rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
The social impact of social funds in
            Jamaica - a mixed-methods analysis of participation,
            targeting, and collective action in community-driven development
The authors develop an evaluation method
            that combines qualitative evidence with quantitative survey
            data analyzed with propensity score methods on matched
            samples to study the impact of a participatory
            community-driven social fund on preference targeting,
            collective action, and community decision-making. The data
            come from a case study of five pairs of communities in
            Jamaica where one community in the pair has received funds
            from the Jamaica social investment fund (JSIF) while the
            other has not-but has been picked to match the funded
            community in its social and economic characteristics. The
            qualitative data reveal that the social fund process is
            elite-driven and decision-making tends to be dominated by a
            small group of motivated individuals. But by the end of the
            project there was broad-based satisfaction with the outcome.
            The quantitative data from 500 households mirror these
            findings by showing that ex-ante the social fund does not
            address the expressed needs of the majority of individuals
            in the majority of communities. By the end of the
            construction process, however, 80 percent of the community
            expressed satisfaction with the outcome. An analysis of the
            determinants of participation shows that better educated and
            better networked individuals dominate the process.
            Propensity score analysis reveals that the JSIF has had a
            causal impact on improvements in trust and the capacity for
            collective action, but these gains are greater for elites
            within the community. Both JSIF and non-JSIF communities are
            more likely now to make decisions that affect their lives
            which indicates a broad-based effort to promote
            participatory development in the country, but JSIF
            communities do not show higher levels of community-driven
            decisions than non-JSIF communities. The authors shed light
            on the complex ways in which community-driven development
            works inside communities-a process that is deeply imbedded
            within Jamaica's socio-cultural and political context.
Voice lessons : local government
            organizations, social organizations, and the quality of
            local governance
As part the Local Level Institutions
            study of local life in villages in rural Indonesia
            information was gathered on sampled household's
            participation in social activities. We classified the
            reported activities into four distinct types of social
            activity: sociability, networks, social organizations, and
            village government organizations. Respondents were also
            asked about questions about their village government:
            whether they were informed about village funds and projects,
            if they participated in village decisions, if they expressed
            voice about village problems, and if they thought the
            village government was responsive to local problems. Several
            findings emerge regarding the relationship between the
            social variables and the governance activities. Not
            surprisingly, an individual household's involvement
            with the village government organizations tends to increase
            their own reports of positive voice, participation, and
            information. In contrast, the data suggest a negative
            spillover on other households. There is a strong
            "chilling" effect of one household's
            participation in village government organizations on the
            voice, participation, and information of other households in
            the same village. The net effect of engagement in village
            government organizations is generally negative, while the
            net effect of membership in social organizations is more
            often associated with good governance outcomes. These
            findings indicate that existing social organizations have a
            potentially important role to play in enhancing the
            performance of government institutions in Indonesia and in
            the evolution of good governance more generally.
Trade liberalization and labor
            market adjustment in Brazil
The authors study the impact of the
            1988-94 trade liberalization in Brazil on wage distribution.
            They explore three main channels through which trade
            liberalization could have affected wage distribution: (1)
            increasing returns to skilled workers because of
            Hecksher-Ohlin adjustments to trade policy; (2)
            trade-induced skill-biased technological change; and (3)
            changes in industry wage premiums. The results suggest that
            trade reform in Brazil did contribute to the growing skill
            premium through skill-biased technological change, which was
            partially instigated by increased foreign competition. The
            authors also find that sector-specific returns to skill
            increased more in sectors with bigger tariff reductions. But
            they find little support for Hecksher-Ohlin type adjustments
            to trade reform. Overall, the effects of trade reform on
            wage inequality seem relatively small.
Renegotiation of concession
            contracts in Latin America
The authors construct a regulation model
            in which renegotiation occurs due to the imperfect
            enforcement of concession contracts. This enables the
            authors to provide theoretical predictions for the impact on
            the probability of renegotiation of a concession, regulatory
            institutions, institutional features, economic shocks, and
            the characteristics of the concession contracts. Then they
            use a data set of nearly 1,000 concessions awarded in Latin
            America and the Caribbean countries from 1989 to 2000
            covering the sectors of telecommunications, energy,
            transport, and water to test these predictions. Finally, the
            authors derive some policy implications of their theoretical
            and empirical work.
