rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
The Role of Technical Assistance in
            Expanding Access to Finance
This paper links the literatures on
            technical assistance and access to finance by examining a
            Mexican program that provided capacity-building grants to
            nonbank financial institutions (NBFIs) serving micro, small,
            and medium enterprises (MSMEs). Using ten years of data from
            81 credit unions and a staggered difference-in-differences
            approach, the analysis shows that the program improved
            NBFIs&#x2019; efficiency, enabling them to obtain more
            funding from private sources and leading to a 79 percent
            increase in lending. The findings suggest that technical
            assistance initiatives can strengthen NBFIs&#x2019;
            ability to expand credit access for underserved MSMEs.
The evidence is in : how should
            youth employment programs in low-income countries be designed
Youth in many low-income countries are
            entering the labor force in unprecedented numbers, yet many
            struggle to secure rewarding livelihoods. This paper
            outlines the economic development challenges that constrain
            youth's transition into employment, and it parses the
            evidence on which programs and policies appear to speed that
            transition. It concludes that it may be time for a
            fundamental reassessment of approaches for addressing youth
            employment and the youth transition in low-income countries.
            Employment opportunities in low-income countries reflect the
            pace of economic and structural transformation. In designing
            strategies, policies, and programs to meet the
            entry-into-employment challenge for youth, the starting
            point is to diagnose the economy and current/future
            employment opportunities. Combined with the analysis of
            youth employment problems from a structural transformation
            perspective, evidence from rigorous evaluations of youth
            employment interventions provides new insight into which
            kinds of interventions are more likely to help youth succeed
            in certain contexts. The evidence reviewed here casts
            serious doubt on the efficacy and value of training
            interventions to help youth enter formal wage employment.
            The case is stronger for interventions that speed the
            transition to self-employment in farming or non-farm
            household enterprises. Support for development of
            transferable character skills and social integration among
            youth through positive youth development programs should be
            tested further for employment and earnings impacts, perhaps
            along with cash transfers to youth or access to finance. In
            reviewing the evidence on the cost-effectiveness and
            sustainability of youth employment impacts, the paper also
            notes the need for better measures of displacement and
            general equilibrium effects.
The ecological impact of
            transportation infrastructure
There is a long-standing debate over
            whether new roads unavoidably lead to environmental damage,
            especially forest loss, but causal identification has been
            elusive. Using multiple causal identification strategies,
            this paper studies the construction of new rural roads to
            over 100,000 villages and the upgrading of 10,000 kilometers
            of national highways in India. The new rural roads had
            precise zero effects on local deforestation. In contrast,
            the highway upgrades caused substantial forest loss, which
            appears to be driven by increased timber demand along the
            transportation corridors. In terms of forests, last mile
            connectivity had a negligible environmental cost, while
            expansion of major corridors had important environmental impacts.
Taking stock of wholesale power
            markets in developing countries : a literature review
Although many developing countries have
            yet to meet the considerable prerequisites for establishing
            wholesale power markets, a significant minority of larger
            middle-income countries have introduced diverse markets in
            the past 25 years. Cost-based pools proved particularly
            popular in Latin America and look to be a more
            straightforward starting point than the bid-based pools
            adopted in some other jurisdictions. Successful design of
            power markets involves paying careful attention to four
            guiding principles. First, trading arrangements must ensure
            efficient and reliable operation of the market, efficiently
            employing available resources not only to balance aggregate
            supply and demand, but also to allow congestion management
            and supply ancillary services. Second, market design should
            ensure strong participation of the demand side of the
            market, by allowing large customers to participate directly
            in the market, and medium ones to see spot market prices
            through time-of-use tariffs. Third, open access to the power
            grid should be guaranteed through industry restructuring,
            removal of barriers to entry of different players, and
            establishment of a neutral system operator. Fourth, a
            workable framework for supply adequacy is required to ensure
            capacity meets demand without imposing supply constraints.
