rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
ECOWAS's infrastructure : a
            regional perspective
Infrastructure improvements boosted
            growth in the Economic Community of West African States
            (ECOWAS) by one percentage point per capita per year during
            1995-2005, primarily thanks to growth in information and
            communication technology. Deficient power infrastructure
            held growth back by 0.1 percent. Raising the region's
            infrastructure to the level of Mauritius could boost growth
            by 5 percentage points. Overall, infrastructure in the 15
            ECOWAS countries ranks consistently behind southern Africa
            across many indicators. However, there is parity in access
            to household services -- water, sanitation, and power.
            ECOWAS has a well-developed regional road network, though
            sea corridors and ports need attention. Surface transport is
            expensive and slow, owing to cartelization, restrictive
            regulations, and delays. There is no regional rail network.
            Air transport has improved despite the lack of a strong
            hub-and-spoke structure. Safety remains a concern.
            Electrical power, the most expensive and least reliable in
            Africa, reaches 50 percent of the population but meets just
            30 percent of demand. Regional power trading would bring
            substantial benefits if Guinea could become a hydropower
            exporter. Prices for critical ICT services are relatively
            high. Recent panregional initiatives have improved roaming.
            New projects are underway to provide access and improved
            services to unconnected countries. Completing and
            maintaining ECOWAS's infrastructure will require
            sustained spending of $1.5 billion annually for a decade,
            with one-third going to power. Although the necessary
            spending is only 1 percent of regional GDP, some
            countries' share is between 5 and 25 percent of
            national GDP. Clearly, external assistance will be needed.
Knowledgeable bankers the demand for
            research in World Bank operations
Development impact calls for
            knowledgeable development practitioners. How then do the
            operational staff of the largest development agency value
            and use its research? Is there an incentive to learn and
            does it translate into useful knowledge? A new survey
            reveals that the bulk of the World Bank's senior staff
            value the Bank's research for their work, and most come
            to know it well, although a sizable minority have difficulty
            accessing research to serve their needs. Another group sees
            little value to research for their work and does not bother
            to find out about it. Higher perceived value is reflected in
            greater knowledge about research, though there are frictions
            in this process. Staff working on poverty, human development
            and economic policy tend to value and use research more than
            staff in the more traditional sectors of Bank lending --
            agriculture and rural development, energy and mining,
            transport and urban development; the latter sectors account
            for 45 percent of lending but only 15 percent of staff
            highly familiar with Bank research. Without stronger
            incentives for learning and more relevant and accessible
            research products, it appears likely that this lag in demand
            for research by the traditional sectors will persist.
Labor institutions and their impact
            on shadow economies in Europe
This paper analyzes the role of labor
            market institutions in explaining the development of shadow
            economies in European countries. The analysis uses several
            alternative measures of the shadow sector, and examines the
            effects of labor institutions on the shadow sector in two
            specific regions: new and old European Union member
            countries, as their respective shadow sectors exhibited a
            different development in the past decade. Although the share
            of the shadow economy in gross domestic product averaged
            27.5 percent in the new member countries in 1999-2007, the
            respective share in the old member states stood at 17.9
            percent. The paper estimates the effects of labor market
            institutions on two sets of shadow economy indicators --
            shadow production and shadow employment. Comparing
            alternative measures of the shadow sector allows a more
            granulated analysis of labor market institution effects. The
            results indicate that the one institution that unambiguously
            increases shadow economy production and employment is the
            strictness of employment protection legislation. Other labor
            market institutions -- active and passive labor market
            policies, labor taxation, trade union density, and the
            minimum wage setting -- have less straightforward and
            statistically robust effects and their impacts often diverge
            in new and old European Union member countries. The
            differences are not robust enough, however, to allow for
            rejecting the hypothesis of similar effects of labor market
            institutions in new and old European Union member states.
