rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Statistical Performance Indicators
            and Index : A New Tool to Measure Country Statistical Capacity
The World Bank’s Statistical Capacity
            Index has been widely employed to measure country
            statistical capacity since its inception two decades ago.
            This paper builds on the existing advantages of the
            Statistical Capacity Index, conceptually and empirically, to
            offer new statistical performance indicators and the
            Statistical Performance Index, which can better measure a
            country’s statistical performance. The new index has clearer
            conceptual motivations, employs a stronger mathematical
            foundation, and significantly expands the number of
            indicators and countries covered. The paper further provides
            empirical evidence that illustrates the strong correlation
            of the new index with other commonly used development
            indicators of human capital, governance, poverty, and
            inequality. The framework can accommodate future directions
            to improve the index as the global data landscape evolves
A Demand-Side View of Mobile
            Internet Adoption in the Global South
Mobile technologies show great potential
            to accelerate internet access and usage, especially in
            developing countries. A better understanding of key drivers
            and main constraints for mobile internet access is the first
            prerequisite for governments to design targeted policy
            solutions. This study exploits a household survey that
            collects information on information and communications
            technology access and usage at the household and individual
            levels in 22 countries in the Global South. The study finds
            that in addition to infrastructure investment, which has
            been the main focus of many developing countries, other
            demand-side factors are of critical importance. Across the
            developing world, females, the elderly, those who live in
            rural areas, and those who have a relatively low level of
            income or education are less likely to adopt mobile
            internet. Social network effects are found to have a
            significant positive impact on the usage of mobile internet.
            Those who have more close friends using an online social
            network are more likely to adopt mobile internet.
            Individuals whose five closest friends are using an online
            social network (such as Facebook or Twitter) are 63.1
            percent more likely to adopt it than those without any close
            friends using such online social network sites/apps. Across
            regions, although the factors affecting the adoption of
            mobile internet remain largely the same, the magnitudes of
            their impacts vary. In Asia, gender differences are
            negatively associated with mobile internet. In Africa, the
            impact of education level is more salient than in the other
            two regions, implying an urgent need to improve digital literacy.
Trends and Determinants of Female
            Labor Force Participation in Morocco : An Initial
            Exploratory Analysis
The U-shape theory argues that at early
            stages of development, countries experience a reduction in
            the female labor force participation, eventually followed by
            a recovery. In Morocco, female labor force participation is
            now lower than it was two decades ago due to several factors
            that are discussed in the paper. There is also a persistent
            50-percentage-points gender gap in labor force participation
            rates, despite improvements typically related to development
            and female inclusion—such as a higher gross domestic product
            per capita, lower fertility rates, and better access to
            education. At the same time, urban job creation has not been
            able to offset rural job destruction nor the increase in the
            working age population for both genders. Using data from the
            Moroccan Labor Force Survey, the World Values Survey, and
            the Arab Barometer, probit models and a multinomial logit
            are estimated to explore the challenges affecting female
            insertion into the labor market. The findings show that
            higher educational attainment increases the probability of
            female participation, but this relationship has decreased
            over time, not being enough to offset other obstacles caused
            by other individual and household characteristics. Being
            married and the presence of other inactive women are found
            to decrease female participation. The educational level of
            the head of household (typically men) increases female
            inactivity, suggesting that potentially gender roles may
            drive women out of the labor market and slow the recovery in
            women’s participation.
Damaged by the Disaster : The Impact
            of COVID-19 on Firms in South Asia
To assess the impact of COVID-19 on
            firms, the World Bank and the International Finance
            Corporation conducted Business Pulse Surveys in several
            countries, including six in the South Asia region. Analysis
            focusing on the South Asia region suggests that, first,
            firms in the South Asia region have suffered
            disproportionately more from the economic brunt of the
            pandemic. Second, even within the region, COVID-19 did not
            affect all firms equally. Although exporters remain
            resilient by some metrics, firms that are smaller,
            female-led firms and those in vulnerable sectors suffered
            higher rates of closure. Third, while digital technologies
            have taken the center stage post-pandemic, the South Asia
            region lags in the adoption of these technologies. Finally,
            policy support for firms is key to building back better and
            resilient recovery, yet only a small share of firms can
            access public support. To be effective, firm support
            programs ought to be carefully customized and target firms
            based on the dominant channel through which COVID-19 affects
            them rather than their external attributes.