            This may entail complementing efficient energy price signals
            with other mechanisms (such as auctions and capacity
            obligations) to provide adequate incentives for investment
            in new generation capacity. Experience demonstrates that the
            early stages of establishing power markets can be
            challenging and necessitate the creation of regulatory
            mechanisms for market monitoring that can identify and
            address emerging design flaws, particularly for abuses of
            market power. Countries not yet ready to introduce wholesale
            power markets may still benefit from several emerging
            regional power markets. Looking ahead, the design of power
            markets is becoming increasingly complex due to the
            challenges posed by disruptive technologies such as variable
            renewable energy, large-scale storage, and increasingly
            sophisticated demand-side participation.
Decentralized delivery of financial
            education : evidence from a country-wide field experiment
Can financial education delivery be
            successfully decentralized? This paper studies a large-scale
            field experiment with 200 Savings and Credit Cooperative
            Associations (SACCOs) in Rwanda, and tests competing models
            of local financial education delivery. One-third of SACCOs,
            randomly selected, were invited to a comprehensive
            training-of-trainers (TOT) workshop and stipulated to send
            the SACCO manager, a loan officer, and a board member to be
            trained. Another one-third were invited to the same
            workshop, but allowed free selection of trainers. The latter
            resulted in significantly more community members and fewer
            loan officers being trained as trainers. Within a year,
            these trainers successfully disseminated content to 68,000
            households, with higher session attendance in the autonomous
            selection group. Analysis from follow-up surveys finds stark
            differences in behavior change: recipients in the autonomous
            selection group show significant improvements in financial
            attitudes, rules of thumb, and planning, as well as
            budgeting and savings behaviors. In contrast, recipients in
            the fixed selection group show no significant improvements
            on any of the outcome measures. These results underscore the
            importance of community-led delivery of financial education programs.
Not(ch) your average tax system :
            corporate taxation under weak enforcement
How should developing countries tax
            corporate income? This paper studies this question in Costa
            Rica, where firms face discontinuously higher average tax
            rates on profits when their revenue marginally increases.
            The paper combines a discontinuity and a bunching design to
            estimate the profit elasticity and separate it into revenue
            and cost elasticities. Faced with higher tax rates, firms
            slightly reduce revenue but considerably increase costs,
            generating a large elasticity of profits. In this context,
            the revenue maximizing rate for profit taxation is below 25
            percent and broadening the tax base while lowering the rate
            can increase revenue for these firms by 80 percent.
Characterizing business cycles in
            small economies
This paper aims to document a set of
            stylized facts characterizing business cycle dynamics in
            smaller economies. The paper uses a large sample of
            countries spanning 1960-2014 to show that country size is a
            significant factor affecting countries' volatility,
            comovement with gross domestic product and real interest
            rate, and persistence. Specifically, analysis finds that
            smaller countries (i) tend to have more volatile gross
            domestic product; (ii) have more volatile, less procyclical,
            and less persistent investment; (iii) exhibit more volatile
            trade balance and current account, have more procyclical
            exports, and thus less countercyclical trade balance; (iv)
            have more volatile government consumption and more
            procyclical public revenues and fiscal balance; and (v)
            possess more procyclical inflation. The effects of country
            size remain robust even after we control for the level of
            economic and institutional development, the presence of
            fiscal rule(s) and fixed exchange rates, and the commodity
            exporting status.
Cooperation creates special moral obligations
A large-scale economic experiment,
            conducted on a representative sample of the US population,
            shows that cooperation creates special moral obligations.
            Participants in the experiment, acting as impartial
            spectators, transferred significantly more money to an
            unlucky worker when two individuals had cooperated than when
            they had worked independently. The authors further show that
            the effect of cooperation is strongly associated with
            political affiliation, with Democrats attaching
            significantly more importance to cooperation as a source of
            moral obligation than Republicans. The findings shed light
            on the foundations of redistributive preferences and may
            contribute to explain the often observed asymmetry in moral
            concern for different groups of individuals, both nationally
            and internationally.