Identifying and evaluating large
            scale policy interventions : what questions can we answer
Using a data-driven empirical case study
            method, the paper evaluates the impact of one identified
            reform program on development outcomes. The paper uses the
            World Bank Country Policy and Institutional Assessment
            Ratings to identify large scale structural and macro-level
            policy interventions in the last decade that were seen as
            being sustained and successful for IDA countries. Robustness
            checks are performed to show the efficacy of the method in
            particular cases. It was found that the method attains
            robustness in the case of Nigeria.
The role of Islamic finance in
            enhancing financial inclusion in organization of Islamic
            cooperation (OIC) countries
The core principles of Islam lay great
            emphasis on social justice, inclusion, and sharing of
            resources between the haves and the have nots. Islamic
            finance addresses the issue of "financial
            inclusion" or "access to finance" from two
            directions -- one through promoting risk-sharing contracts
            that provide a viable alternative to conventional debt-based
            financing, and the other through specific instruments of
            redistribution of the wealth among the society. Use of
            risk-sharing financing instruments can offer
            Shariah-compliant microfinance, financing for small and
            medium enterprises, and micro-insurance to enhance access to
            finance. And redistributive instruments such as Zakah,
            Sadaqat, Waqf, and Qard-al-hassan complement risk-sharing
            instruments to target the poor sector of society to offer a
            comprehensive approach to eradicating poverty and to build a
            healthy and vibrant economy. Instruments offered by Islam
            have strong historical roots and have been applied
            throughout history in various Muslim communities. The paper
            identifies gaps currently existing in Organisation of
            Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries on each front, that is,
            Shariah-compliant micro-finance and financing for small and
            medium enterprises and the state of traditional
            redistributive instruments. The paper concludes that Islam
            offers a rich set of instruments and unconventional
            approaches, which, if implemented in true spirit, can lead
            to reduced poverty and inequality in Muslim countries
            plagued by massive poverty. Therefore, policy makers in
            Muslim countries who are serious about enhancing access to
            finance or "financial inclusion" should exploit
            the potential of Islamic instruments to achieve this goal
            and focus on improving the regulatory and financial
            infrastructure to promote an enabling environment.
Mass media and public services : the
            effects of radio access on public education in Benin
Does radio access improve public service
            provision? And if so, does it do so by increasing government
            accountability to citizens, or by persuading households to
            take advantage of publicly-provided services? Prior research
            has argued that citizens with greater access to mass media
            receive greater benefits from targeted government welfare
            programs, but has not addressed these questions for public
            services such as in education and health. Using unique data
            from Benin, this paper finds that literacy rates among
            school children are higher in villages exposed to signals
            from a larger number of community radio stations. The effect
            is identified based on a "natural experiment" in
            the northern communes of Benin where within-commune
            variation in village access to radio stations is exogenous
            to observed and unobserved village characteristics. In
            contrast to prior research, the authors find that this media
            effect does not operate through government accountability:
            government inputs into village schools and household
            knowledge of government education policies are no different
            in villages with greater access to community radio. Instead,
            households with greater access are more likely to make
            financial investments in the education of their children.
Severance pay compliance in Indonesia
This paper contributes new evidence from
            two large household surveys on the compliance of firms with
            severance pay regulations in Indonesia, and the extent to
            which changes in severance pay regulations could affect
            employment rigidity. Compliance appears to be low, as only
            one-third of workers entitled to severance pay report
            receiving it, and on average workers only collect 40 percent
            of the payment due to them. Eligible female and low-wage
            workers are least likely to report receiving payments.
            Widespread non-compliance is consistent with trends in
            employment rigidity, which remained essentially unchanged
            following the large increases in severance mandated by the
            2003 law. These results suggest that workers may benefit
            from a compromise that relaxes severance pay regulations
            while improving enforcement of severance pay statutes, and
            possibly establishing a system of unemployment benefits.
