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  • 2010-2014  (582)
  • 1990-1994
  • 1925-1929
  • 2013  (582)
  • 1929
  • Washington, D.C : The World Bank  (582)
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  • 2010-2014  (582)
  • 1990-1994
  • 1925-1929
Year
  • 1
    ISBN: 9780821398371
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    DDC: 333.79/40959091732
    Keywords: Cities and towns Case studies Energy consumption ; Energy policy Case studies ; Infrastructure (Economics) Case studies ; Renewable energy sources Case studies ; Sustainable urban development Case studies ; Urban ecology (Sociology) Case studies ; Cities and towns Case studies Energy consumption ; Energy policy Case studies ; Infrastructure (Economics) Case studies ; Renewable energy sources Case studies ; Sustainable urban development Case studies ; Urban ecology (Sociology) Case studies ; Cities and towns ; Energy policy ; Infrastructure (Economics) ; Renewable energy sources ; Sustainable urban development ; Urban ecology (Sociology) ; Fallstudiensammlung
    Abstract: "Presents a blueprint for transforming East Asian cities to global engines of green growth by choosing energy efficient solutions for their infrastructure needs, with case studies in Cebu City (the Philippines), Da Nang (Vietnam), and Surabaya (Indonesia) illustrating the use of sustainable urban energy and emissions planning (SUEEP)"--
    Note: Includes bibliographical references
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 2
    ISBN: 9781464800269
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    DDC: 363.34/92172
    Keywords: Emergency management Planning ; Meteorological services ; Weather forecasting ; Emergency management Planning ; Meteorological services ; Weather forecasting ; Emergency management ; Meteorological services ; Planning ; Weather forecasting
    Note: Includes bibliographical references
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 3
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    ISBN: 9780821398135
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (239 p)
    Edition: 2015 World Bank eLibrary
    DDC: 338.9
    Abstract: This pocket-sized reference on key development data for over 200 countries provides profiles of each country with 54 development indicators about people, environment, economy, technology and infrastructure, trade, and finance
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 4
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    ISBN: 9780821396179
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (208 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Series Statement: Africa Development Indicators
    DDC: 330.960112
    Keywords: Afrika ; Wirtschaftsentwicklung ; Indikator
    Abstract: Africa Development Indicators 2012/13 is the most detailed collection of data on Africa. It contains macroeconomic, sectoral, and social indicators for 53 countries. The print edition includes a companion CD-ROM with additional data, some 1,700 indicators covering 1961-2010. -Basic indicators -National and fiscal accounts -External accounts and exchange rates -Millennium Development Goals -Private sector development -Trade and regional integration -Infrastructure -Human development -Agriculture, rural development, and the environment -Labor, migration, and population -HIV/AIDS and malaria -Capable states and partnership -Paris Declaration indicators -Governance and polity Designed as both a quick reference and a reliable dataset for monitoring development programs and aid flows in the region, Africa Development Indicators 2012/13 is an invaluable tool for analysts and policymakers who want a better understanding of Africa’s economic and social development
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 5
    ISBN: 9780821396551
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (xxv, 146 pages) , illustrations , 27 cm
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    DDC: 333.33/8
    Keywords: Housing policy ; Rental housing ; Housing policy ; Rental housing ; Housing policy ; Rental housing
    Note: Includes bibliographical references
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 6
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    ISBN: 9781464800108
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource , Illustrations
    Series Statement: New Frontiers of Social Policy
    Series Statement: World Bank E-Library Archive
    DDC: 302
    Note: Includes bibliographical references
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  • 7
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: 1 Online-Ressource (xxiii, 273 pages) , illustrations , 23 cm
    Edition: Online edition s.l.
    Series Statement: New Frontiers of Social Policy
    Series Statement: World Bank eLibrary
    DDC: 302
    Keywords: Marginality, Social ; Social integration
    Note: Includes bibliographical references
    URL: Volltext  (URL des Erstveröffentlichers)
    URL: Volltext  (URL des Erstveröffentlichers)
    URL: Volltext  (URL des Erstveröffentlichers)
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  • 8
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    ISBN: 9780821398258
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (123 p)
    Edition: 2015 World Bank eLibrary
    Series Statement: World Development Indicators
    Abstract: A new look and new ways to access the world’s premier source of development data Looking for accurate, up-to-date data on development issues? World Development Indicators (WDI) is the World Bank’s premier annual compilation of data about development. Compiled from officially-recognized international sources, WDI presents the most current and accurate global development data available, including national, regional and global estimates. This year’s print edition and e-book have been redesigned to allow users the convenience of easily linking to the latest data on-line. What you will find in the print edition: • A selection of the most popular indicators across 155 economies and 14 country groups organized into six WDI themes • Thematic and regional highlights, providing an overview of global development trends • An in-depth review of the progress made toward achieving the Millennium Development Goals • A user guide describing resources available on-line and on mobile apps. What you can do on-line: • Download individual tables and other key information • Access and download time series data using the data retrieval system • Access indicators in five different languages (Arabic, Chinese, French, English, and Spanish) • Directly obtain the the most up-to-date data available. The WDI Little Data Book 2013 is a companion to the WDI, and is a handy country-by-country view of key development indicators for more than 200 countries. Each page provides a country data profile of of its people, environment, economy, states and markets, and global links.. ACCESS WDI TIME SERIES DATA FREE ONLINE = data.worldbank.org (the full data retrieval system organized by indicator, country and topic); and data.worldbank.org/data-catalog/world-development-indicators (for all on-line WDI resources) DOWNLOAD THE WDI DATAFINDER MOBILE APP AND OTHERS = data.worldbank.org/apps WDI DataFinder is a mobile app for browsing the current WDI database on smartphones and tablets, using iOS, Android, and Blackberry, available in four languages: English, French, Spanish, and Chinese. Use the app to browse data using the structure of the WDI; visually compare countries and indicators; create, edit and save customized tables, charts and maps; and share what you create on Twitter, Facebook, and via email
