rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Political economy of public policies
            : insights from distortions to agricultural and food markets
The agricultural and food sector is an
            ideal case for investigating the political economy of public
            policies. Many of the policy developments in this sector
            since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational, while
            others have been gradual but persistent. This paper reviews
            and synthesizes the literature on trends and fluctuations in
            market distortions and the political-economy explanations
            that have been advanced. Based on a rich global data set
            covering a half-century of evidence on commodities,
            countries, and policy instruments, the paper identifies
            hypotheses that have been explored in the literature on the
            extent of market distortions and the conditions under which
            reform may be feasible.
What explains aid project success in
            post-conflict situations
This paper investigates the
            effectiveness of post-conflict aid at the project level and
            aims to identify post-conflict situations as a window of
            opportunity for project success. The Independent Evaluation
            Group dataset provides extensive information on the
            characteristics of World Bank projects including an
            independent rating of their success, supervision and
            evaluation quality. The paper estimates the probability of
            success of aid projects depending on the characteristics of
            the intervention and looks for possible special patterns in
            post civil war situations. The results suggest that the
            probability of success of World Bank projects increases as
            peace lasts. Supervision appears to be a crucial determinant
            of the success of projects, especially during the first
            years of peace. Although the results of the sector-level
            analysis need to be taken with caution, the authors find
            that projects in the transport sector and in the urban
            development sector appear more successful in post-conflict
            environments. On the contrary, education projects seem less
            successful and therefore need to be highly supervised.
            Projects in the private sector should wait as they face a
            higher probability of failure in the first years of peace.
Egypt beyond the crisis :
            medium-term challenges for sustained growth
The paper analyzes the impact of the
            recent global crisis in the context of the previous two
            decades' growth and capital flows. Growth decomposition
            exercises show that Egyptian growth is driven mostly by
            capital accumulation. To estimate the share of labor in
            national income, the analysis adjusts the national accounts
            statistics to include the compensation of self-employed and
            non-paid family workers. Still, the share of labor, about 30
            percent, is significantly lower than previously estimated.
            The authors estimate the output costs of the current crisis
            by comparing the output trajectory that would have prevailed
            without the crisis with the observed and revised gross
            domestic product projections for the medium term. The fall
            in private investment was the main driver of the output
            cost. Even if private investment recovers its pre-crisis
            levels, there is a permanent loss in gross domestic product
            per capita of about 2 percent with respect to the scenario
            without the crisis. The paper shows how the shock to
            investment is magnified due to the capital-intensive nature
            of the Egyptian economy: if the economy had the
            traditionally-used share of labor in income (40 percent),
            the output loss would have been reduced by half.
The co-movement of asset returns and
            the micro-macro focus of prudential oversight
The integration of micro-prudential
            oversight with the macro-approach to financial stability --
            long in the making -- raises several issues of coordination
            of regulatory responsibilities. This paper argues that a
            decomposition of the covariance of asset returns into an
            endogenous volatility component -- which can be reduced --
            and an exogenous volatility component -- which we have to
            live with -- helps address these coordination issues and
            provides the basis for financial health diagnostics and
            supervisory responses to observed symptoms of financial
            instability. By linking risk origination and risk control,
            the paper may also contribute to the search for an
            operational definition of the term "macro-prudential."
The Chrysler effect : the impact of
            the Chrysler bailout on borrowing costs
Did the U.S. government's
            intervention in the Chrysler reorganization overturn
            bankruptcy law? Critics argue that the government-sponsored
            reorganization impermissibly elevated claims of the auto
            union over those of Chrysler's other creditors. If the
            critics are correct, businesses might suffer an increase in
            their cost of debt because creditors will perceive a new
            risk, that organized labor might leap-frog them in
            bankruptcy. This paper examines the financial market where
            this effect would be most detectible, the market for bonds
            of highly unionized companies. The authors find no evidence
            of a negative reaction to the Chrysler bailout by
            bondholders of unionized firms. They thus reject the notion
            that investors perceived a distortion of bankruptcy
            priorities. To the contrary, bondholders of unionized firms
            reacted positively to the Chrysler bailout. This evidence
            suggests that bondholders interpreted the Chrysler bailout
            as a signal that the government will stand behind unionized
            firms. The results are consistent with the notion that
            too-big-to-fail government policies generate moral hazard in
            the credit markets.
