rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Technical efficiency gains from port
            reform : the potential for yardstick competition in Mexico
The authors show how relatively standard
            methodologies can help to measure the efficiency gains from
            reforming the organization of port infrastructure, how those
            measures can be used to promote competition between ports,
            and how competition can be built into an incentive-driven
            regulatory regime. As illustration, they use a case study of
            port reform in mexico in 1993, the first efficiency analysis
            of port restructuring in a developing country. Their
            analysis, which covers 1996-99 and relies on a stochastic
            production frontier, shows that overall, Mexico has achieved
            annual efficiency gains of 6-8 percent in the use of port
            infrastructure since assigning its management to
            independent, decentralized operators. Changes in relative
            performance ratings are revealing. They identify consistent
            sets of leaders and laggards, including some that would not
            have been identified by partial productivity indicators
            commonly used in the sector. The authors' main
            conclusions: 1) Reforms have significantly improved average
            port performance. 2) The analytically sound performance
            rankings allowed by the port-specific efficiency measures
            can help to promote yardstick competition in the sector.
            These rankings are superior to those that would emerge from
            use of partial productivity indicators. They account for the
            joint effects of all inputs on outputs--which is crucial,
            because it avoids the risk of inconsistent rankings based on
            different partial indicators, arbitrarily chosen. Developing
            the database method to measure efficiency in countries with
            no strong tradition of database development is an enormous
            task--especially in transport sectors, where the tradition
            of generating databases useful to policymakers is in its
            infancy. The most immediate effect of this exercise was to
            reveal the poverty of the database in the Mexican port
            sector and the need for regulators to invest in its development.
Mode of foreign entry, technology
            transfer, and foreign direct investment policy
Foreign direct investment can take place
            through the direct entry of foreign firms or the acquisition
            of existing domestic firms. Mattoo, Olarreaga, and Saggi
            examine the preferences of a foreign firm and the host
            country government with respect to these two modes of
            foreign direct investment in the presence of costly
            technology transfer. The tradeoff between technology
            transfer and market competition emerges as a key determinant
            of preferences. The authors identify the circumstances in
            which the choices of the government and the foreign firm
            diverge-and in which domestic welfare can be improved by
            restrictions on foreign direct investment that induce the
            foreign firm to choose the socially preferred mode of entry.
Assisting the transition from
            workfare to work : a randomized experiment
Randomly sampled workfare participants
            in a welfare-dependent region of Argentina were given a
            voucher that entitled an employer to a sizable wage subsidy.
            A second sample also received the option of skill training,
            while a third sample formed the control group. The authors
            analyze the effects of this scheme on participants'
            employment and income, using double-difference and
            instrumental-variables methods to deal with potential
            experimental biases, including selective compliance with the
            randomized assignment. The authors find that compared with
            the control group, voucher recipients had a significantly
            higher probability of employment, though their current
            incomes were no higher. The impact was largely confined to
            women and younger workers. Labor supply effects appear to
            have been important. However, training had no significant
            impact. The experiment was cost-effective in reducing the
            government's welfare spending, since take-up of the
            subsidy by employers was low.
Investment and income effects of
            land regularization : the case of Nicaragua
The authors use data from Nicaragua to
            examine the impact of the award of registered and
            nonregistered title on land values and on investments
            attached to land. They find that receipt of registered title
            increases land values by 30 percent and greatly increases
            the propensity to invest, bringing investment closer to the
            optimum. Consistent with descriptive statistics indicating
            great demand for regularization of land rights, especially
            from the poor, this finding suggests that titling can have a
            positive distributional effect. Of overriding importance,
            however, are the legal validity and official recognition of
            the titles issued.