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 9
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    ISBN: 9780821397862
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (115 p)
    Edition: 2015 World Bank eLibrary
    Series Statement: Africa Development Indicators
    Abstract: The Little Data Book on Gender in Africa 2012/13 provides a summary collection of gender statistics on Africa available in one volume. It contains 60 indicators, covering 53 African countries. Additional data may be found on the companion CD-ROM or online, covering about 1,700 indicators from 1961 to 2011. Key themes are : • Basic demographic indicators • Education • Health • Labor force and wages • Women’s empowerment. Designed to provide all those interested in Africa with quick reference and a reliable set of data to monitor development programs and aid flows in the region, this is an invaluable pocket edition reference tool for analysts and policy makers who want a better understanding of the economic and social developments occurring in Africa. For free access to Africa Development Indicators online, please visit http://data.worldbank.org/data-catalog
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 10
    ISBN: 9780821397435 , 9780821398470 , 9780821398500
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (3 volumes)) , 26 cm
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Series Statement: A World Bank study
    DDC: 371.2/07096761
    Keywords: Curriculum planning ; School children Food ; School improvement programs ; School-based management ; Teacher effectiveness ; Curriculum planning ; School children Food ; School improvement programs ; School-based management ; Teacher effectiveness ; Curriculum planning ; School children ; School improvement programs ; School-based management ; Teacher effectiveness
    Note: Includes bibliographical references and index
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 11
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    ISBN: 9780821398159
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (239 p)
    Edition: 2015 World Bank eLibrary
    Abstract: The Little Green Data Book is a pocket-sized ready reference on key environmental data for over 200 countries. Key indicators are organized under the headings of agriculture, forestry, biodiversity, oceans, energy, emission and pollution, and water and sanitation. The 2013 edition of The Little Green Data Book introduces new set of ocean-related indicators, highlighting the role of oceans in economic development
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 12
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    ISBN: 9780821398739
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (254 p)
    Edition: 2015 World Bank eLibrary
    Series Statement: Independent Evaluation Group Studies
    Abstract: This report evaluates the outcomes of World Bank Group support to Afghanistan from 2002-11. Despite extremely difficult security conditions, which deteriorated markedly after 2006, the World Bank Group has commendably established and sustained a large program of support to the country. The key messages of the evaluation are: • While World Bank Group strategy has been highly relevant to Afghanistan’s situation, beginning in 2006 the strategies could have gone further in adapting ongoing programs to evolving opportunities and needs, and in programming activities sufficient to achieve the objectives of the pillars in those strategies. • Overall, Bank Group assistance has achieved substantial progress toward most of its major objectives, although risks to development outcomes remain high. Impressive results have been achieved in public financial management, public health, telecommunications, and community development; substantial outputs have also been achieved in primary education, rural roads, irrigation, and microfinance-all started during the initial phase. Bank assistance has been critical in developing the mining sector as a potential engine of growth. However, progress has been limited in civil service reform, agriculture, urban development, and private sector development. • The Bank Group’s direct financial assistance has been augmented effectively by analytic and advisory activities and donor coordination through the Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund. Knowledge services have been an important part of Bank Group support and have demonstrated the value of strategic analytical work, even in areas where the Bank Group may opt out of direct project financing. • With the expected reduction of the international presence in 2014, sustainability of development gains remains a major risk because of capacity constraints and inadequate human resources planning on the civilian side. To enhance program effectiveness, the evaluation recommends that the Bank Group help the government develop a comprehensive, long-term human resources strategy for the civilian sectors; focus on strategic analytical work in sectors that are high priorities for the government; assist in the development of local government institutions and, in the interim, support the development of a viable system for service delivery at subnational levels; assist in transforming the National Solidarity Program into a more sustainable financial and institutional model to consolidate ...
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  • 13
    ISBN: 9781464800603 , 9781464800610
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    Series Statement: Directions in development
    DDC: 362.1
    Keywords: Economic Development ; Economic Recession ; Health Care Sector economics ; Health Policy ; Economic Development ; Economic Recession ; Health Care Sector ; Health Policy ; economics
    Description / Table of Contents: A framework for health sector resilienceAssessing vulnerability of the health sector to economic downturns -- Tracking the impact on households and institutions : the Europe and Central Asia story -- Mitigating the effects of economic downturns -- Lessons from the European Union.