Climate proofing infrastructure in
            Bangladesh : the incremental cost of limiting future inland
            monsoon flood damage
Two-thirds of Bangladesh is less than 5
            meters above sea level, making it one of the most flood
            prone countries in the world. Severe flooding during a
            monsoon causes significant damage to crops and property,
            with severe adverse impacts on rural livelihoods. Future
            climate change seems likely to increase the destructive
            power of monsoon floods. This paper examines the potential
            cost of offsetting increased flooding risk from climate
            change, based on simulations from a climate model of extreme
            floods out to 2050. Using the 1998 flood as a benchmark for
            evaluating additional protection measures, the authors
            calculate conservatively that necessary capital investments
            out to 2050 would total US$2,671 million (at 2009 prices) to
            protect roads and railways, river embankments surrounding
            agricultural lands, and drainage systems and erosion control
            measures for major towns. With gradual climate change,
            however, required investments would be phased. Beyond these
            capital-intensive investments, improved policies, planning
            and institutions are essential to ensure that such
            investments are used correctly and yield the expected
            benefits. Particular attention is needed to the robustness
            of benefits from large-scale fixed capital investments.
            Investments in increased understanding of risk-mitigation
            options and in economic mobility will have especially high returns.
Did higher inequality impede growth
            in rural China
This paper estimates the relationship
            between initial village inequality and subsequent household
            income growth for a large sample of households in rural
            China. Using a rich longitudinal survey spanning the years
            1987-2002, and controlling for an array of household and
            village characteristics, the paper finds that households
            located in higher inequality villages experienced
            significantly lower income growth through the 1990s.
            However, local inequalitys predictive power and effects are
            significantly diminished by the end of the sample. The paper
            exploits several advantages of the household-level data to
            explore hypotheses that shed light on the channels by which
            inequality affects growth. Biases due to aggregation and
            heterogeneity of returns to own-resources, previously
            suggested as candidate explanations for the relationship,
            are both ruled out. Instead, the evidence points to
            unobserved village institutions at the time of economic
            reforms that were associated with household access to higher
            income activities as the source of the link between
            inequality and growth. The empirical analysis addresses a
            number of pertinent econometric issues including measurement
            error and attrition, but underscores others that are likely
            to be intractable for all investigations of the
            inequality-growth relationship.
Corporate vulnerability and bank
            stability : evidence from Jordan
This paper uses data on publicly listed
            companies in Jordan to evaluate corporate vulnerability and
            perform corporate stress testing. The exercise finds that
            both earnings and interest rate shocks have significant
            impact on corporate vulnerability. Because different banks
            have different sector exposures, and different sectors
            exhibit different vulnerability at different times, the
            stress tests that include corporate exposure will provide a
            more precise evaluation of bank soundness.
Students and the market for schools
            in Haiti
Uniquely among Latin American and
            Caribbean countries, Haiti has a largely non-public
            education system. Prior to the earthquake of January 2010,
            just 19 percent of primary school students were enrolled in
            public schools, with the remainder enrolled in a mix of
            religious, for-profit, and non-governmental
            organization-funded schools. This paper examines changes in
            Haitian schooling patterns in the last century and shows the
            country experienced tremendous growth in school attainment,
            driven almost entirely by growth in the private sector.
            Additionally, it provides evidence that the private market
            "works" to the extent that primary school fees are
            higher for schools with characteristics associated with
            education quality. The paper also analyzes the demand and
            supply determinants of school attendance and finds that
            household wealth is a major determinant of attendance. Given
            these findings, the authors conclude that in the near-term
            paying school fees for poor students may be an effective
            approach to expanding schooling access in Haiti.
Methods of household consumption
            measurement through surveys : experimental results from Tanzania
Consumption expenditure has long been
            the preferred measure of household living standards.
