rafmacalaba/datause-encoder-data huggingface dataset:
Cohort size and youth employment outcomes
This paper utilizes a cross-country
            panel of 83 developing countries to examine how changes in
            cohort size are correlated with subsequent employment
            outcomes for workers at different ages. The results depend
            on countries' level of development. In low-income
            countries, young adults that are born into smaller cohorts
            are less likely to work, but   school attendance remains
            unchanged. In middle-income countries, young adults in
            smaller cohorts are less likely to be unemployed and more
            likely to work outside of agriculture. Neither pattern can
            be discerned among older adults, although the estimates are
            imprecise. In sum, reductions in cohort size are associated
            with moderate improvements in employment outcomes for youth
            in middle-income countries, but there is scant evidence that
            these improvements persist into adulthood.
Too small to regulate
The paper argues that to achieve
            compliance of firms with regulations such as product quality
            or environmental or health standards it is better to have
            industries with a few large corporations than numerous small
            firms. A model is constructed to show that limited liability
            constraints bind more easily in competitive industries,
            making it harder to impose sufficiently severe penalties and
            costlier to send sufficient monitors. Having large
            corporations allows the government effectively to delegate
            some of its monitoring functions to the managers of the
            corporation. The tradeoff between this issue and the usual
            argument in favor of competition is considered.
Sub-Saharan Africa's recent
            growth spurt : an analysis of the sources of growth
Since the mid-1990s, Sub-Saharan Africa
            has experienced unprecedented levels of high economic
            growth. A key question follows: What accounts for the
            turnaround of the growth performance in the mid-1990s? The
            answer can provide insight into whether the recent growth
            spurt in Sub-Saharan Africa is merely temporary or the
            beginning of a sustainable takeoff. This paper examines the
            sources of growth of 32 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa in a
            growth accounting framework. The findings suggest that the
            recent growth spurt is largely associated with an increase
            in the share of working-age population, capital
            accumulation, and total factor productivity, unlike previous
            periods. Resources play a role by attracting capital
            inflows, particularly from foreign direct investment and
            shifting labor away from agriculture. However, the growth
            prospects for Sub-Saharan Africa seem promising beyond
            resources, with steady progress in decreased fertility,
            increased foreign direct investment, political stability,
            and structural transformation.
The effect of aid on growth :
            evidence from a quasi-experiment
The literature on aid and growth has not
            found a convincing instrumental variable to identify the
            causal effects of aid. This paper exploits an instrumental
            variable based on the fact that since 1987, eligibility for
            aid from the International Development Association (IDA) has
            been based partly on whether or not a country is below a
            certain threshold of per capita income. The paper finds
            evidence that other donors tend to reinforce rather than
            compensate for reductions in IDA aid following threshold
            crossings. Overall, aid as a share of gross national income
            (GNI) drops about 59 percent on average after countries
            cross the threshold. Focusing on the 35 countries that have
            crossed the income threshold from below between 1987 and
            2010, a positive, statistically significant, and
            economically sizable effect of aid on growth is found. A one
            percentage point increase in the aid to GNI ratio from the
            sample mean raises annual real per capita growth in gross
            domestic product by approximately 0.35 percentage points.
            The analysis shows that the main channel through which aid
            promotes growth is by increasing physical investment.
Urbanization as opportunity
Urbanization deserves urgent attention
            from policy makers, academics, entrepreneurs, and social
            reformers of all stripes. Nothing else will create as many
            opportunities for social and economic progress. The
            urbanization project began roughly 1,000 years after the
            transition from the Pleistocene to the milder and more
            stable Holocene interglacial. In 2010, the urban population
            in developing countries stood at 2.5 billion. The developing
            world can accommodate the urban population growth and
            declining urban density in many ways. The most important
            citywide projects -- successes like New York and Shenzhen --
            show even more clearly how influential human intention can
            be. The developing world can accommodate the urban
            population growth and declining urban density in many ways.
            One is to have a threefold increase in the average
            population of its existing cities and a six fold increase in
            their average built-out area. Another, which will leave the
            built-out area of existing cities unchanged, will be to
            develop 625 new cities of 10 million people -- 500 new
            cities to accommodate the net increase in the urban
            population and another 125 to accommodate the 1.25 billion
            people who will have to leave existing cities as average
            density falls by half.
The end of seasonality new insights
            from Sub-Saharan Africa
This paper revisits the extent of
            seasonality in African livelihoods, which has disappeared
            from Africa's development debate. Through econometric
            analysis of monthly food price series across 100 locations
            in three countries during 2000-12, it is shown that seasonal
            movements in maize wholesale prices explain 20 (Tanzania,
            Uganda) to 40 (Malawi) percent of their monthly volatility.
            Monthly maize peak prices are on average 30 (Tanzania,
            Uganda) to 50 (Malawi) percent higher than their monthly
            troughs and two to three times higher than the seasonal gaps
            observed for white maize at the South African Futures
            Exchange. Furthermore, household food consumption is found
            to inversely track food prices in each country, decreasing
            when staple prices increase and increasing when they
            decline. Clearly, (excess) seasonality in African food
            markets and consumption persists, necessitating policy attention.