A framework for regulating
            microfinance institutions : the experience in Ghana and the Philippines
An earlier Policy Research Working Paper
            (Hennie van Greuning, Joselito Gallardo, and Bikki Randhawa,
            "A Framework for Regulating Microfinance
            Institutions," WPS 2061, February 1999) presented a
            regulatory framework that identifies thresholds in financial
            intermediation activities that trigger a requirement for a
            microfinance institution to satisfy external or mandatory
            guidelines-a tiered approach to regulation and prudential
            supervision. The model focuses on risk-taking activities of
            microfinance institutions that must be managed and
            prudentially regulated. The author reports on the results of
            the field testing and assessment of the tiered approach,
            focusing on the experience of Ghana and the Philippines. The
            two countries both have a wide range of informal,
            semi-formal, and formal institutions providing financial
            services to the poor, but differ in how they regulate
            financial intermediation activities by microfinance
            providers. In his assessment and a comparative analysis, the
            author focuses on key issues in the regulatory and
            supervisory environment for microfinance-and in the legal
            system and judicial processes-being addressed by government
            authorities and microfinance stakeholders in both countries.
            He gives particular attention to the thresholds at which
            intermediation activities become subject to prudential
            regulation and regulatory standards for capitalization and
            capital adequacy, asset quality and provisioning for
            nonperforming loans, and liquidity management. seeks to
            identify the key elements and characteristics of the
            microfinance regulatory experience of Ghana and the
            Philippines and to draw the lessons that may be useful for
            other countries interested in establishing a regulatory
            environment conducive to the development of sustainable
            microfinance institutions. The experience of Ghana and the
            Philippines shows that a transparent, inclusive regulatory
            framework is indispensable for enabling microfinance
            institutions to maintain market specialization and to pursue
            institutional development that leads to sustainability.
            Clear pathways for institutional transformation facilitate
            the integration of microfinance institutions into the formal
            financial system.
Growth, distribution, and poverty in
            Africa : messages from the 1990s
review recent evidence on the trends in
            household well-being in Africa during the 1990s. They draw
            on the findings of a series of studies on poverty dynamics
            that use the better data sets now available. The authors
            begin by taking a broad view of poverty, tracing changes in
            both income poverty and in other more direct measures of
            individual welfare. Experiences have been varied: several
            countries have seen a sharp decline in poverty, while some
            have witnessed a marked increase. Yet, in the aggregate,
            economic growth has been pro-poor. Nonetheless, the
            aggregate numbers also hide significant and systematic
            distributional effects which have caused some groups to be
            left behind. The authors draw four key conclusions: Economic
            policy reforms (improving macroeconomic balances and
            liberalizing markets) have been conducive to reducing
            poverty. Market connectedness is key for the poor to benefit
            from new opportunities generated by economic growth. Some
            population groups and regions, by virtue of their sheer
            remoteness, have been left behind when growth picks up.
            Education and access to land further condition the extent to
            which households can benefit from economic opportunities and
            escape poverty. Finally, rainfall variations and ill health
            are found to have profound effects on poverty outcomes in
            Africa underscoring the significance of social protection in
            a poverty reduction strategy.
Money demand in Venezuela : multiple
            cycle extraction in a cointegration frmaework
Money demand in Venezuela is modeled
            using structural time series and error correction
            approaches, for the period 1993.1 to 2001.4. The preferred
            model features seasonal cointegration and was estimated
            following a structural time series approach. There are
            similarities in the long-run behavior of money demand
            associated with the structural time series and error
            correction approaches. Estimated short-run dynamics are more
            fragile, with the structural time series modeling approach
            providing richer insights into the adjustment dynamics of
            money demand. A cycle with a three-year period has been
            found to be common to money demand, real GDP, and
            opportunity cost variables. This cycle is robust to changes
            in model specification, including choice of opportunity cost
            variables. Higher frequency cycles are also found to exist,
            but are more sensitive to model specification. Results are
            also presented for a combined approach that takes advantage
            of error correction models, as well as insights into
            short-run dynamics afforded by the structural time series
            modeling approach.