Simulating the impact of the 2009
            financial crisis on welfare in Latvia
This note details simulations of the
            distributional impacts of the 2009 financial crisis on
            households in Latvia. It uses household survey data
            collected prior to the crisis and simulates the impact of
            the growth slowdown. The simulations show that Latvia
            experienced a sharp rise in poverty, widening of the poverty
            gap, and a rise in income inequality due to the economic
            contraction in 2009. The 18 percent contraction in gross
            domestic product (affecting mainly trade hotels and
            restaurants, construction, and manufacturing) likely led the
            poverty head count to increase from 14.4 percent in 2008 to
            20.2 percent in 2009. The poverty gap, which measures the
            national poverty deficit, was simulated to increase from 5.9
            percent in 2008 to 8.3 percent in 2009. The analysis finds
            that the results are robust to most assumptions except
            post-layoff incomes, which substantially mitigated household
            welfare. The authors also simulate the impact of
            Latvia's Emergency Social Safety Net components and
            find that the Safety Net likely mitigated crisis impacts for
            many beneficiaries. The simulations measure only direct
            short-run impacts; hence, they do not take into account
            general equilibrium effects. Post-crisis income data from a
            different data source suggest that poverty rates increased
            by 8.0 percentage points between 2008 and 2009. As a result,
            the authors suggest that their ex-ante simulation performs
            reasonably well and is a useful tool to identify vulnerable
            groups during the early stages of a crisis.
Innovative firms or innovative
            owners determinants of innovation in micro, small, and
            medium enterprises
Innovation is key to technology adoption
            and creation, and to explaining the vast differences in
            productivity across and within countries. Despite the
            central role of the entrepreneur in the innovation process,
            data limitations have restricted standard analysis of the
            determinants of innovation to consideration of the role of
            firm characteristics. The authors develop a model of
            innovation that incorporates the role of both owner and firm
            characteristics, and use this to determine how product,
            process, marketing, and organizational innovations should
            vary with firm size and competition. They then use a new,
            large, representative survey from Sri Lanka to test this
            model and to examine whether and how owner characteristics
            matter for innovation. The survey also allows analysis of
            the incidence of innovation in micro and small firms, which
            have traditionally been overlooked in the study of
            innovation, despite these firms comprising the majority of
            firms in developing countries. The analysis finds that more
            than one-quarter of the microenterprises are engaging in
            innovation, with marketing innovations the most common. As
            predicted by the model, firm size has a stronger positive
            effect, and competition a stronger negative effect, on
            process and organizational innovations than on product
            innovations. Owner ability, personality traits, and
            ethnicity have a significant and substantial impact on the
            likelihood of a firm innovating, confirming the importance
            of the entrepreneur in the innovation process.
Beyond mitigation : potential
            options for counter-balancing the climatic and environmental
            consequences of the rising concentrations of greenhouse gases
Global climate change is occurring at an
            accelerating pace, and the global greenhouse gas (GHG)
            emissions that are forcing climate change continue to
            increase. Given the present pace of international actions,
            it seems unlikely that atmospheric composition can be
            stabilized at a level that will avoid "dangerous
            anthropogenic interference" with the climate system, as
            called for in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
            Complicating the situation, as GHG emissions are reduced,
            reductions in the offsetting cooling influence of sulfate
            aerosols will create an additional warming influence, making
            an early transition to climate stabilization difficult. With
            significant reductions in emissions (mitigation) likely to
            take decades, and with the impacts of projected climate
            change-even with proactive adaptation-likely to be quite
            severe over the coming decades, additional actions to offset
            global warming and other impacts have been proposed as
            important complementary measures. Although a number of
            possible geoengineering approaches have been proposed, each
            has costs and side effects that must be balanced against the
            expected benefits of reduced climate impacts. However,
            substantial new research is needed before comparison of the
            relative benefits and risks of intervening is possible. A
            first step in determining whether geoengineering is likely
            to be a useful option is the initiation of research on four
            interventions to limit the increasing serious impacts:
            limiting ocean acidification by increasing the removal of
            carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and upper ocean; limiting
            the increasing intensity of tropical cyclones; limiting the
            warming of the Arctic and associated sea level rise; and
            sustaining or enhancing the existing sulfate cooling
            influence. In addition, in depth consideration is needed
            regarding the governance structure for an international
            geoengineering decision-making framework in the event that
            geoengineering becomes essential.