    Note: Includes bibliographical references
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  • 14
    ISBN: 9780821387306
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (397 p)
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    Series Statement: Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics (Global)
    Abstract: The Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 2011: Development Challenges in a Post-crisis World (ABCDE) presents papers from a global gathering of the world?s leading development scholars and practitioners held May 31 - June 2, 2010. Paper themes include: Environmental Commons and the Green Economy, Post-crisis Development Strategy, the Political Economy of Fragile States, Measuring Welfare, and Social Programs and Transfers. Keynote addresses: Elinor Ostrom: Overcoming the Samaritan's Dlimemma in Development Aid -- Torsten Persson: Weak States, Strong States, and Development -- Joseph Stiglitz: Learning, Growth, and Development -- Partha Dasgupta: Poverty Traps --
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  • 15
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    ISBN: 9780821398289
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource
    Edition: 2014 World Bank eLibrary
    DDC: 332.098
    Keywords: Finance ; Financial institutions ; Monetary policy ; Finance ; Financial institutions ; Monetary policy ; Finance ; Financial institutions ; Monetary policy
    Note: Includes bibliographical references and index
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 16
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (33 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Ley, Eduardo Real-Time Macro Monitoring and Fiscal Policy
    Abstract: This paper considers the effects of inaccurate real-time output data on fiscal management, both with respect to budgetary planning and fiscal surveillance. As newer and better information becomes available, output data available in real time get revised and are likely to conflict with final figures that are only released some years later. Nevertheless, fiscal policy needs to be inevitably based on real-time figures. The paper develops a simple modeling framework to formalize these linkages and combines it with a newly compiled dataset from the International Monetary Fund's World Economic Outlook, comprising final and real-time output data for 175 countries, over a period of 17 years. We simulate the effects of output revisions on revisions of the overall balance, the structural balance and debt accumulation. It finds that output revisions may have substantial effects on the ability of governments to correctly estimate the overall balance and the structural fiscal balance in real time, and that the effects may imply substantial debt accumulation
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  • 17
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (41 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Agénor, Pierre-Richard Gender Equality and Economic Growth in Brazil
    Abstract: This paper studies the long-run impact of policies aimed at fostering gender equality on economic growth in Brazil. The first part provides a brief review of gender issues in the country. The second part presents a gender-based, three-period OLG model that accounts for women's time allocation between market work, child rearing, human capital accumulation, and home production. Bargaining between spouses depends on relative human capital stocks, and thus indirectly on access to infrastructure. The model is calibrated and various experiments are conducted, including investment in infrastructure, conditional cash transfers, a reduction in gender bias in the market place, and a composite pro-growth, pro-gender reform program. The analysis showed that fostering gender equality, which may partly depend on the externalities that infrastructure creates in terms of women's time allocation and bargaining power, may have a substantial impact on long-run growth in Brazil
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  • 18
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (37 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Buvinic, Mayra Violent Conflict and Gender Inequality
    Abstract: Violent conflict, a pervasive feature of the recent global landscape, has lasting impacts on human capital, and these impacts are seldom gender neutral. Death and destruction alter the structure and dynamics of households, including their demographic profiles and traditional gender roles. To date, attention to the gender impacts of conflict has focused almost exclusively on sexual and gender-based violence. The authors show that a far wider set of gender issues must be considered to better document the human consequences of war and to design effective postconflict policies. The emerging empirical evidence is organized using a framework that identifies both the differential impacts of violent conflict on males and females (first-round impacts) and the role of gender inequality in framing adaptive responses to conflict (second-round impacts). War's mortality burden is disproportionately borne by males, whereas women and children constitute a majority of refugees and the displaced. Indirect war impacts on health are more equally distributed between the genders. Conflicts create households headed by widows who can be especially vulnerable to intergenerational poverty. Second-round impacts can provide opportunities for women in work and politics triggered by the absence of men. Households adapt to conflict with changes in marriage and fertility, migration, investments in children's health and schooling, and the distribution of labor between the genders. The impacts of conflict are heterogeneous and can either increase or decrease preexisting gender inequalities. Describing these gender differential effects is a first step toward developing evidence-based conflict prevention and postconflict policy
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  • 19
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (13 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Hanusch, Marek Credit Rating Agencies in Emerging Democracies
    Abstract: Credit rating agencies have drawn criticism for failing to anticipate and deter root causes of the 2008-2009 financial crisis in the United States. However, this paper presents evidence that credit rating agencies regularly anticipate and deter governments in emerging democracies from opportunistic borrowing and potential financial crises related to elections and the political budget cycle behavior they encourage. The paper considers a sample of 18 such countries holding 32 presidential elections from 1989 to 2004. The analysis shows that credit rating agencies induced greater fiscal discipline during election periods when governments had incentives to borrow opportunistically for short-term electoral gain. Countries with higher credit rating agency sovereign ratings borrowed less than lower-rated countries in election periods, but borrowed more in non-election periods. Credit rating agencies promoted fiscal discipline during increasingly frequent election periods in emerging democracies
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  • 20
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (24 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Zhang, Fan The Energy Transition of the Transition Economies