Deep Services Trade Agreements and
            their Effect on Trade and Value Added
The majority of services trade is
            currently transacted under the terms of preferential trade
            agreements (PTAs) with increasingly ambitious provisions on
            crossborder trade and investment in services. This paper
            exploits novel and detailed information on the architecture
            and depth of services PTAs (the World Bank Deep Trade
            Agreements 2.0 database) to study which provisions, or
            policy configurations, characterise an effective agreement.
            The richness of policy information is crucial for being able
            to identify those aspects that matter most, namely an
            agreement's structure, its rules of origin for firms
            and natural persons, and provisions that ensure
            accountability. Ambitious provisions in these areas are
            associated with 15-65 percent higher bilateral trade, driven
            by regulation-intensive services. Services PTAs also lead to
            an increase in services value added sourced from PTA
            partners, through provisions that facilitate the exchange of
            capital and people. This finding sheds light on how services
            PTAs can affect the configuration of value chain trade.
A Cautionary Tale : An Experiment on
            The Stability of Business Environment Perceptions in a Firm Survey
Several studies in the literature have
            adopted attitude or perception-based survey questions to
            evaluate the business environment and its effect on firms.
            The Enterprise Surveys of the World Bank are not an
            exception. In the case of the Enterprise Surveys, these
            questions involve rating an element of the business
            environment at the end of each section of the survey
            instrument. Such questions are often used but sometimes are
            inconsistent with responses elicited on the experience of
            the firm over a specific timeframe—experience-based
            questions. The literature is mixed as to whether
            perception-based questions are susceptible to anchoring or
            context effects. In this study, an experiment is set up to
            explore whether perceptions of the business environment are
            stable or vulnerable to the ordering of questions in the
            Enterprise Surveys questionnaire. The experiment entails
            randomizing the placement order of the perception-based
            questions at the end of a section or at the beginning of the
            survey. Significant question-order effects are uncovered
            only for perceptions of corruption and business licensing
            and permits but not the other elements, after accounting for
            a variety of factors. The study recommends that analysis in
            these two areas should go beyond perception-based questions
            and verify their findings with experience-based questions.
From Health Crisis to Financial Distress
I discuss the multifaceted economic and
            financial vulnerabilities that have been created or
            exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic on a foundation of
            already weak economic fundamentals in many countries. Crises
            often do not travel alone. Banking, sovereign debt, exchange
            rate crashes, sudden stops, and inflation often intersect to
            become severe conglomerate crises. Historically, whether of
            the individual or conglomerate variety, crises influence the
            shape and speed of economic recovery. As the health crisis
            morphs into a financial or debt crisis in some countries, I
            discuss what may lie ahead in terms of the stages in crisis
            resolution and a brief reflection on how the resolution
            process can be expedited.
Long-Term Impacts of Short Exposure
            to Conditional Cash Transfers in Adolescence : Evidence from
            the Philippines
This paper evaluates the long-term
            impacts of the national conditional cash transfer program in
            the Philippines on beneficiaries who were exposed to it
            during a relatively short but potentially critical period of
            transitioning from adolescence to adulthood. The paper
            estimates the impacts of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino
            Program on men and women who were enrolled in the program
            for up to 1.5 years when they were between ages 12.5 and 14
            and are currently in their early twenties. The analysis
            finds evidence of impacts on marriage and fertility for
            women: participation in the program is associated with delay
            in marriage and the first birth of approximately one year
            and six months, respectively. No impacts are found on
            educational or labor market outcomes or proxies for economic
            welfare. Further, there is no strong and consistent evidence
            of changes in empowerment or gender norms.
