rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Africa's macroeconomic story
Much of Sub-Saharan Africa's
            post-independence macroeconomic history has been
            characterized by boom-bust cycles. Growth accelerations have
            been common, but short lived. Weak policy formulation and
            implementation led to large external and fiscal imbalances,
            excessive debt accumulation, volatile inflation, and sharp
            exchange rate fluctuations. This characterization changed,
            however, in the mid-1990s, when debt relief and better
            macroeconomic policy began to provide a source of stability
            that has helped sustain robust growth throughout much of the
            region. In resource rich countries, the process was
            supported over the past few years by a dramatic increase in
            commodity prices. But resources are only one part of the
            story. Growth has exhibited impressive resilience even in
            the face of negative external shocks, as in 2008-2009. While
            the short-term outlook remains positive, over the medium
            term policy makers face new challenges. Several countries
            have the potential to greatly expand natural resource
            production and become major commodity exporters; volatile
            resource revenue will complicate their fiscal and monetary
            planning. Rising investor appetite for financial assets of
            frontier markets and the development of domestic debt
            markets will continue to broaden the menu of and trade-offs
            among financing options at a time when global interest rates
            may start sloping upward. Complex financing arrangements --
            notably for private-public or public-public partnerships in
            infrastructure -- will become more common and will generate
            new types of fiscal commitments and contingencies.
Promises, promises : vote-buying and
            the electoral mobilization strategies of non-credible politicians
Vote-buying is pervasive, but not
            everywhere. What explains significant variations across
            countries in the greater use of pre-electoral transfers to
            mobilize voters relative to the use of pre-electoral
            promises of post-electoral transfers? This paper explicitly
            models the trade-offs that politicians incur when they
            decide between mobilizing support with vote-buying or
            promises of post-electoral benefits. Politicians rely more
            on vote-buying when they are less credible, target
            vote-buying to those who do not believe their political
            promises, and only buy votes from those who would have
            received post-electoral transfers in a world of full
            political credibility. The enforcement of a prohibition on
            vote-buying reduces the welfare of those targeted with
            vote-buying, but improves the welfare of all other groups in society.
What have we learned from the
            enterprise surveys regarding access to credit by SMEs
Using a unique firm level data set --
            the Enterprise Surveys -- this paper develops a new measure
            of credit-constrained status for firms using hard data
            instead of perceptions data. The paper classifies firms into
            four ordinal categories: Not Credit Constrained, Maybe
            Credit Constrained, Partially Credit Constrained, and Fully
            Credit Constrained to understand the characteristics of the
            firms that fall into each group. Comparable data from the
            Enterprise Surveys for 116 countries are used to look at the
            relationship between firm size and credit-constrained
            status. First, the analysis finds that small and medium
            enterprises are more likely to be credit constrained (either
            partially or fully) than large firms. Furthermore, small and
            medium enterprises finance their working capital and
            investments mainly through trade credit and informal sources
            of finance. These two results hold to a large extent in all
            the regions of the developing world. Second, although size
            is a significant predictor of the probability of being
            credit constrained, firm age is not. Third, high-performing
            firms, as measured by labor productivity, are less likely to
            be credit constrained. This result applies to all firms but
            is not as strong for small firms as it is for large and
            medium firms. Finally, in countries with high private
            credit-to-gross domestic product ratios, firms are less
            likely to be credit constrained. Given the importance of
            access to credit for firm growth and efficiency, this paper
            confirms that throughout the developing world access to
            credit is inversely related to firm size but positively
            related to productivity and financial deepening in the country.
The decision to invest in child
            quality over quantity : household size and household
            investment in education in Vietnam
During Vietnam's two decades of
            rapid economic growth, its fertility rate has fallen sharply
            at the same time that its educational attainment has risen
            rapidly -- macro trends that are consistent with the
            hypothesis of a quantity-quality tradeoff in child-rearing.
            This paper investigates whether the micro-level evidence
            supports the hypothesis that Vietnamese parents are in fact
            making a tradeoff between quantity and quality of children.
            The paper presents data on private tutoring -- a widespread
            education phenomenon in Vietnam -- as a new measure of
            household investment in children's quality combining it
            with traditional measures of household education
            investments. To assess the quantity-quality tradeoff, the
            paper instruments for family size using the distance to the
            nearest family planning center. IV estimation results based
            on data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys
            (VHLSSs) and other sources show that families do indeed
            invest less in the education of school-age children who have
            larger numbers of siblings. This effect holds for several
            different indicators of educational investment and is robust
            to different definitions of family size, identification
            strategies, and model specifications that control for
            community characteristics as well as the distance to the
            city center. Finally, estimation results suggest that
            tutoring may be a better measure of quality-oriented
            household investments in education than traditional measures
            like enrolment, which are arguably less nuanced and less household-driven.