    Abstract: The aggregate manufacturing energy intensity of 28 countries in Eastern Europe and Central Asia had declined by 35 percent during 1998-2008. This study reveals strong evidence of convergence: less efficient countries improved more rapidly and the cross-country variance in energy productivity narrowed over time. An index decomposition analysis indicates that energy intensities declined largely because of more efficient energy use rather than shifts from energy intensive to less intensive manufacturing activities. Income growth and energy price increases were the main drivers of the convergence. They dominated the impact of trade, which led to specialization in energy intensive industries
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  • 21
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (37 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Lofgren, Hans Closing Rural-Urban MDG Gaps in Low-Income Countries
    Abstract: This paper addresses policies aimed at closing the rural-urban gap for one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the under-five mortality rate (U5MR). The paper relies on the Maquette for MDG Simulations (MAMS), a computable general equilibrium model, applied to the database of an archetypical low-income country. The scenarios, which focus on the period 2013-2030, include a "business-as-usual" base scenario and policy scenarios that analyze efforts to raise the rural population up to the urban level in terms of health services or the under-five mortality rate. The policy scenarios are implemented with alternative sources of fiscal space. The results indicate that, if current trends continue, considerable progress for MDGs should be expected by 2030. If the government raises rural health services, then the decline in the rural U5MR would accelerate. If most additional resources come from foreign grants or government efficiency gains, then the repercussions for other development indicators, including poverty reduction, would be positive. However, if most additional resources are from domestic taxes or borrowing, then progress for the rural U5MR would come at the expense of less progress for other indicators. Sensitivity analysis shows that these qualitative findings are robust to different values for two parameters related to initial rural-urban cost and service gaps. However, quantitatively, the results depend on the values of these two parameters, implying that individual country characteristics strongly influence the fiscal-space requirements for and consequences of equalizing rural-urban MDG services and outcomes
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  • 22
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (34 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Tiwari, Sailesh Monsoon Babies
    Keywords: Kinder ; Biologische Daten ; Ernährung ; Niederschlag ; Nepal
    Abstract: Do household consumption-smoothing strategies in poor countries entail significant long-run costs in terms of reduced human capital? This paper exploits the timing of monsoon rainfall shocks and the seasonal nature of agriculture to isolate income effects on early childhood anthropometric outcomes in rural Nepal and to provide evidence on the persistence of these effects into later childhood. Findings suggest that a 10 percent increase in rainfall from historic norms during the most recently completed monsoon leads to a 0.15 standard deviation increase in weight-for-age for children ages 0-36 months. This total impact consists of a negative "disease environment effect" of no more than 0.02 standard deviations and a positive "income effect" as high as 0.17 standard deviations. Consistent with this interpretation, excess monsoon rainfall also enhances child stature, but only if the monsoon rainfall shock is experienced in the second year of life. Moreover, this effect on child height is transitory, dissipating completely by age five
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  • 23
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (39 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Mayneris, Florian Chinese Firms' Entry to Export Markets
    Abstract: In this paper, the effect of proximity to multinational exporters on the creation of new export linkages (the extensive margin of trade) is debated. Using panel data from Chinese customs for 1997-2007, the capacity for Chinese domestic firms to begin exporting new varieties to new markets is shown to respond positively to the export activity of neighboring foreign firms. These spillovers are shown to be product and country specific. This conclusion is robust to fixed effects and instrumental variable specifications that control for both supply and demand shocks that could bias the estimations. The impact is sizable. The marginal impact of product-country-specific foreign export spillovers is five times as large as the effect of a 10 percent increase in the demand for the product in the destination country. Foreign export spillovers are also shown to be primarily limited to ordinary trade activities. Overall, our findings suggest that even for a country with an important cost-advantage such as China, there is room for initiatives from policy-makers that will diffuse best practices regarding export experience among exporters
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  • 24
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (44 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Ghani, Ejaz Diasporas and Outsourcing
    Abstract: This paper examines the role of the Indian diaspora in the outsourcing of work to India. The data are taken from oDesk, the world's largest online platform for outsourced contracts. Despite oDesk minimizing many of the frictions that diaspora connections have traditionally overcome, diaspora connections still matter on oDesk, with ethnic Indians substantially more likely to choose a worker in India. This higher placement is the result of a greater likelihood of choosing India for the initial contract, due in large part to taste-based preferences, and substantial path dependence in location choices. The paper further examines wage and performance outcomes of outsourcing as a function of ethnic connections
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  • 25
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (50 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Jacoby, Hanan G Food Prices, Wages, and Welfare in Rural India
    Abstract: This paper considers the welfare and distributional consequences of higher relative food prices in rural India through the lens of a specific-factors, general equilibrium, trade model applied at the district level. The evidence shows that nominal wages for manual labor both within and outside agriculture respond elastically to increases in producer prices; that is, wages rose faster in rural districts growing more of those crops with large price run-ups over 2004-09. Accounting for such wage gains, the analysis finds that rural households across the income spectrum benefit from higher agricultural commodity prices. Indeed, rural wage adjustment appears to play a much greater role in protecting the welfare of the poor than the Public Distribution System, India's giant food-rationing scheme. Moreover, policies, like agricultural export bans, which insulate producers (as well as consumers) from international price increases, are particularly harmful to the poor of rural India. Conventional welfare analyses that assume fixed wages and focus on households' net sales position lead to radically different conclusions
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  • 26
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (38 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Azevedo, Joao Pedro Is Labor Income Responsible for Poverty Reduction?