Strategic approaches to science and
            technology in development
Watson, Crawford, and Farley examine the
            ways in which science and technology (S&T) support
            poverty alleviation and economic development and how these
            themes have been given emphasis or short shrift in various
            areas of the World Bank's work. Central to their thesis
            is the now well-established argument that development will
            increasingly depend on a country's ability to
            understand, interpret, select, adapt, use, transmit,
            diffuse, produce, and commercialize scientific and
            technological knowledge in ways appropriate to its culture,
            aspirations, and level of development. The authors go beyond
            this tenet, analyzing the importance of S&T for
            development within specific sectors. They present policy
            options for enhancing the effectiveness of S&T systems
            in developing countries, review previous experience of the
            World Bank and other donors in supporting S&T, and
            suggest changes that the World Bank and its partners can
            adopt to increase the impact of the work currently
            undertaken in S&T. The authors' main messages are:
            1) S&T has always been important for development, but
            the unprecedented pace of advancement of scientific
            knowledge is rapidly creating new opportunities for and
            threats to development. 2) Most developing countries are
            largely unprepared to deal with the changes that S&T
            advancement will bring. 3) The World Bank's numerous
            actions in various domains of S&T could be more
            effective in producing the needed capacity improvements in
            client countries. 4) The World Bank could have a greater
            impact if it paid increased attention to S&T in
            education, health, rural development, private sector
            development, and the environment. The strategy emphasizes
            four S&T policy areas: education and human resources
            development, the private sector, the public sector, and
            information communications technologies.
Comparing mortgage credit risk
            policies : an options-based approach
Buckley, Karaguishiyeva,Van Order, and
            Vecvagare analyze the structure of approaches to mortgage
            credit risk that are now being used in a number of OECD and
            transition economies. The authors' basic approach is to
            show how option pricing models can help measure and evaluate
            the risks of various schemes. They find that mortgage
            default insurance can be a cost-effective tool for both
            improving housing affordability and efficiently addressing
            some of the rationing that characterizes this market. When
            correctly structured, as it is in a number of transition and
            market countries, this kind of program can be expected to
            reduce nonprice rationing at an actuarially fair price. At
            the same time, considerable care must be exercised in the
            development of such instruments. Geographical risk
            diversification, particularly across borders, can play a
            major role in the success of these programs. Such
            diversification could be important not only in smaller
            transition economies but in EU countries as well.
Trade reform in Vietnam :
            opportunities with emerging challenges
In 1986 Vietnam initiated a transition
            from a centrally planned economy to a market-oriented
            economy where the government would keep playing a leading
            role. These renovation (doi moi) policies were successful at
            generating economic growth and reducing poverty. In the
            ten-year socioeconomic strategy endorsed by the Ninth Party
            Congress in April 2001, the authorities further articulated
            their development objectives in terms of economic growth and
            poverty reduction. To reach these objectives, the government
            indicated that its structural reform priorities were to
            change Vietnam's trade and financial policies,
            liberalize the climate for private investment, increase the
            efficiency of public enterprises, and improve governance.
            The author argues that the pace of implementation of trade
            reform-which has been impressive so far-is raising new
            challenges. On one side, fast liberalization of trade reform
            may soon conflict with the slow pace of implementation of
            other reforms, including restructuring of state-owned
            enterprises and state-owned commercial banks. On the other
            side, Vietnam would greatly benefit from fast implementation
            of trade reform and particularly fast accession to the World
            Trade Organization (WTO), especially after China's
            recent WTO accession. Auffret concludes that implementation
            of trade reform will be a testing ground to reveal the
            extent of Vietnam's commitment to a market-oriented economy.