Trade in developing East Asia : how
            it has changed and why it matters
East Asia, for long the epitome of
            successful engagement in trade, faces serious challenges:
            technological change that may threaten the very model of
            labor intensive industrialization and a backlash against
            globalization that may reduce access to important markets. A
            detailed analysis of the evolution of East Asia's trade
            and trade policy in goods and services leads to the
            conclusion that how East Asia copes with these global
            challenges will depend on how it addresses three more
            proximate national and regional challenges. The first is the
            emergence of one East Asian country, China, as a global
            trade giant—accounting for nearly one-seventh of global
            exports and one-tenth of global imports -- which is
            fundamentally altering the trading patterns and
            opportunities of its neighbors. The second is the asymmetric
            implementation of national reform -- remarkable openness to
            goods trade and investment coexists with relative
            restrictiveness of services policies -- which is affecting
            the evolution of comparative advantage and productivity in
            each country. The third is the divergence between the
            relatively shallow and fragmented agreements that regulate
            the region’s trade and investment and the growing importance
            of regional and global value chains as crucial drivers of
            productivity growth.
Playing to strength : growth
            strategy for small agrarian economies in Africa
With urban industrialization on the
            scale achieved by East Asian economies looking increasingly
            less plausible, small economies in Africa need an
            alternative strategic approach to long-term growth. The
            purpose of this paper is to identify a growth strategy with
            the greatest potential for small, landlocked economies in
            East Africa. The paper uses Malawi, Rwanda, and Uganda as
            case studies to explore the potential for growth in
            agriculture, manufacturing, and tourism in these countries.
            The paper marshals extensive reasoning that while the
            manufacturing sector and exports of light labor or resource
            intensive manufactures could contribute a fraction of
            aggregate growth, it is agriculture, agribusiness, and
            services that will contribute the lion’s share because of an
            unprecedented convergence of technologies. Industrialized
            agriculture and agri-business could enable these countries
            to sustain rapid growth even in the face of climate change.
            Malawi, Rwanda, and Uganda, with some trying, can accelerate
            their convergence to the technological frontier to take full
            advantage of this promise. Undoubtedly, there are obstacles
            to transferring the advanced technologies wholesale to East
            Africa, but their eventual assimilation is a must and the
            removal of hurdles needs to be addressed. Extracting the
            maximum growth mileage will require policy action on
            multiple fronts.
Infrastructure, value chains, and
            economic upgrades
Infrastructure development is critical
            to delivering growth, reducing poverty, and addressing
            broader development goals. This paper surveys the literature
            on the linkages between infrastructure investment and
            economic growth, discusses the role of infrastructure in
            participation in global value chains and supporting economic
            upgrades, highlights the challenges that the least developed
            countries face, and provides policy recommendations. It
            suggests that addressing the bottlenecks in infrastructure
            is a necessary condition to provide a window of opportunity
            for an economy to develop following its comparative
            advantage. With the right conditions, good infrastructure
            can support an economy, particularly a less developed
            economy, to reap the benefits of participation in global
            value chains to upgrade the economic structure.
Competing priorities : women's
            microenterprises and household relationships
Recent studies have suggested that
            women's business decisions are influenced by members of
            their household, especially their spouse, and that these
            intrahousehold dynamics contribute to gender gaps in
            entrepreneurship outcomes. This in-depth qualitative study
            among microentrepreneurs in urban Ghana sought to understand
            the connections between women's businesses and their
            households' management of economic resources. The
            findings show that women’s business decisions are influenced
            by: (1) a desire to reinforce their partner's
            responsibilities as a primary provider, (2) attempts to
            fulfill normative expectations regarding daily provision of
            needs for the family, and (3) a need to prepare for
            long-term security. To reinforce their husband's
            responsibilities as a provider, women hid income and
            savings, and sometimes explicitly limited business growth.