    Abstract: Demographics, labor income, public transfers, or remittances: Which factor contributes the most to observed reductions in poverty? Using counterfactual simulations, this paper accounts for the contribution labor income has made to the observed changes in poverty over the past decade for a set of 16 countries that have experienced substantial declines in poverty. In contrast to methods that focus on aggregate summary statistics, the analysis generates entire counterfactual distributions that allow assessing the contributions of different factors to observed distributional changes. Decompositions across all possible paths are calculated so the estimates are not subject to path-dependence. The analysis shows that for most countries in the sample, labor income is the most important contributor to changes in poverty. In ten of the countries, labor income explains more than half of the change in moderate poverty; in another four, it accounts for more than 40 percent of the reduction in poverty. Although public and private transfers were relatively more important in explaining the reduction in extreme poverty, more and better-paying jobs were the key factors behind poverty reduction over the past decade
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  • 27
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (41 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Hamilton, Alexander Small is Beautiful, at Least in High-Income Democracies
    Abstract: Why is there significant variation in rent extraction among high-income democracies? A large number of political economy investigations into this research question have found that a long period of democratic rule and high per capita income are associated with less rent extraction among public policy-makers. However, attempts to explain the residual, yet significant, variation in rent extraction among countries that possess both these characteristics have been significantly more circumspect and disputed. This paper explores how the distribution of policy-making responsibilities between electorally accountable decision-makers and their electorally unaccountable public policy-making counterparts determines the optimal level of rents extracted in any given high-income democracy context. Specifically, the paper formally models how: (1) variation in the ratio of electorally accountable decision-makers to electorally unaccountable decision-makers, by altering (2) voters' evaluation of incumbent competency, changes (3) the incentives that policy-makers, wishing to remain in office, have to minimize their short-term level of rent extraction in order to signal their competency and hopefully retain office. Given these “career concerns,” the theoretical model predicts that an increase or decrease in the ratio will be associated with more or less rent extraction. This hypothesis is then tested empirically. Establishing that the ratio does robustly predict variation in rent extraction is a significant finding, as it can enable analysts to predict how changes in policy-making contexts may affect the incentives for good governance in this sub-set of countries
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  • 28
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (40 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Arvis, Jean-François Trade Costs in the Developing World
    Abstract: The authors use newly collected data on trade and production in 178 countries to infer estimates of trade costs in agriculture and manufactured goods for the 1995-2010 period. The data show that trade costs are strongly declining in per capita income. Moreover, the rate of change of trade costs is largely unfavorable to the developing world: trade costs are falling noticeably faster in developed countries than in developing ones, which serves to increase the relative isolation of the latter. In particular, Sub-Saharan African countries and low-income countries remain subject to very high levels of trade costs. In terms of policy implications, the analysis finds that maritime transport connectivity and logistics performance are very important determinants of bilateral trade costs: in some specifications, their combined effect is comparable to that of geographical distance. Traditional and non-traditional trade policies more generally, including market entry barriers and regional integration agreements, play a significant role in shaping the trade costs landscape
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  • 29
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (24 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Avsar, Veysel Antidumping, Retaliation Threats, and Export Prices
    Abstract: Utilizing four-dimensional (firm-product-destination-year) Brazilian firm-level export data, the paper shows that antidumping (AD) duties result in a significant and dramatic increase in the unit values of the products that firms export to duty-imposing countries. Furthermore, it examines the effect of potential (retaliatory) AD duties on the unit price of the firms' shipments. The findings suggest that AD activities in Brazil lead Brazilian exporting firms to increase their unit export prices for the named industries' products to decrease the dumping margin and avoid the threat of retaliation by the target countries
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  • 30
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (38 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Grossmann, Volker Wage Effects of High-Skilled Migration
    Abstract: The international migration of high-skilled workers may trigger productivity effects at the macro level such that the wage rate of skilled workers increases in host countries and decrease in source countries. The authors exploit data on international bilateral migration flows and provide evidence consistent with this theoretical hypothesis. They propose various instrumentation strategies to identify the causal effect of skilled migration on log differences of GDP per capita, total factor productivity, and the wages of skilled workers between pairs of source and destination countries. These strategies aim to address the endogeneity problem that arises when international wage differences affect migration decisions
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  • 31
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (31 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Cihák, Martin Incentive Audits
    Abstract: A large body of evidence points to misaligned incentives as having a key role in the run-up to the global financial crisis. These include bank managers' incentives to boost short-term profits and create banks that are “too big to fail,” regulators' incentives to forebear and withhold information from other regulators in stressful times, and credit rating agencies' incentives to keep issuing high ratings for subprime assets. As part of the response to the crisis, policymakers and regulators also attempted to address some incentive issues, but various outside observers have criticized the response for being insufficient. This paper proposes a pragmatic approach to re-orienting financial regulation to have at its core the objective of addressing incentives on an ongoing basis. Specifically, the paper proposes “incentive audits” as a tool that could help in identifying incentive misalignments in the financial sector. The paper illustrates how such audits could be implemented in practice, and what the implications would be for the design of policies and frameworks to mitigate systemic risks
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  • 32
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (43 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Lozano-Gracia, Nancy Leveraging Land to Enable Urban Transformation