            However, accurate measurement is a challenge and household
            expenditure surveys vary widely across many dimensions,
            including the level of reporting, the length of the
            reference period, and the degree of commodity detail. These
            variations occur both across countries and also over time
            within countries. There is little current understanding of
            the implications of such changes for spatially and
            temporally consistent measurement of household consumption
            and poverty. A field experiment in Tanzania tests eight
            alternative methods to measure household consumption on a
            sample of 4,000 households. There are significant
            differences between consumption reported by the benchmark
            personal diary and other diary and recall formats.
            Under-reporting is particularly relevant in illiterate
            households and for urban respondents completing household
            diaries; recall modules measure lower consumption than a
            personal diary, with larger gaps among poorer households and
            households with more adult members. Variations in reporting
            accuracy by household characteristics are also discussed and
            differences in measured poverty as a result of survey design
            are explored. The study concludes with recommendations for
            methods of survey based consumption measurement in
            low-income countries.
The impacts of biofuel targets on
            land-use change and food supply : a global CGE assessment
This study analyzes the long-term
            impacts of large-scale expansion of biofuels on land-use
            change, food supply and prices, and the overall economy in
            various countries or regions using a global computable
            general equilibrium model, augmented by a land-use module
            and detailed representation of biofuel sectors. The study
            finds that an expansion of global biofuel production to meet
            currently articulated or even higher national targets in
            various countries for biofuel use would reduce gross
            domestic product at the global level; however, the gross
            domestic product impacts are mixed across countries or
            regions. The expansion of biofuels would cause significant
            land re-allocation with notable decreases in forest and
            pasture lands in a few countries. The results also suggest
            that the expansion of biofuels would cause a reduction in
            food supply. Although the magnitude of the impact on food
            supply at the global level is not as large as perceived
            earlier, it would be significant in developing countries
            like India and those in Sub-Saharan Africa. Agricultural
            commodities such as sugar, corn, and oil seeds, which serve
            as the main biofuel feedstocks, would experience significant
            increases in their prices in 2020 compared with the prices
            at baseline due to the expansion of biofuels to meet the
            existing targets.
The impacts of biofuel targets on
            land-use change and food supply : a global CGE assessment
WPS5513 Policy Research Working Paper 5513 The Impacts of Biofuel Targets on Land-Use Change and Food Supply A Global CGE Assessment _Govinda R. Timilsina John C. Beghin Dominique van der Mensbrugghe Simon Mevel_ The World Bank Development Research Group Environment and Energy Team December 2010
Analyzing community responses to HIV
            and AIDS : operational framework and typology
This paper presents a framework for
            analyzing the community response to HIV and AIDS. On the
            basis of a review of the literature, six criteria are
            proposed for characterizing such community responses: (1)
            the types of organizations and structures implementing the
            response, (2) the types of activities or services
            implemented and the beneficiaries of these, (3) the actors
            involved in and driving community responses, (4) the
            contextual factors that influence community responses, (5)
            the extent of community involvement in the response, and (6)
            the extent to which community responses involve wider
            partnerships and collaboration.
Consumer protection laws and
            regulations in deposit and loan services : a cross-country
            analysis with a new data set
Consumer protection and financial
            literacy can contribute to improved efficiency,
            transparency, competition, and access in retail financial
            markets by reducing information asymmetries and power
            imbalances between providers and users of financial
            services. Financial consumer protection has gained
            significance in policy debates, especially since the onset
            of the financial crisis in 2008. This paper presents the
            results of a survey on consumer protection regulations in
            142 countries. The findings indicate that although consumer
            protection legislation is in place in the majority of
            countries, these do not necessarily address the issues
            specific to financial services. There is some evidence that
            enforcement powers and monitoring capacity are limited in
            many countries, obstructing the effective implementation of
            the existing regulations. Furthermore, independent third
            party dispute resolution mechanisms are not widespread. The
            paper also compiles comprehensive information on laws and
            regulations relevant for consumer protection and discusses a
            number of challenges related to empirical analyses of
            financial consumer protection to enable cross-country comparison.