The Evolution of City Form :
            Evidence from Satellite Data
This paper describes new global
            evidence—derived from satellite data—for rates and patterns
            of urban spatial development since 1990 along three margins:
            horizontal spread (outward extension), infill development
            (inward additions in the gaps left between earlier
            structures), and vertical layering (upward construction).
            The end product of this growth is floor space, the amount
            and distribution of which are central to understanding how a
            city becomes livable and sustainable. Over the quarter
            century between 1990 and 2015, urban built-up area worldwide
            grew by 30 percent through horizontal spread and infill.
            While most cities grow through a combination of horizontal
            spread and infill, the paper provides the first estimates of
            the relative prominence of each type of expansion at
            different stages of economic development. In low-income and
            lower-middle-income countries, 90 percent of urban built-up
            area expansion occurs as horizontal spread. The study also
            finds that increasing incomes are a uniquely necessary
            condition for a rise in floor space per person through
            vertical layering: the reason is that building tall is
            capital intensive. The analysis highlights that if a city’s
            population doubles but incomes stay constant, the city’s
            floor space per person declines by 40 percent; by contrast,
            if per capita income doubles but population stays constant,
            the city’s total floor space per person increases by 29 percent.
Understanding FDI Spillovers in the
            presence of GVCs
Does a global value chain framework
            provide additional insights into the question of whether
            foreign direct investment is beneficial to host countries?
            The literature has found mixed results on whether foreign
            direct investment provides positive spillovers over and
            above mere financing. But the studies have focused on one
            country, or studies with an international focus tend to
            abstract from intersectoral linkages. By examining this
            question in the context of global value chains, this paper
            provides a much better understanding of the association as
            well as general validity. It harmonizes three major panel
            data sets: 1) the Multi-Regional Input-Output table for
            international input-output linkages, 2) the FDI Markets
            reports for greenfield foreign direct investment, and 3) the
            World Bank Enterprise Surveys for firm performance measures.
            The paper produces a rich panel data set from 2011 to 2017.
            The findings show that foreign direct investment has a
            positive effect on labor productivity in sectors and firms
            within those sectors. Moreover, global value chain
            participation plays a key role in shaping the foreign direct
            investment effects. Sectors with lower global value chain
            participation benefit more from foreign direct investment:
            doubling the foreign direct investment in those sectors
            results in an 8 percent productivity gain. The positive
            effect seems to be due to the increased competition created
            by foreign direct investment. Foreign direct investment
            spillovers also take place through domestic and foreign
            backward linkages, which means that foreign direct
            investment also has positive inter-sector and cross-border spillovers.
How Has COVID-19 Affected the
            Intention to Migrate via the Backway to Europe
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in
            border closures in many countries and a sharp reduction in
            overall international mobility. However, this disruption of
            legal pathways to migration has raised concerns that
            potential migrants may turn to irregular migration routes as
            a substitute. This paper examines how the pandemic has
            changed intentions to migrate from The Gambia, the country
            with the highest pre-pandemic per-capita irregular migration
            rates in Africa. A large-scale panel survey conducted in
            2019 and 2020 is used to compare changes in intentions to
            migrate to Europe and to neighboring Senegal. The data show
            that the pandemic has reduced the intention to migrate to
            both destinations, with approximately one-third of young
            males expressing less intention to migrate. The largest
            reductions in migration intentions are for individuals who
            were unsure of their intent pre-pandemic, and for poorer
            individuals who are no longer able to afford the costs of
            migrating at a time when these costs have increased and
            their remittance income has fallen. This paper also
            introduces the methodology of priming experiments to the
            study of migration intentions, by randomly varying the
            salience of the COVID-19 pandemic before eliciting
            intentions to migrate. There is no impact of this added
            salience, which appears to be because knowledge of the
            virus, while imperfect, was already enough to inform
            migration decisions. Nevertheless, despite these decreases
            in intentions, the overall desire to migrate the backway to
            Europe remains high, highlighting the need for legal
            migration pathways to support migrants and divert them from
            the risks of backway migration.