    Abstract: Around the world, in both developed and developing countries, policy makers use a variety of tools to manage and accommodate urban growth and redevelopment. Government officials have three main concerns in terms of land policy: (i) accommodating urban expansion, (ii) providing infrastructure, and (iii) managing density. Together, the planning for infrastructure and urban expansion, land use, and density policies combine to shape the spatial structure of cities. This paper reviews global experience on using land based instruments to accommodate urban development and financing infrastructure. The review suggests that urban transformation is most efficient when land markets are fluid, particularly when they are grounded in strong institutions that (i) assign and protect property rights, (ii) enable independent valuation and public dissemination of land values across uses, and (iii) enable the judicial system to handle disputes that may arise in the process
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  • 33
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (63 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Harrison, Ann E Explaining Africa's (Dis)advantage
    Abstract: Africa's economic performance has been widely viewed with pessimism. This paper uses firm-level data for 89 countries to examine formal firm performance. Without controls, manufacturing African firms do not perform much worse than firms in other regions. But they do have structural problems, exhibiting much lower export intensity and investment rates. Once the analysis controls for geography and the political and business environment, formal African firms robustly lead in sales growth, total factor productivity levels and productivity growth. Africa's conditional advantage is higher in low-tech than in high-tech manufacturing, and exists in manufacturing but not in services. While geography, infrastructure, and access to finance play an important role in explaining Africa's disadvantage in firm performance, the key factor is party monopoly. The longer a single political party remains in power, the lower are firm productivity levels, growth rates, and sales growth for manufacturing. In contrast, the business environment and firm characteristics (except for foreign investment) do not matter as much. The paper also finds evidence that the effects of the political and business environment are heterogeneous across sectors and firms of various levels of technology
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  • 34
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (71 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Headey, Derek D The Impact of the Global Food Crisis on Self-Assessed Food Security
    Abstract: The paper provides the first large-scale survey-based evidence on the impact of the global food crisis of 2007-08 using an indicator of self-assessed food security from the Gallup World Poll. For the sampled countries as a whole, this subjective indicator of food security remained the same or even improved, seemingly owing to a combination of strong economic growth and limited food inflation in some of the most populous countries, particularly India. However, these favorable global trends mask divergent trends at the national and regional levels, with a number of countries reporting substantial deterioration in food security. The impacts of the global crisis therefore appear to be highly context specific
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  • 35
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (38 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Michalopoulos, Constantine Trends in Developing Country Trade 1980-2010
    Abstract: This paper reviews trends and patterns in developing countries' trade from 1980 to 2010. During the 30-year span, world trade expanded rapidly, especially in developing countries in the last decade. A similar picture emerges in trade in services. These overall trends, however, mask different trade patterns during some of the time periods and among different developing countries and groups. For example, except for Asia, the 1980s were pretty much a "lost" decade for many developing countries and groups. But that changed in the 1990s and 2000s, with trade by all major developing countries growing faster than developed countries. From 1980 to 2000, trade by Least Developed Countries grew much more slowly than that of developing countries as a whole. But those countries saw the fastest growth in trade in the following decade. This strong overall trade performance-with some exceptions (for example Sub-Sahara Africa in the manufacturing trade)-raises questions about sustainability, trade policy and the architecture of the trading system
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  • 36
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (58 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Calì, Massimiliano Does Urbanization Affect Rural Poverty?
    Abstract: Although a high rate of urbanization and a high incidence of rural poverty are two distinct features of many developing countries, there is little knowledge of the effects of the former on the latter. Using a large sample of Indian districts from the 1983-1999 period, the authors find that urbanization has a substantial and systematic poverty-reducing effect in the surrounding rural areas. The results obtained through an instrumental variable estimation suggest that this effect is causal in nature and is largely attributable to the positive spillovers of urbanization on the rural economy rather than to the movement of the rural poor to urban areas. This rural poverty-reducing effect of urbanization is primarily explained by increased demand for local agricultural products and, to a lesser extent, by urban-rural remittances, the rural land/population ratio, and rural nonfarm employment
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  • 37
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (51 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Reis, José Guilherme Determinants of Export Growth at the Extensive and Intensive Margins
    Abstract: As globalization progresses and investment is mobile, it is ever more important for policy makers to understand drivers of growth and exports at the micro-level: Which products are being produced and exported? Which firms populate the domestic economy? Are they successful in exporting? How are firms affected by exogenous shocks and policy intervention? Through the use of descriptive statistics and econometric analysis, this paper assesses the trade competitiveness of Pakistan using micro-data. The case of Pakistan is interesting since the country's recent trade policy has reverted to a protectionist path since the mid-2000s and trade performance is stagnating, as indicated by a decrease in its trade-to-gross domestic product ratio over the past decade and low levels of sophistication of exports. The main findings of the paper are the following. Like many other countries, Pakistan posts a high concentration of exports in the hands of a limited number of large exporters. The dominance of few exporters has increased over time and it seems associated with the changes in trade policy. Low rates of product innovation and experimentation and a low ability of the Pakistani export sector to enter into new higher growth sectors are other features emerging from the data. All in all, the mediocre performance seems to be associated with internal problems with trade-related incentives, business environment, and governance, in addition to the well-known external constraints
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  • 38
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (61 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Van de Gaer, Dirk Children's Health Opportunities and Project Evaluation
    Abstract: This paper proposes a methodology to evaluate social projects from the perspective of children's opportunities on the basis of the effects of these projects on the distribution of outcomes. The evaluation is conditioned on characteristics for which individuals are not responsible; in this case, parental education level and indigenous background. The methodology is applied to evaluate the effects on children's health opportunities of Mexico's Oportunidades program, one of the largest conditional cash transfer programs for poor households in the world. The evidence from this program shows that gains in health opportunities for children from indigenous backgrounds are substantial and are situated in crucial parts of the distribution, whereas gains for children from nonindigenous backgrounds are more limited