Financial crises, financial
            dependence, and industry growth
The authors investigate the link between
            financial crises and industry growth. They analyze data from
            19 industrial and developing countries that have experienced
            financial crises during the past 30 years to investigate how
            financial crises affect sectors dependent on external
            sources of finance. Specifically, the authors examine
            whether the impact of a financial crisis on externally
            dependent sectors varies with the depth of the financial
            system. They find that sectors highly dependent on external
            finance tend to experience a greater contraction of value
            added during a crisis in deeper financial systems than in
            countries with shallower financial systems. They hypothesize
            that the deepening of the financial system allows sectors
            dependent on external finance to obtain relatively more
            external funding in normal periods, so a crisis in such
            countries would have a disproportionately negative effect on
            externally dependent sectors. In contrast, since externally
            dependent firms tend to obtain relatively less external
            financing in shallower financial systems (and hence have
            relatively lower growth rates in such countries during
            normal times), a crisis in such countries has less of a
            disproportionately negative effect on the growth of
            externally dependent sectors.
Trade, growth, and poverty
The evidence from individual cases and
            from cross-country analysis supports the view that
            globalization leads to faster growth and poverty reduction
            in poor countries. To determine the effect of globalization
            on growth, poverty, and inequality, the authors first
            identify a group of developing countries that are
            participating more in globalization. China, India, and
            several other large countries are part of this group, so
            well over half the population of the developing world lives
            in these globalizing economies. Over the past 20 years, the
            post-1980 globalizers have seen large increases in trade and
            significant declines in tariffs. Their growth rates
            accelerated between the 1970s and the 1980s and again
            between the 1980s and the 1990s, even as growth in the rich
            countries and the rest of the developing world slowed. The
            post-1980 globalizers are catching up to the rich countries,
            but the rest of the developing world (the non-globalizers)
            is falling further behind. Next, the authors ask how general
            these patterns are, using regressions that exploit
            within-country variations in trade and growth. After
            controlling for changes in other policies and addressing
            endogeneity with internal instruments, they find that trade
            has a strong positive effect on growth. Finally, the authors
            examine the effects of trade on the poor. They find little
            systematic evidence of a relationship between changes in
            trade volumes (or any other measure of globalization they
            consider) and changes in the income share of the poorest-or
            between changes in trade volumes and changes in household
            income inequality. They conclude, therefore, that the
            increase in growth rates that accompanies expanded trade
            translates on average into proportionate increases in
            incomes of the poor. Absolute poverty in the globalizing
            developing economies has fallen sharply in the past 20
            years. The evidence from individual cases and from
            cross-country analysis supports the view that globalization
            leads to faster growth and poverty reduction in poor countries.
Assessing the distributional impact
            of public policy
Economic development necessarily changes
            the welfare of socioeconomic groups to various degrees,
            depending on differences in their social arrangements. The
            challenge for policymakers is to select the changes that
            will be most socially desirable. The author demonstrates the
            usefulness of distributional analysis for social evaluation
            and, more specifically, for welfare evaluation, using data
            from the 1994 Integrated Household Survey in Guinea. Because
            the international community has declared poverty eradication
            a fundamental objective of development, the author uses a
            poverty-focused approach to social evaluation based on the
            maximum principle. This principle offers a unifying
            framework for analyzing the socioeconomic impact of public
            policy by using a wide variety of evaluation functions,
            inequality indicators (like the extended Gini coefficient),
            and poverty indices (such as Sen's index and the
            members of the Foster-Greer-Thorbecke family). The author
            also examines, within the context of commodity taxation, how
            to identify socially desirable policy options using both the
            dominance criterion and abbreviated social welfare
            functions. He includes computer routines for calculating
            various welfare indices and for plotting the relevant
            concentration curves.