SME contributions to employment, job
            creation, and growth in the Arab world
Recent economic and political
            developments have highlighted a challenge shared across the
            Arab region of generating employment, promoting inclusive
            growth, and improving competitiveness. In the short run,
            weakened macroeconomic fundamentals in the developing
            economies of the Middle East and North Africa are a key
            challenge. The region's main challenge is to achieve
            sustainable growth that delivers the quantity and quality of
            jobs needed. An inclusive and competitive private sector has
            proven to be one of the most effective and long-term
            solutions for this challenge. This paper provides an
            analytical framework to diagnose and identify key challenges
            to the growth of small and medium enterprises that is
            supported by a quantitative model based on the World
            Bank's Enterprise Surveys database. The findings
            reconfirm that the route to a sustained role for small and
            medium enterprises in job creation requires improving the
            credibility of reforms, the effectiveness of policies, and
            equitable enforcement.  Although one size fits all is
            infeasible for Arab countries, it is important to design
            policies across sectors to create productive employment and
            promote economic growth. Supporting innovation and enhancing
            access to finance are central to the development agenda for
            small and medium enterprises. And creating an enabling
            environment and setting up accountable institutions are key
            to ensure equal opportunity and inclusive growth.
Unlocking land values for urban
            infrastructure finance : international experience -
            considerations for Indian policy
Despite strong economic growth,
            investment in basic urban infrastructure -- water supply,
            wastewater removal and treatment, roads, and other
            capital-intensive systems -- has failed to keep pace with
            urban growth, leaving a critical urban infrastructure
            deficit. At the same time, urban lands in these many
            developing countries are among the most expensive in the
            world. Much of this land is owned by public authorities.
            Significant parts of it lie vacant, unused for public
            service provision or inappropriate for conversion to
            higher-valued economic activity. A composite public-sector
            balance sheet for India's urban areas would show an
            asset mix strong on public-sector landholdings but weak on
            infrastructure. This raises the following questions: Can
            some excess public-sector land be exchanged for
            infrastructure, in a manner that is politically acceptable
            and economically efficient? Can public land sales be a
            realistic source of finance for critically needed urban
            infrastructure investment? This paper considers the policy
            context that has shaped different land-disposal and
            earmarking initiatives, provides details about the actual
            workings of institutions, and examines international
            experience in infrastructure investment. This study
            contributes to the consultative process underway in India to
            consider strategies to unlock public land values to help
            finance urban infrastructure investment.
Shared prosperity and the mitigation
            of poverty : in practice and in precept
The World Bank Group recently adopted
            two overarching goals -- the end of extreme, chronic poverty
            in the world by 2030 and the promotion of shared prosperity
            in every society. The paper examines the normative
            properties of these goals, their strengths and weaknesses,
            and their implications for actual policymaking, especially
            in the presence of globalization. This is closely related to
            the age-old debate on growth versus direct welfare
            interventions as instruments for countering poverty. The
            paper analyzes past trends on poverty and tries to shed new
            light on this old debate.
A randomized, controlled study of a
            rural sanitation behavior change program in Madhya Pradesh, India
Poor sanitation and open defecation are
            thought to be a major cause of diarrhea and intestinal
            parasite infections among young children. In 1999, India
            launched the Total Sanitation Campaign with the goal of
            achieving universal toilet coverage in rural India by 2012.
            This paper reports on a cluster-randomized, controlled trial
            that was conducted in 80 rural villages in Madhya Pradesh to
            measure the effect of the program on toilet access,
            sanitation behavior, and child health outcomes. The study
            analyzed a random sample of 3,039 households and 5,206
            children under five years of age. Field staff collected
            baseline measures of sanitation conditions, behavior, and
            child health, and re-visited households 21 months later. The
            analysis finds that implementation of the program activities
            was slower than the original timeline (only 35 percent of
            villages were triggered more than six months before the
            follow-up survey). Nevertheless, the Total Sanitation
            Campaign successfully increased toilet coverage by 19
            percent in intervention villages compared with control
            villages (41 percent v. 22 percent), while reported open
            defecation decreased by 10 percent among adults (74 percent
            v. 84 percent). The intervention also led to some
            improvements in water quality and protozoan infection, but
            consistent improvements were not observed across multiple
            child health outcomes (diarrhea, helminth infections, child
            growth). However, the exposure period was likely to have
            been too short to result in any benefit of the sanitation
            interventions on child health. Given the large improvements
            in toilet construction documented, an additional follow-up
            survey with a longer period of exposure would yield valuable
            information on the effects of improved sanitation conditions
            on health outcomes.
The social impact of financial
            crises: evidence from the global financial crisis
Financial systems can contribute to
            economic development by providing people with useful tools
            for risk management, but when they fail to manage the risks
            they retain, they can create severe financial crises with
            devastating social and economic effects. The financial
            crisis that hit the world economy in 2008-2009 has
            transformed the lives of many individuals and families, even
            in advanced countries, where millions of people fell, or are
            at risk of falling, into poverty and exclusion. For most
            regions and income groups in developing countries, progress
            to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 has slowed
            and income distribution has worsened for a number of
            countries. Countries hardest hit by the crisis lost more
            than a decade of economic time. As the efforts to strengthen
            the financial systems and improve the resilience of the
            global financial system continue around the world, the
            challenge for policy makers is to incorporate the lessons
            from the failures to take into consideration the complex
            linkages between financial, fiscal, real, and social risks
            and ensure effective risk management at all levels of
            society. The recent experience underscores the importance
            of: systematic, proactive, and integrated risk management by
            individuals, societies, and governments to prepare for
            adverse consequences of financial shocks; mainstreaming
            proactive risk management into development agendas;
            establishing contingency planning mechanisms to avoid
            unintended economic and social consequences of crisis
            management policies and building a better capacity to
            analyze complex linkages and feedback loops between
            financial, sovereign, real and social risks; maintaining
            fiscal room; and creating well-designed social protection
            policies that target the vulnerable, while ensuring fiscal sustainability.
