            use those estimates to assign priorities to different air
            pollution control strategies. The author describes a method
            for quantifying the benefits of reduced ambient
            concentrations of pollutants (such as ozone and particulate
            matter) typically found in urban areas worldwide. The author
            then applies the method to data on Jakarta, Indonesia, an
            area characterized by little wind, high population
            concentration (8 million people), congested roads, and
            ambient air pollution. The magnitude of the benefits of
            pollution control depend on the level of air pollution, the
            expected effects on health of the pollutants
            (dose-response), the size of the population affected and the
            economic value of these effects. The results for Jakarta
            suggest that significant benefits result from reducing
            exposure to both outdoor and indoor air pollutants. For
            example, if annual concentrations of particulate matter were
            reduced to the midpoint of the World Health Organization
            guideline (and former U.S. ambient standard), the estimates
            indicate a reduction per year of 1,400 premature deaths
            (with a range of 900 to 1,900), 49,000 emergency room
            visits, 600,000 asthma attacks, 7.6 million restricted
            activity days (including work loss), 124,000 cases of
            bronchitis in children, and 37 million minor respiratory
            symptoms. In the case of Jakarta, the methodology suggests
            that reducing exposure to lead and nitrogen dioxide should
            also be a high priority. An important consequence of ambient
            lead pollution is a reduction in learning abilities for
            children, measured as I.Q loss. Apart from that, reducing
            the proportion of respirable particles can reduce the amount
            of illness and premature mortality. Clearly, air pollution
            represents a significant public health hazard to residents
            of Jakarta and other cities consistently exposed to high
            levels of air pollution, such as Bangkok, Mexico City, and
            Santiago, Chile.
Regulations, institutions, and
            economic performance : the political economy of the
            Philippines' telecommunications sector
The author addresses the puzzle of
            sluggish investment in the Philippines' dominant
            telecommunications firm, PLDT.  This case allows a study of
            the underlying causes of success or failure in a privately
            owned infrastructure sector in a developing country.  Since
            its inception, PLDT has been privately owned and has had
            direct access to international capital markets.  But its
            services have been deficient, in quality and quantity, since
            the early 1960s.  Using a transaction costs approach, the
            author hypothesizes that contracting problems between
            various economic players are important determinants of
            observed outcomes.  Poor services are attributed to factors
            that impede implementation of performance - improving
            implicit or explicit contracts, including regulatory rules
            and regulations.  After reviewing PLDT's responses to
            events in the last six decades, the author demonstrates that
            the problem can be traced to lack of commitment to
            regulatory policies beyond the term of each administration -
            because a relatively weak legislature and judiciary are
            dominated by the executive branch.  This system of
            governance is linked to the nature of Philippine society: a
            small elite engaged in competitive politics among themselves
            tries to bar the rest of the population from active
            participation, without actually denying their citizenship.
            The president of the coutry has great leeway in setting and
            implementing regulations, so the elite group associated with
            the president can unilaterally modify telecommunications
            policy in a way that serves its interests.  Those in control
            of PLDT find investing in the company's highly
            capital-intensive facilities risky if they are not connected
            to the president's circle. As a result, the government
            has an incentive to redistribute quasi-rents through
            regulatory mechanisms.  This imposes a strong
            "political business cycle" on PLDT's growth
            pattern: investment rises only in the early years of
            "friendly" administrations and remains low at all
            other times.  The author establishes this relationship by
            empirical analysis.  Despite the failure of cyclical
            investment, no attempt has been made to reform the
            regulatory system because most solutions require an
            institutional commitment to a set of rules and procedures
            that are either infeasible or contrary to the interests of
            the elite.  Certain reforms are becoming increasingly
            feasible, however, as a new middle class develops and elite
            alliances shift.
Why higher fiscal spending persists
            when a boom in primary commodities ends
The author analyzes the fiscal policy of
            primary commodity exporters. After the initial boom in
            fiscal spending that accompanies a commodity boom, he asks,
            why do commodity-exporting countries tend to maintain higher
            spending levels despite a drop in commodity prices. He
            identifies three factors that might explain the tendency: a
            pressure (from political constituents, for example) to keep
            spending, the difficulty of reversing policy (or
            disinvesting - the costs of firing people, for example), and
            the effects of limited indebtedness, or credit-rationing
            constraints. Fiscal policy must be developed with these
            three factors in mind. Using a fiscal policy optimizing
            model, the author examines evidence for the existence of
            these three factors. He uses the model's unconstrained
            and constrained Euler equations to estimate the Lagrange
            multipliers associated with the limited indebtedness
            constraint. The empirical work is done using data from
            Africa's franc zone countries. The persistence of
            pressure to spend may not play an important role, says the
            author. More important in explaining the tendency to
            maintain spending levels after a commodity boom ends are
            liquidity constraints and the costs of policy reversal.