Services liberalization in
            preferential trade arrangements : the case of Kenya
Given the growing importance of
            commitments to foreign investors in services in regional
            trade agreements, it is important to develop applied general
            equilibrium models to assess the impacts of liberalization
            of barriers to multinational service providers. This paper
            develops a 55 sector applied general equilibrium model of
            Kenya with foreign direct investment and Dixit-Stiglitz
            productivity effects from additional varieties of
            imperfectly competitive goods or services, and uses the
            model to assess its regional and multilateral trade options,
            focusing on commitments to foreign investors in services. To
            assess the sensitivity of the results to parameter values,
            the model is executed 30,000 times, and results are reported
            as confidence intervals of the sample distributions. The
            analysis reveals that a 50 percent preferential reduction in
            the ad valorem equivalents of barriers in all business
            services by Kenya with its African partners would be
            somewhat beneficial for Kenya. If a preferential agreement
            with African partners is combined with an agreement with the
            European Union, the gains would more than triple the gains
            of an Africa only agreement. Multilateral reduction of
            services barriers, however, would yield gains about 12 times
            the gains of an agreement with the Africa region alone.
            These results suggest that preferential liberalization in
            the region is a valuable first step, but wider
            liberalization, with larger partners and liberal rules of
            origin or multilaterally, will yield much larger gains due
            to providing access to a much wider set of services
            providers. The largest gains would come from domestic
            regulatory reform in services, as this would almost triple
            the gains of multilateral liberalization.
The wage effects of immigration and emigration
Immigrants in Rome or Paris are more
            visible to the public eye than the Italian or French
            engineers in Silicon Valley, especially when it comes to the
            debate on the effects of immigration on the employment and
            wages of natives in high-income countries. This paper argues
            that such public fears, especially in European countries are
            misplaced; instead, more concern should be directed towards
            emigration. Using a new dataset on migration flows by
            education levels for the period 1990-2000, the results show
            the following: First, immigration had zero to small positive
            long-run effect on the average wages of natives, ranging
            from zero in Italy to +1.7 percent in Australia. Second,
            emigration had a mild to significant negative long-run
            effect ranging from zero for the US to -0.8 percent in the
            UK. Third, over the period 1990-2000, immigration generally
            improved the income distribution of European countries while
            emigration worsened it by increasing the wage gap between
            the high and low skilled natives. These patterns hold true
            using a range of parameters for the simulations, accounting
            for the estimates of undocumented immigrants, and correcting
            for the quality of schooling and/or labor-market downgrading
            of skills. All results go counter to the popular beliefs
            about migration, but they are due to the higher skill
            intensity of both emigration and immigration relative to non-migrants.
Emigration and democracy
Migration is an important yet neglected
            determinant of institutions. This paper documents the
            channels through which emigration affects home country
            institutions and considers dynamic-panel regressions for a
            large sample of developing countries. The authors find that
            emigration and human capital both increase democracy and
            economic freedom. This implies that unskilled (skilled)
            emigration has a positive (ambiguous) impact on
            institutional quality. Simulations show an impact of skilled
            emigration that is generally positive, significant for a few
            countries and for many countries once incentive effects of
            emigration on human capital formation are accounted for.
Related lending and banking development
Does related lending have positive or
            negative effects on the development of banking systems? This
            paper analyzes a unique cross-country data set covering 74
            countries from 1990 to 2007, and finds that related lending,
            on average, does not have any effect on the growth of
            credit. The authors do find, however, that there are
            conditional relationships: related lending tends to retard
            the growth of banking systems when rule of law is weak,
            while it tends to promote the growth of banking systems when
            rule of law is strong. They also find that related lending
            appears to be associated with looting when banks are owned
            by non-financial firms, but that it does not when
            non-financial firms are owned by banks. The results indicate
            that whether related lending is positive or pernicious
            depends critically on the institutional context in which it
            takes place; there is no single "best policy"
            regarding related lending. These findings are robust to
            alternative specifications, including instrumental variable regressions.