Impact assessments in finance and
            private sector development : what have we learned and what
            should we learn
Until recently rigorous impact
            evaluations have been rare in the area of finance and
            private sector development. One reason for this is the
            perception that many policies and projects in this area lend
            themselves less to formal evaluations. However, a vanguard
            of new impact evaluations on areas as diverse as fostering
            microenterprise growth, microfinance, rainfall insurance,
            and regulatory reform demonstrates that in many
            circumstances serious evaluation is possible. The purpose of
            this paper is to synthesize and distil the policy and
            implementation lessons emerging from these studies, use them
            to demonstrate the feasibility of impact evaluations in a
            broader array of topics, and thereby help prompt new impact
            evaluations for projects going forward.
Inflation dynamics and food prices
            in an agricultural economy : the case of Ethiopia
Ethiopia has experienced a historically
            unprecedented increase in inflation, mainly driven by cereal
            price inflation, which is among the highest in Sub-Saharan
            Africa. Using monthly data from the past decade, the authors
            estimate error correction models to identify the relative
            importance of several factors contributing to overall
            inflation and its three major components, cereal prices,
            food prices, and non-food prices. The main finding is that,
            in a longer perspective, over three to four years, the main
            factors that determine domestic food and non-food prices are
            the exchange rate and international food and goods prices.
            In the short run, agricultural supply shocks and inflation
            inertia strongly affect domestic inflation, causing large
            deviations from long-run price trends. Money supply growth
            does affect food price inflation in the short run, although
            the money stock itself does not seem to drive inflation. The
            results suggest the need for a multi-pronged approach to
            fight inflation. Forecast scenarios suggest monetary and
            exchange rate policies need to take into account cereal
            production, which is among the key determinants of
            inflation, assuming a decline in global commodity prices.
            Implementation of successful policies will be contingent on
            the availability of foreign exchange and the performance of agriculture.
Governance matters VIII : aggregate
            and individual governance indicators 1996-2008
This paper reports on the 2009 update of
            the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project,
            covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six
            dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and
            Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of
            Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory
            Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These
            aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and
            disaggregated individual variables measuring various
            dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources
            provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the
            views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO
            experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey
            respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report
            the margins of error accompanying each country estimate.
            These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring
            governance using any kind of data. They find that even after
            taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit
            meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring
            progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with
            the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.
The economic impact of banking the
            unbanked : evidence from Mexico
This paper examines the effects of
            providing financial services to low-income individuals on
            entrepreneurial activity, employment, and income. The
            analysis exploits cross-time and cross-municipality
            variation in the opening of Banco Azteca in Mexico to
            measure these effects with a difference-in-difference
            strategy. Banco Azteca opened more than 800 branches
            simultaneously in 2002, focusing on low-income clients. The
            results show that the opening of Banco Azteca led to an
            increase in the number of informal business owners by 7.6
            percent. Total employment also increased, by 1.4 percent,
            and average income went up by about 7 percent.
Diasporas
Migration flows are shaped by a complex
            combination of self-selection and out-selection mechanisms.
            In this paper, the authors analyze how existing diasporas
            (the stock of people born in a country and living in another
            one) affect the size and human-capital structure of current
            migration flows. The analysis exploits a bilateral data set
            on international migration by educational attainment from
            195 countries to 30 developed countries in 1990 and 2000.
            Based on simple micro-foundations and controlling for
            various determinants of migration, the analysis finds that
            diasporas increase migration flows, lower the average
            educational level and lead to higher concentration of
            low-skill migrants. Interestingly, diasporas explain the
            majority of the variability of migration flows and
            selection. This suggests that, without changing the
            generosity of family reunion programs, education-based
            selection rules are likely to have a moderate impact. The
            results are highly robust to the econometric techniques,
            accounting for the large proportion of zeros and endogeneity problems.