The effects of barriers on equity
            investment in developing countries
Equity flows to developing countries
            climbed to an estimated $13 billion in 1992, four times the
            amount invested three years earlier.  Investment increased
            partly because countries removed restrictions on foreign
            ownership, liberalized capital account transactions, and
            generally made foreign access to their markets easier.  The
            authors investigate how stock performance in emerging
            markets is affected by foreign investors' formal access
            to stocks (as measured by the International Finance
            Corporation's index of "investability"). To
            measure foreigners' access to emerging-market stocks,
            they use the investability index created by the IFC's
            Emerging Market Data Base.  The IFC indexes should be a good
            indicator of changes in legal barriers over time or of the
            relative importance of those barriers across securities in
            one market at a given point in time, or across markets.
            Using the Stehle (1977) model, the authors reject the
            hypothesis that emerging markets are integrated with world
            capital markets (for most emerging markets).  They fail to
            reject the hypothesis that emerging markets are segmented
            (for all emerging markets). The authors interpret this as
            legal and other barriers limiting foreign investors'
            access to emerging markets.  They next investigate the
            relationship between stock performance and the investability
            index to determine the importance of legal barriers relative
            to other barriers. They find a strong relationship between a
            stock's price-earnings ratio and its investability
            index, which suggests that formal barriers to
            foreigners' access has a negative effect on stock
            prices and thus raises the cost of capital for firms listed.
            Countries could lower the (risk-adjusted) cost of capital,
            they contend, by removing legal barriers to foreign
            investors' access to equity markets.
The economic impact of export
            controls : an application to Mongolian cashmere and Romanian
            wood products
Countries sometimes use export controls
            on raw materials to encourage domestic processing. The
            motivation is usually to assure raw materials at low prices
            for domestic industries, although exports are sometimes
            controlled in an attempt to increase export earnings (by
            promoting exports of higher value-added processed goods
            rather than raw materials). The problem is, export controls
            hurt raw material producers and cause economic distortions
            that result in net losses to the country. The impact of raw
            material export controls on total export earnings is
            ambiguous: the decline in raw material export when
            production is discouraged by lower prices may outweigh the
            effect of increased exports of processed goods. The author
            develops a simple partial equilibrium model of export
            controls on raw material to investigate the impact of export
            restrictions and to estimate the potential magnitude of the
            transfers between groups and the net costs of the
            export-control regimes. The author's estimates of the
            magnitude of transfers and costs of export controls on raw
            cashmere (in Mongolia) and wood production (in Romania)
            indicate that the transfers and costs may be substantial.
            The author finds that (under reasonable assumptions about
            elasticities of supply) export controls can transfer
            significant profits from the raw materials producers to the
            processing industries, causing significant net losses to the
            economy and a substantial net decrease in export earnings.
            Quantitative export controls will be even more distortive if
            processing industries have any monopsony (single-buyers)
            power. This is quite likely in developing countries with
            small industrial bases - or in economies in transition,
            where central planning has left a legacy of very large firms
            in highly concentrated industries. With monopsony power in
            the processing industry, both output and exports of final
            products can be reduced by quantitative export controls on
            raw material inputs. The quantitative control bestows
            effective monopsony power on the processing firm and
            encourages it to exploit this monopsony power by reducing
            output. If the raw materials could be freely exported,
            processors would not be able to effectively exercise
            monopsony power.
What are OECD trade preferences
            worth to sub-Saharan Africa
Some developing countries may experience
            important trade losses if tariffs are liberalized on a
            general most-favored-nation (MFN) basis. Sub-Saharan Africa
            appears to be especially vulnerable to this problem. African
            countries receive important Lome Convention preferences in
            the European Economic Community (EEC), under which duty-free
            treatment, or tariffs below MFN and generalized system of
            preferences (GSP) rates, are applied to their exports. Other
            OECD countries normally apply GSP duties, or even more
            advantageous "least developed" country preferences
            to African exports. The proposed Uruguay Round reductions in
            MFN tariffs will erode those tariff preference margins and
            cause some African exports to be displaced by other
            suppliers. The author documents the importance of African
            countries of existing OECD preference, particularly those of
            the EEC. More than 95 percent of all African-tariff-line
            products shipped to the EEC receive duty-free treatment,
            while other exporters of the same products face tariffs as
            much as 20 percentage points higher. Similar favorable terms
            of preferential access also exist in Japan and the United
            States, although the preference margins are smaller than in
            the EEC. Using a trade projection model developed by the
            World Bank and the UNCTAD, the author estimates that
            eliminating EEC, Japanese, and U.S. MFN tariffs would cause
            African export losses of about $4 billion (estimated present
            value). The countries that seem to be most vulnerable to
            these adverse trade effects are Cote d'Ivoire,
            Ethiopia, Kenya, Malawi, Senegal, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. What
            about the possibility that the losses African countries
            could experience from erosion of tariff preferences could be
            offset by the liberalization of nontariff measures? The
            author discounts this likelihood. In general, few important
            OECD nontariff measures are applied to African products --
            most African textile and clothing exports are even excluded
            from Multifibre Arrangement restrictions. And those that are
            applied (such as eco-labeling or licensing requirements) do
            not restrict trade very much. The author's observations
            accent the need for action to offset the impact of
            Africa's loss of preferences as a result of the Uruguay
            Round. What offsetting actions are possible and appropriate?