            To ensure their ability to smooth household consumption and
            respond to emergencies, women prioritized savings over
            investment. And, to plan for their long-term security, women
            opted for cautious business investment, maintaining pressure
            on their partner to meet current needs and investing in
            children and property for the future. More broadly, the
            findings illustrate that interpersonal interactions
            concerning the management of economic resources are an
            integral part of how household members negotiate their
            rights and responsibilities in relation to each other.
Pathways to formalization : going
            beyond the formality dichotomy -- the case of Peru
Too often, academics and policy makers
            interpret formality as a binary choice and formalization as
            an irreversible process. Yet, formalization has many facets
            and shades on the business and labor fronts, and firms may
            not be able or willing to formalize all at once. This paper
            explores the joint process of business and labor
            formalization, using a unique panel data set of Peruvian
            micro enterprises. The paper finds that business formality
            does not imply labor formality, and vice versa. Further,
            there is significant churning in and out of different
            dimensions of formality within a relatively short period.
            Using an instrumental variable approach, the paper infers
            that business formalization affects labor formalization but
            not the other way around, and that enforcement is a key
            driver of formalization. Overall, the analysis shows that
            formalization is a gradual and reversible process, with
            small entrepreneurs weighing their possibilities in each
            pathway to business (often) or labor (less often)
            formalization, but rarely both at the same time.
Mapping the landscape of
            transactions : the governance of business relations in Latin America
To what extent do firms use trust, law,
            and third-parties to ensure fulfillment of agreements to
            transact? How do they combine these mechanisms to form
            transactional governance structures? How do answers to these
            questions vary across countries? Generating the relevant
            data requires constructing a survey question answerable by
            any firm, anywhere. The question is administered in six
            South American countries. Applied to the resultant data,
            latent class analysis (LCA) estimates classes that
            correspond to the transactional governance structures that
            firms employ to support implementation of agreements.
            Without imposing an a priori model, LCA discovers meaningful
            governance structures. Bilateralism appears in all
            governance structures. Law is never used alone. Bilateralism
            and formal institutions are sometimes complements, never
            substitutes. Within-country regional variation in the use of
            bilateralism and law exceeds cross-country variation. LCA
            provides the posterior probabilities that each firm uses
            each governance structure, facilitating testing hypotheses
            consequent on Williamson's discriminating-alignment agenda.
The distributional impact of taxes
            and social spending in Romania
The combined effect of taxes and social
            spending in Romania helps to reduce inequality, although
            less so than in other European Union countries. However, the
            combination of direct and indirect taxes and transfers leads
            to an increase in poverty, as direct cash transfers to poor
            households are not large enough to compensate them for the
            burden of indirect taxes. This is especially important for
            rural households and families with children. Moreover,
            recent reductions in the rates for personal income and
            value-added taxes are expected to have led to an increase in
            inequality, as most of the tax relief accrued to the top of
            the income distribution. Although these changes likely
            helped to reduce poverty, they were an expensive way to
            achieve a small decline in the poverty rate. Higher and
            better targeted social assistance spending could have
            achieved better distributional results at a much lower
            fiscal cost. These results call for greater use of
            simulation tools that could inform policy makers and the
            public of the fiscal costs and redistributive impacts of
            proposed reforms.
Can a small social pension promote
            labor force participation evidence from the Colombia Mayor program
One of the primary motivations behind
            the establishment of noncontributory pension programs is to
            allow beneficiaries to retire from the labor force. Yet, as
            with other unconditional cash transfer schemes, their
            aggregate effects may be more complex. Using panel data and
            instrumental variable techniques, this paper shows that the
            effect of one such program, Colombia Mayor, has been to
            raise the labor force participation of relatively younger
            male beneficiaries. This increase occurred precisely in the
            occupations with characteristics that are likely to require
            some up-front investment. The paper concludes that the
            transfer effectively loosened the liquidity constraints to
            remaining in these occupations. However, no such effect is
            found among women or older beneficiaries.