The trade-reducing effects of
            restrictions on liner shipping
This paper examines how policy governing
            the liner shipping sector affects maritime transport costs
            and seaborne trade flows. The paper uses a novel data set
            and finds that restrictions, particularly on foreign
            investment, increase maritime transport costs, strongly but
            unevenly. The cost-inflating effect ranges from 24 to 50
            percent and trade on some routes may be inhibited
            altogether. Distance increases maritime transport costs, but
            also attenuates the cost impact of policy barriers. Overall,
            policy restrictions may lower trade flows on specific routes
            by up to 46 percent and therefore deserve greater attention
            in national reform programs and international trade negotiations.
Fiscal adjustment and income
            inequality : sub-national evidence from Brazil
The paper combines state-level fiscal
            data with household survey data to assess the links between
            sub-national fiscal policy and income inequality in Brazil
            over the period 1995-2011. The results indicate that a
            tighter fiscal stance at the sub-national level is not
            associated with a deterioration in inequality measures. This
            finding contrasts with the conclusions of several papers in
            the burgeoning literature on the effects of fiscal
            consolidation on inequality using national data for OECD
            economies. In addition, the authors find that a tighter
            stance is typically positively associated with a measure of
            "shared prosperity". Hence, the results caution
            against extrapolating policy implications of the literature
            focusing on advanced economies to other settings.
Deals and delays : firm-level
            evidence on corruption and policy implementation times
This paper examines whether demands for
            bribes for particular government services are associated
            with expedited or delayed policy implementation. The
            "grease the wheels" hypothesis, which contends
            that bribes act as speed money, implies three testable
            predictions. First, on average, bribe requests should be
            negatively correlated with wait times. Second, this
            relationship should vary across firms, with those with the
            highest opportunity cost of waiting being more likely to pay
            and face shorter delays. Third, the role of grease should
            vary across countries, with benefits larger where regulatory
            burdens are greatest. The data are inconsistent with all
            three predictions. According to the preferred
            specifications, ceteris paribus, firms confronted with
            demands for bribes take approximately 1.5 times longer to
            get a construction permit, operating license, or electrical
            connection than firms that did not have to pay bribes and,
            respectively, 1.2 and 1.4 times longer to clear customs when
            exporting and importing. The results are robust to
            controlling for firm fixed effects and at odds with the
            notion that corruption enhances efficiency.
The anatomy of failure : an
            ethnography of a randomized trial to deepen democracy in
            rural India
Programs that induce citizen
            participation to improve the quality of government at the
            local level are the subjects of large amounts of funding and
            intense debate. This paper combines a randomized control
            trial of a citizenship training and facilitation program in
            rural India, with an in-depth, four-year ethnography of the
            intervention to understand the underlying mechanisms of
            change. The quantitative data show no impact from the
            intervention. Household and village survey data from 100
            treatment and 100 control villages show considerable
            improvement across a wide variety of governance and
            participation indicators over time, but the differences in
            the changes between treatment and control villages are not
            statistically significant. The detailed qualitative data
            from a 10 percent subsample allow us to unpack the reasons
            why the intervention "failed," highlighting the
            role of variations in the quality of facilitation, lack of
            top-down support, and difficulties with confronting the
            stubborn challenge of persistent inequality. However, the
            qualitative investigation also uncovered subtle treatment
            effects that are difficult to observe in structured surveys.
            The paper thus demonstrates that a concerted effort to use
            "thick description" to uncover the process of
            change using careful and detailed qualitative work can add
            value to standard impact evaluations.
Can service be a growth escalator in
            low-income countries
Several high-level reports have raised
            the concern that low-income countries, especially in Africa,
            are experiencing premature de-industrialization. The concern
            is that they are growing without transforming. Have the
            latecomers to development missed the boat? Although these
            concerns are well placed, Africa's growth seems to be
            benefitting from a structural transformation of a different
            kind. The manufacturing sector as a share of gross domestic
            product has shrunk, but countries have benefitted from the
            third industrial revolution with globalization of services
            being at the forefront of this technological revolution. As
            services produced and traded across the world expand with
            globalization, the possibilities for low-income countries to
            develop based on their comparative advantage expand. That
            comparative advantage can just as easily be in services as
            in manufacturing. Comparative advantage need not be a
            one-trick pony.
Learning dynamics and support for
            economic reforms : why good news can be bad
Support for economic reforms has often
            shown puzzling dynamics: many reforms that began
            successfully lost public support. This paper shows that
            learning dynamics can rationalize this paradox because the
            process of revealing reform outcomes is an example of
            sampling without replacement. This concept challenges the
            conventional wisdom that one should begin by revealing
            reform winners. It may also lead to situations in which
            reforms that enjoy both ex ante and ex post majority support
            will still not come to completion. The framework can be used
            to explain why gradual reforms worked well in China (where
            successes in Special Economic Zones facilitated further
            reform), whereas this was much less the case for Latin
            American and Central and Eastern European countries.