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  • 39
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (36 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Song, Fenghua Notes on Financial System Development and Political Intervention
    Abstract: The paper studies the impact of political intervention on a financial system that consists of banks and financial markets and develops over time. In this financial system, banks and markets exhibit three forms of interaction: they compete, they complement each other, and they co-evolve. Coevolution is generated by two new ingredients of financial system architecture relative to the existing theories: securitization and risk-sensitive bank capital. The authors show that securitization propagates banking advances to the financial market, permitting market evolution to be driven by bank evolution, and market advances are transmitted to banks through bank capital. Then they examine how politicians determine the nature of political intervention designed to expand credit availability. The authors find that political intervention in banking exhibits a U-shaped pattern, where it is most notable in the early stage of financial system development (through bank capital subsidy in exchange for state ownership of banks) and in the advanced stage (through direct lending regulation). Despite expanding credit access, political intervention results in an increase in financial system risk and does not contribute to financial system evolution. Numerous policy implications are drawn out
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  • 40
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (28 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Park, Nowook Making Performance Budgeting Reform Work
    Abstract: Performance budgeting is considered one of the essential elements of public financial management reform and has been adopted in many countries. However, it continues to present a significant challenge within the budget process. This case study draws from change management theories to tell the inside story of performance budgeting reform in the Republic of Korea, including the background of the reform, the formation of the reform team, and how the team overcame resistance among stakeholders to implement and institutionalize the performance budgeting system. Policy implications include the importance of (1) strong support from top decision makers and (2) customization of the performance budgeting system to accommodate a country's cultural and socio-economic characteristics. The Korean case also demonstrates that stable, sustainable performance budgeting reform requires capacity building of relevant stakeholders and, sometimes, significant restructuring of organizations to accommodate the new systems
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  • 41
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (23 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Arvis, Jean-François Integrating Gravity
    Abstract: This paper revisits the ubiquitous bi-proportional gravity model and investigates the reasons why different theoretical frameworks may lead to the same empirical formula. The generic gravity equation possesses scale invariance symmetries that constrain possible theoretical explanations based on optimal allocation principles, such as neoclassical or probabilistic frameworks. These constraints imply that a representative consumer's utilities must be separable, and that an entropy model is the only consistent maximum likelihood allocation of a matrix of flows between origin and destination. The paper explores the feasibility of wider classes of non-scale invariant gravity equations, where gravity is no longer bi-proportional by including nonlinear interactions between trade costs and fundamental country factors such as economic size. It shows that such extensions are feasible but that they do not result in a significant improvement in the explanatory power of the empirical analysis
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  • 42
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (58 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Cull, Robert Government Connections and Financial Constraints
    Abstract: This paper examines the role of firms' government connections, defined by government intervention in the appointments of Chief Executive Officers and the status of state ownership, in determining the severity of financial constraints faced by Chinese firms. In line with the previous literature, the paper demonstrates that investment by non-state firms is highly sensitive to internal cash flows, while no such sensitivity is found for government-owned enterprises. Even within the subset of non-state firms, government connections are associated with substantially less severe financial constraints (less reliance on internal cash flows to fund investment). The paper also finds that large non-state firms with weak government connections are especially financially constrained, due perhaps to the formidable hold that their state rivals have on financial resources after the "grabbing-the-big-and-letting-go-the-small" privatization program in China. Firms with government-appointed Chief Executive Officers also have significantly lower investment intensities, due perhaps to their lower-powered incentives. The empirical results suggest that government connections play an important role in explaining Chinese firms' investment behavior and financing conditions, and provide further evidence on the nature of the misallocation of credit by China's dominant state-owned banks
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  • 43
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (43 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Duggan, Victor Service Sector Reform and Manufacturing Productivity
    Keywords: 1997-2009 ; Dienstleistungssektor ; Auslandsinvestition ; Produktivität ; Indonesien
    Abstract: This paper examines the extent to which policy restrictions on foreign direct investment in the Indonesian service sector affected the performance of manufacturers over the period 1997-2009. It uses firm-level data on manufacturers' total factor productivity and the OECD's foreign direct investment Regulatory Restrictiveness Index, combined with data from Indonesia's input-output tables regarding the intensity with which manufacturing sectors use services inputs. Controlling for firm-level fixed effects and other relevant policy indicators, it finds, first, that relaxing policies toward foreign direct investment in the service sector was associated with improvements in perceived performance of the service sector. Second, it finds that this relaxation in service sector foreign direct investment policies accounted for 8 percent of the observed increase in manufacturers' total factor productivity over the period. The total factor productivity gains accrue disproportionately to those firms that are relatively more productive, and that gains are related to the relaxation of restrictions in both the transport and electricity, gas, and water sectors. Total factor productivity gains are associated, in particular, with the relaxation of foreign equity limits, screening, and prior approval requirements, but less so with discriminatory regulations that prevent multinationals from hiring key personnel abroad
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  • 44
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (31 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Loayza, Norman Poverty, Inequality, and the Local Natural Resource Curse
    Abstract: The extent to which local communities benefit from commodity booms has been subject to wide but inconclusive investigations. This paper draws from a new district-level database to investigate the local impact on socioeconomic outcomes of mining activity in Peru, which grew almost twentyfold in the last two decades. The authors find evidence that producing districts have better average living standards than otherwise similar districts: larger household consumption, lower poverty rate, and higher literacy. However, the positive impacts from mining decrease significantly with administrative and geographic distance from the mine, while district-level consumption inequality increases in all districts belonging to a producing province. The inequalizing impact of mining activity, both across and within districts, may explain part of the current social discontent with mining activities in the country, even despite its enormous revenues