Sector organization, governance, and
            the inefficiency of African water utilities
The authors analyze the determinants of
            the efficiency levels reached by twenty one African water
            utilities. They assess efficiency through the estimation of
            a production frontier for the sector in Africa. The
            efficiency estimates confirm much of the common perceptions
            from partial productivity indicators. They point to a great
            heterogeneity in the African water utilities'
            performances, the predominance of constant returns to scale,
            and the great rate of technological progress. And the
            authors show that the institutional capacity of the country,
            as well as its governance quality, are significant driving
            factors in the performance of each firm.
Growth without governance
It is well known that there is a strong
            positive correlation between per capita incomes and the
            quality of governance across countries. the authors propose
            an empirical strategy that allows separation of this
            correlation into (1) a strong positive causal effect running
            from better governance to higher per capita incomes, and,
            perhaps surprisingly at first, (2) a weak and even negative
            causal effect running in the opposite direction from per
            capita incomes to governance. The first result confirms
            existing evidence on the importance of good governance for
            economic development. The second result is new and suggests
            the absence of a "virtuous circle" in which higher
            incomes lead to further improvements in governance. This
            motivates the authors' choice of title, "Growth
            Without Governance." They document this evidence using
            a newly updated set of worldwide governance-indicators
            covering 175 countries for the period 2000-01, and use the
            results to interpret the relationship between incomes and
            governance focusing on the Latin America and Caribbean
            region-within a worldwide empirical context. Finally, the
            authors speculate about the potential importance of elite
            influence and state capture in accounting for the surprising
            negative effects of per capita incomes on governance,
            present some evidence on such capture in some Latin American
            countries, and suggest priorities for actions to improve
            governance when such pernicious elite influence shapes
            public policy.
The impact of property rights on
            households' investment, risk coping, and policy
            preferences : evidence from China
Even though it is widely recognized that
            giving farmers more secure land rights may increase
            agricultural investment, scholars contend that, in the case
            of China, such a policy might undermine the function of land
            as a social safety net and, as a consequence, not be
            sustainable or command broad support. Data from three
            provinces, one of which had adopted a policy to increase
            security of tenure in advance of the others, suggest that
            greater tenure security, especially if combined with
            transferability of land, had a positive impact on
            agricultural investment and, within the time frame
            considered, led neither to an increase in inequality of land
            distribution nor a reduction in households' ability to
            cope with exogenous shocks. Household support for more
            secure property rights is increased by their access to other
            insurance mechanisms, suggesting some role of land as a
            safety net. At the same time, past exposure to this type of
            land right has a much larger impact quantitatively,
            suggesting that a large part of the resistance to changed
            property rights arrangements disappears as household
            familiarity with such rights increases.
Catastrophe insurance market in the
            Caribbean Region : market failures and recommendations for
            public sector interventions
The Caribbean region suffers from a high
            degree of economic volatility. A history of repeated
            external and domestic shocks has made economic insecurity a
            major concern across the region. Of particular concern to
            all households, especially the poorest segments of the
            population, is the exposure to shocks that are generated by
            catastrophic events or natural disasters. The author
            develops a conceptual framework for risk management and
            shows that the insurance market for catastrophic risk in the
            Caribbean region remains a "thin" market
            characterized by "high" prices and "low"
            transfer of risk. He analyzes the possible market failures
            which could explain the lack of development of the
            catastrophe insurance market. Finally he outlines a set of
            recommendations for public sector interventions.
Wages and productivity in Mexican manufacturing
The author identifies the determinants
            of wages and productivity in Mexico over time using national
            representative linked employer-employee databases from the
            manufacturing sector. She shows that both employers and
            employees are benefiting from investments in education,
            training, work experience, foreign research and development,
            and openness after the North American Free Trade Agreement
            (NAFTA). Additional years of schooling have a higher impact
            on wages and productivity after NAFTA than before.
            Endogenous training effects are larger for productivity than
            for wages, suggesting that the employers share the costs and
            returns to training. The author also finds that investment
            in human capital magnifies technology-driven productivity
            gains. By comparing four regions of Mexico-north, center,
            south, and Mexico City-regional wage and productivity gaps
            are found to have increased over time.