Business environment, economic
            agglomeration and job creation around the world
Based on a comprehensive worldwide firm
            survey, this paper looks at how the business environment and
            economic agglomeration affect job creation, holding constant
            conventional determinants of firm growth, such as firm
            ownership, size, and age. The analysis finds that economic
            agglomeration is most important, especially modern
            telecommunications, access to export markets, concentration
            of economic activity in large cities, and capacity
            agglomeration (the concentration of large firms in a city).
            Although the business environment affects job growth less
            than agglomeration does, some elements of the business
            environment matter, such as labor flexibility, unionization,
            and local skill levels. There is strong heterogeneity in job
            creation across firm size and age.
North-South standards harmonization
            and international trade
Recent years have seen a surge in
            economic integration agreements (EIAs) and the development
            of non-tariff measures (NTMs). As a consequence, a growing
            number of EIAs include provisions on NTMs. However, little
            attention has been given in the literature to the effects of
            NTM liberalization in the context of EIAs. In this paper, we
            focus on provisions for technical regulations and analyze
            whether the North-South harmonization of technical barriers
            affects international trade. Using a gravity equation, it
            tests whether, as a result of the deep integration
            associated with standards provisions included in the EIA,
            the Southern partners' trade expands with the North,
            but at the expense of their trade with non-bloc Southern
            partners. Empirical results provide strong support for this
            conjecture. Moreover, harmonization on the basis of regional
            standards negatively impacts the exports of developing
            countries to the North.
International tradability indices
            for services
This paper uses a theoretically grounded
            model of international trade to estimate the cross-border
            tradability of services. The resulting indices cover up to
            99 countries and ten sectors. The results show that
            information and communications technology capital and legal
            institutions are particularly important determinants of a
            country's ability to successfully export services. The
            tradability indices are strongly correlated with outcome
            indicators, such as trade shares of individual countries. In
            addition, they are strongly correlated with important
            inputs, including country productivity and size, factor
            endowments, trade costs, and regulatory measures. In
            particular, the results suggest that a more restrictive
            regulatory environment significantly reduces the
            international tradability of services.
Decentralized beneficiary targeting
            in large-scale development programs : insights from the
            Malawi farm input subsidy program
This paper contributes to the
            long-standing debate on the merits of decentralized
            beneficiary targeting in the administration of development
            programs, focusing on the large-scale Malawi Farm Input
            Subsidy Program. Nationally-representative household survey
            data are used to systematically analyze the decentralized
            targeting performance of the program during the 2009-2010
            agricultural season. The analysis begins with a standard
            targeting assessment based on the rates of program
            participation and the benefit amounts among the eligible and
            non-eligible populations, and provides decompositions of the
            national targeting performance into the inter-district,
            intra-district inter-community, and intra-district
            intra-community components. This approach identifies the
            relative contributions of targeting at each level. The
            results show that the Farm Input Subsidy Program is not
            poverty targeted and that the national government,
            districts, and communities are nearly uniform in their
            failure to target the poor, with any minimal targeting (or
            mis-targeting) overwhelmingly materializing at the community
            level. The findings are robust to the choice of the
            eligibility indicator and the decomposition method. The
            multivariate analysis of household program participation
            reinforces these results and reveals that the relatively
            well-off, rather than the poor or the wealthiest, and the
            locally well-connected have a higher likelihood of program
            participation and, on average, receive a greater number of
            input coupons. Since a key program objective is to increase
            food security and income among resource-poor farmers, the
            lack of targeting is a concern and should underlie
            considerations of alternative targeting approaches that, in
            part or completely, rely on proxy means tests at the local level.
Risky business : political
            instability and greenfield foreign direct investment in the
            Arab world
Which foreign direct investments are
            most affected by political instability? Analysis of
            quarterly greenfield investment flows into countries in the
            Middle East and North Africa from 2003 to 2012 shows that
            adverse political shocks are associated with significantly
            reduced investment inflows in the non-resource tradable
            sectors. By contrast, investments in natural resource
            sectors and non-tradable activities appear insensitive to
            such shocks. Consistent with these patterns, the significant
            reduction in investment inflows in Arab Spring affected
            economies was starkest in the non-resource manufacturing
            sector. Political instability is thus associated with
            increased reliance on non-tradables and aggravated resource
            dependence. Conversely, how intensified political
            instability affects aggregate foreign direct investment is
            critically contingent on the initial sector composition of
            these flows.