Do capital flows respond to risk and return
This paper explores empirically the role
            of risk and return in the observed evolution of net foreign
            asset positions of industrial and developing economies. The
            paper adopts a dynamic approach in which investors'
            portfolios adjust gradually to their long-run equilibrium,
            defined by a standard Tobin-Markowitz framework. The
            parameters characterizing the long-run equilibrium are
            estimated using data on foreign assets and liabilities of a
            large number of industrial and developing countries spanning
            the period from 1965 to 1997. The paper employs a dynamic
            panel estimation procedure allowing for unrestricted
            short-run heterogeneity across countries, using the pooled
            mean group estimator recently developed by Pesaran, Shin,
            and Smith (1999). The empirical results lend considerable
            support to the model when applied to countries with low
            capital controls and/or high and upper-middle income. The
            results for countries with either high capital controls or
            low per capita income are less supportive of the stock
            equilibrium model for net foreign asset positions.
International migration,
            remittances, and the brain drain ; a study of 24 labor
            exporting countries
While the level of international
            migration and remittances continues to grow, data on
            international migration remains unreliable. At the
            international level, there is no consistent set of
            statistics on the number or skill characteristics of
            international migrants. At the national level, most
            labor-exporting countries do not collect data on their
            migrants. Adams tries to overcome these problems by
            constructing a new data set of 24 large, labor-exporting
            countries and using estimates of migration and educational
            attainment based on United States and OECD records. He uses
            these new data to address the key policy question: How
            pervasive is the brain drain from labor-exporting countries?
            Three basic findings emerge: With respect to legal
            migration, international migration involves the movement of
            the educated. The vast majority of migrants to both the
            United States and the OECD have a secondary (high school)
            education or higher. While migrants are well-educated,
            international migration does not tend to take a very high
            proportion of the best educated. For 22 of the 33 countries
            in which educational attainment data can be estimated, less
            than 10 percent of the best educated (tertiary-educated)
            population of labor-exporting countries has migrated. For a
            handful of labor-exporting countries, international
            migration does cause brain drain. For example, for the five
            Latin American countries (Dominican Republic, El Salvador,
            Guatemala, Jamaica and Mexico) located closest to the United
            States, migration takes a large share of the best educated.
            This finding suggests that more work needs to be done on the
            relationship between brain drain, geographical proximity to
            labor-receiving countries, and the size of the (educated)
            population of labor-exporting countries.
The anatomy of a multiple crisis :
            why was Argentina special and what can we learn from it
The Argentine crisis has been variously
            blamed on fiscal imbalances, real overvaluation, and
            self-fulfilling investor pessimism triggering a capital flow
            reversal. The authors provide an encompassing assessment of
            the role of these and other ingredients in the recent
            macroeconomic collapse. They show that in the final years of
            convertibility, Argentina was not hit harder than other
            emerging markets in Latin America and elsewhere by global
            terms-of-trade and financial disturbances. So the crisis
            reflects primarily the high vulnerability to disturbances
            built into Argentina's policy framework. Three key
            sources of vulnerability are examined: the hard peg adopted
            against optimal currency area considerations in a context of
            wage and price inflexibility; the fragile fiscal position
            resulting from an expansionary stance in the boom; and the
            pervasive mismatches in the portfolios of banks'
            borrowers. While there were important vulnerabilities in
            each of these areas, neither of them was higher than those
            affecting other countries in the region, and thus there is
            not one obvious suspect. But the three reinforced each other
            in such a perverse way that taken jointly they led to a much
            larger vulnerability to adverse external shocks than in any
            other country in the region. Underlying these
            vulnerabilities was a deep structural problem of the
            Argentine economy that led to harsh policy dilemmas before
            and after the crisis erupted. On the one hand, the Argentine
            trade structure made a peg to the dollar highly inconvenient
            from the point of view of the real economy. On the other
            hand, the strong preference of Argentinians for the dollar
            as a store of value-after the hyperinflation and
            confiscation experiences of the 1980s-had led to a highly
            dollarized economy in which a hard peg or even full
            dollarization seemed reasonable alternatives from a
            financial point of view.