            Aggressive reform of the African countries' own trade
            regimes appears to be the most effective way to counter the
            effects of the erosion of OECD preferences.
Intra - Sub - Saharan African trade
            : is it too little : Intra-sub - Saharan African trade : is
            it too little
Trade among sub-Saharan African
            countries is very limited. This fact, plus other political
            and economic considerations, has been used to motivate a
            growing number of regional integration schemes. Although
            many authors have shown that intra-sub-Saharan African trade
            is limited, none has yet asked whether the level of
            intra-sub-Saharan African trade is higher or lower than one
            would expect, given a plausible model of the determination
            of trade flows. The authors compare actual trade with what a
            traditional gravity model would predict. They find that a
            gravity model predicts the low level of intra-sub-Saharan
            African trade. For the 19 sub-Saharan African countries in
            their sample, the actual sub-Saharan African share of
            imports plus exports was an average (median) of 8.1 percent
            (4.5 percent) while the gravity model predicts a slightly
            lower, not higher, mean (median) of 7.5 percent (4.5 percent).
Regulation, institutions, and
            commitment : privatization and regulation in the Argentine
            telecommunications sector
In 1990, Argentina privatized its
            state-owned telephone company, ENTel. Shifting
            telecommunications to the private sector was one of the
            first actions taken under the reform program of the new
            president, Carlos Saul Menem.  In privatizing ENTel, the
            government focused on privatization as a way of establishing
            its reform credentials.  Establishing a post-privatization
            regulatory regime was given lower priority.  A well-defined
            regulatory regime was not in place before the sale, but
            privatization took place nonetheless. The authors find that
            despite the delay in implementing a regulatory regime,
            ENTel's privatization appears to have had a net
            positive impact, both on Argentina's reputation and on
            welfare.  The reform program had its own virtuous cycle,
            creating and reinforcing credibility in the short run.  But
            the neglect of the regulatory regime appears to have been
            costly in terms of the sale price that the government
            received and the tariff levels that investors demanded.  In
            the long run, this neglect, if it persists, may have a
            negative impact on the telecommunications sector's
            performance.  Regulation plays an important role in the
            private provision of telecommunications.  Many argue that
            competition should be limited to allow economies of scale.
            But limited competition can lead to abuses of monopoly power
            and to demands from customers and suppliers for a regulatory
            regime to protect them from such abuses. In addition, the
            sector requires high sunk costs and asset specificity and
            the assets' owners are particularly exposed to the
            risks of expropriation - either outright (through
            nationalization) or gradual (through service requirements or
            low tariffs).  A stable, credible regulatory environment
            reduces the risk of investment in this sector and reduces
            the expected rate of return that private investors would
            require to participate.  Establishing a stable, credible
            regulatory regime before privatization increases the value
            of a privatized telecommunications firm to potential
            purchasers by reducing the risk associated with the
            purchase.  This in turn affects the price generated by the
            selling government.  By failing to establish such a regime
            in advance, the Argentine government received a lower sale
            price and increased the probability that buyers would
            capture windfall profits.
The life cycle distributional
            consequence of pay-as-you-go and funded pension systems
Using a dynamic cohort microsimulation
            model (LIFEMOD), the authors examine the life-cycle
            distributional consequences of a variety of pay-as-you-go
            (PAYG) and funded pension systems.  This technique allows
            them to investigate both the socioeconomic characteristics
            and the number of people affected by a change in
            contribution or eligibility rules in any pension system.
            LIFEMOD uses 1985 parameters for the United Kingdom so
            specific results are not valid for other countries.  But
            winners and losers are likely to be similar across
            countries.  They find the following:  Women benefit much
            more than men in a flat-rate PAYG system.  In simulations,
            84 percent of surviving women but only 33 percent of
            surviving men are net beneficiaries, because women have
            higher life expectancy and lower lifetime earnings. Imposing
            minimum contributions substantially reduces the number of
            women who qualify for a pension.  Imposing a joint
            contribution rule on the earnings of married couples
            significantly increases the number of women qualifying
            without significantly reducing the proportion of qualifying
            men.  In funded pension systems, on average men accumulate
            much more pension capital than women do because of
            men's higher earnings and more continuous paid work.
            Different rates of real interest and earnings growth affect
            individuals' fund accumulation differently. Women
            benefit more from high rates of return and low earnings
            growth because they tend to receive a higher proportion of
            their lifetime earnings when young.  But some men and many
            women fail to achieve minimum pension levels.  If the
            pension shortfall is compensated for by lump-sum capital
            top-ups, women receive 93 percent of top-ups (70 percent if
            joint contributions are used).  In hybrid pension systems
            that combine both PAYG and funded elements, the higher the
            proportion of PAYG payments, the greater the replacement
            rate for people in the bottom 40 percent of the lifetime
            earnings distribution (the majority of whom are women).  But
            replacement rates for people in the middle of income
            distribution are insensitive to any variant of the
            PAYG-funded combination.  In short, flat-rate pay-as-you-go
            pension plans and funded pensions produce very different
            distributional outcomes, the single most important
            determinant of which is the different lifetime employment
            and earnings records of men and women.