Barriers to Growth-Enhancing
            Structural Transformation : The Role of Subnational
            Differences in Intersectoral Productivity Gaps
The movement of workers from the farm
            sector to a more productive nonfarm sector has failed to
            generate significant gains in labor productivity in recent
            decades in many developing countries. This paper offers a
            new perspective on the barriers to growth-enhancing
            structural transformation, combining structural modeling
            with enterprise census data from Ghana. The paper argues
            that subnational differences in the intersectoral
            productivity gap between the nonfarm informal and formal
            sectors constrain the productivity gain from structural
            transformation. In Ghana, intersectoral productivity gaps
            among the richer regions are on average three times larger
            than among the poorer regions. The disparity in regional
            intersectoral productivity gaps is modeled as reflecting the
            disparity in the regional misallocation of labor between the
            informal and formal sectors. Misallocation is identified as
            the output wedge between the informal and formal sectors.
            Simulations suggest that a more productive nonfarm informal
            sector reduces the disparity in regional intersectoral
            productivity gaps and, in turn, increases national
            productivity and the contribution of structural
            transformation to national productivity. For example, a
            90-percent reduction in the disparity in regional
            intersectoral productivity gaps raises Ghana’s national
            aggregate productivity by 11.9 percent and the contribution
            of structural transformation to productivity by 19.7 percent.
Climate-Related and Environmental
            Risks for the Banking Sector in Latin America and the
            Caribbean : A Preliminary Assessment
There is increasing recognition that
            climate-related and environmental risks are a source of
            financial risks. Using publicly available data, this paper
            attempts a preliminary estimation of the physical and
            transition risks for the banking sector in a sample of
            economies in Latin America and the Caribbean. The results
            show that exposure to floods, compounded by high loan
            concentration in and around countries’ capital cities,
            represents the most important source of credit risk for the
            banking sector. After large-scale natural disasters, banks’
            nonperforming loans increase by up to 1.4 percentage points
            in affected provinces. The results also show that banks in
            the region are exposed to transition risks, especially in
            Argentina, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Uruguay, due to their high
            lending to the agriculture sector, which is the largest
            emitter of greenhouse gases in the countries. Firms
            operating in transition-sensitive sectors already present
            signs of financial stress, especially those in the fossil
            fuel and agriculture sectors. Overall, the results
            demonstrate the importance for financial authorities in the
            region to advance in the integration of climate-related and
            environmental risks in their work.
Heterogeneous Impacts of SPS and TBT
            Regulations : Firm-Level Evidence from Deep Trade Agreements
This paper estimates the impacts of
            regulating the use of sanitary and phytosanitary and
            technical barriers to trade measures through preferential
            trade agreements on exports of firms in Chile, Colombia, and
            Peru along the firm size spec trum. The analysis exploits
            novel data from the World Bank Deep Trade Agreements
            database and customs covering the universe of exporting
            firms in each country over 1996–2015. The paper uses a
            firm-product gravity equation with a stringent set of fixed
            effects and controls for the overall depth of the
            preferential trade agreements and product-specific bilateral
            tariffs. The findings show that firms’ exports increase
            significantly in destination markets with preferential trade
            agreements, including a larger number of sanitary and
            phytosanitary and technical barriers to trade provisions,
            and the effect is stronger for smaller firms. Provisions for
            the harmonization of sanitary and phytosanitary regulations
            in preferential trade agreements also have greater benefits
            for the exports of smaller firms, and so do preferential
            trade agreements, including stronger transparency provisions
            for sanitary and phytosanitary and technical barriers to
            trade regulations. The results are robust to dropping larger
            exporters and highly concentrated export sectors to address
            endogeneity. The benefits of sanitary and phytosanitary and
            technical barriers to trade provisions are mainly driven by
            sectors with more heavily-regulated products. Entry into new
            product markets and increases in export quality partly
            explain the rising exports of smaller firms. Finally, the
            estimated impacts are similar regardless of the income level
            of the preferential trade agreement partners.