Gender, generations, and nonfarm participation
The authors present an empirical
            analysis of intergenerational links in nonfarm participation
            with a focus on gender effects. Using survey data from
            Nepal, the evidence shows that the mother exerts a strong
            influence on a daughter's employment choice. Having a
            mother in a nonfarm sector raises a daughter's
            probability of nonfarm participation by 200 percent. The
            effects are truly dramatic for skilled nonfarm jobs. Having
            a mother in a skilled job raises a daughter's
            probability by 1,200 percent. Having a father in a nonfarm
            sector, on the other hand, does not have any significant
            effect on a son's probability of nonfarm participation
            when the endogeneity of education and assets is corrected
            for by the two-stage conditional maximum likelihood
            approach. But a moderate positive intergenerational
            correlation between fathers and sons exists for skilled jobs.
Stabilization and association
            process in the Banlkans : integration options and their assessment
The stabilization and association
            process launched by the European Union in the aftermath of
            the Kosovo war in 1999 has created a new policy environment
            for five South East European countries (SEE-5). In exchange
            for EU assistance, the prospect of EU accession, and the
            continuation of preferential access to EU markets, SEE-5
            governments have to upgrade their institutions and
            governance by European standards and engage in mutual
            regional cooperation, including stability pact
            member-countries. The authors examine the benefits to SEE-5
            of trade liberalization along two dimensions and suggest
            conditions under which these could be maximized. They argue
            that the process of regional trade liberalization should be
            extended to multilateral liberalization, aligning SEE-5
            most-favored-nation (MFN) applied tariffs on industrial
            products with EU MFN tariffs, and that priority be given to
            structural reforms and regional cooperation aimed at trade
            facilitation. As inter-industry trade rather than
            intra-industry trade dominates intra-SEE-5 trade, the
            potential for expansion in intra-SEE-5 trade is limited at
            least within the confines of the existing production
            structures and transportation infrastructure. Therefore
            SEE-5 free trade agreements are unlikely to contribute to
            economic growth without concurrent efforts to improve
            infrastructure, trade facilitation, business, and investment
            climate, as well as to increase competition from MFN imports
            to external preferential suppliers through multilateral liberalization.
Contracting models of the Phillips
            curve - empirical estimates for Middle-income countries
This paper provides empirical estimates
            of contracting models of the Phillips curve for four
            middle-income developing economies-Chile, the Republic of
            Korea, the Philippines, and Turkey. Following an analytical
            review, models with both one lead and one lag, and two lags
            and three leads, are then estimated using Generalized Method
            of Moments (GMM) techniques. The results indicate that for
            both Chile and Turkey past and future inflation are of about
            the same magnitude in affecting current inflation. In Korea
            past inflation has a larger impact on inflation, whereas in
            the Philippines it is future inflation that plays a larger
            role. Homogeneity restrictions are satisfied for Korea and
            Turkey, but not for Chile and the Philippines.
The long-run economic costs of AIDS
            : theory and an application to South Africa
Most existing estimates of the
            macroeconomic costs of AIDS, as measured by the reduction in
            the growth rate of gross domestic product, are modest. For
            Africa-the continent where the epidemic has hit the
            hardest-they range between 0.3 and 1.5 percent annually. The
            reason is that these estimates are based on an underlying
            assumption that the main effect of increased mortality is to
            relieve pressure on existing land and physical capital so
            that output per head is little affected. The authors argue
            that this emphasis is misplaced and that, with a more
            plausible view of how the economy functions over the long
            run, the economic costs of AIDS are almost certain to be
            much higher. Not only does AIDS destroy existing human
            capital, but by killing mostly young adults, it also weakens
            the mechanism through which knowledge and abilities are
            transmitted from one generation to the next. The children of
            AIDS victims will be left without one or both parents to
            love, raise, and educate them. The model yields the
            following results. In the absence of AIDS, the
            counterfactual benchmark, there is modest growth, with
            universal and complete education attained within three
            generations. But if nothing is done to combat the epidemic,
            a complete economic collapse will occur within three
            generations. With optimal spending on combating the disease,
            and if there is pooling, growth is maintained, albeit at a
            somewhat slower rate than in the benchmark case in the
            absence of AIDS. If pooling breaks down and is replaced by
            nuclear families, growth will be slower still. Indeed, if
            school attendance subsidies are not possible, growth will be
            distinctly sluggish. In all three cases, the additional
            fiscal burden of intervention will be large, which
            reinforces the gravity of the findings.