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  • 45
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (24 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: De Walque, Damien Using Provider Performance Incentives to Increase HIV Testing and Counseling Services in Rwanda
    Abstract: Paying for performance provides financial rewards to medical care providers for improvements in performance measured by specific utilization and quality of care indicators. In 2006, Rwanda began a paying for performance scheme to improve health services delivery, including HIV/AIDS services. This study examines the scheme's impact on individual and couples HIV testing and counseling and using data from a prospective quasi-experimental design. The study finds a positive impact of paying for performance with an increase of 6.1 percentage points in the probability of individuals having ever been tested. This positive impact is stronger for married individuals: 10.2 percentage points. The results also indicate larger impacts of paying for performance on the likelihood that the respondent reports both partners have ever been tested, especially among discordant couples (14.7 percentage point increase) in which only one of the partners is HIV positive
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  • 46
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (27 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Bruhn, Miriam Using Administrative Data to Evaluate Municipal Reforms
    Abstract: Efforts to make it easier for firms to register formally are the most common form of business regulatory reform over the past decade. While there is evidence that large reforms have resulted in some increases in registration rates, recent experimental evidence suggests very few informal firms choose to register when given information about how to do so. This raises the question of whether it is productive for governments to continue to extend simplification efforts to all firms, especially those in more remote areas where many of the benefits of registering may be reduced. This study uses administrative data to evaluate the impact of Minas Fácil Expresso, a program in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, which attempted to expand a business start-up simplification program to more remote municipalities. Using difference-in-differences with 56 months of registration data for 822 municipalities, the analysis finds introducing these units actually led to a reduction in registration rates, and no change in tax revenues. The paper uses this evaluation to illustrate the design choices and issues involved in using administrative data to evaluate reforms, with the goal of also providing a template that can be used for evaluating similar reforms elsewhere
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  • 47
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (14 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: De Giorgi, Giacomo SME Registration Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Bangladesh
    Abstract: Informality is pervasive in developing countries. In Bangladesh, the majority of firms are informal and as such they might not have access to prime markets, while lowering the tax base. The authors implemented an information campaign on registration, including both the step-by-step procedures and the potential benefits from registration. They find that the treatment made firms more aware of the procedures, but had no impact on actual registration. The results point toward potentially low benefits and high indirect costs of registration as the main barriers to formality (e.g. access to markets, taxation, labor and product regulations)
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  • 48
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (14 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Himelein, Kristen Weight Calculations for Panel Surveys with Sub-Sampling and Split-Off Tracking
    Abstract: The Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture project collects agricultural and livelihood data in seven countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. In order to maintain representativeness as much as possible over multiple rounds of data collection, a sub-sample of households are selected to have members that have left the household tracked and interviewed in their new location with their new household members. Since the sub-sampling occurs at the level of the household but tracking occurs at the level of the individual, a number of issues arise with the correct calculation for the sub-sampling and attrition corrections. This paper is based on the panel weight calculations for the initial rounds of the Integrated Surveys on Agriculture surveys in Uganda and Tanzania, and describes the methodology used for calculating the weight components related to sub-sampling, tracking, and attrition, as well as the criteria used for trimming and post-stratification. It also addresses complications resulting from members previously classified as having attrited from the sample returning in later rounds
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  • 49
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (39 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Lavelle, Kathryn C American Politics, the Presidency of the World Bank, and Development Policy
    Abstract: The World Bank's president has been an American by tradition. Yet little work has explored the consequences for this connection in influencing visions of development in the organization across time. This paper uses evidence from archives, congressional hearing records, and memoirs and histories of World Bank presidents to investigate United States-World Bank relations and development policy during four presidencies-Eugene Meyer, Eugene Black, Robert McNamara, and James Wolfensohn. The author argues that at times the political arrangements had the effect of pushing the Bank toward greater institutional independence from the United States, particularly when partisanship in American politics rose and new United States presidential administrations came into office with the World Bank president's term holding over from before. At other times, United States-World Bank connections pulled the Bank into foreign policy issues in the United States that the Bank might not otherwise have addressed when advocates pressed their case on Capitol Hill
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  • 50
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (51 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Kilic, Talip Caught in a Productivity Trap
    Abstract: In targeting poverty gains, sub-Saharan African governments have emphasized the alleviation of gender differences in agricultural productivity. The empirical studies on the gender gap, however, have frequently used data that were limited regarding geographic and topical coverage, and/or details on intra-household dynamics. The study provides a nationally-representative analysis of the gender gap in Malawi, and decomposes it, for the first time, at the mean and at selected points of the agricultural productivity distribution into (i) a portion driven by gender differences in levels of observable attributes (the endowment effect), and (ii) a portion driven by gender differences in returns to the same set of observables (the structure effect). Sequentially, the authors unpack the relative contributions of different factors towards the gender gap, and suggest future research priorities to inform policy interventions. The authors find that while female-managed plots are, on average, 25 percent less productive, 82 percent of this differential is explained by differences in endowments, mainly due to high-value crop cultivation and levels of household adult male labor inputs. The factors driving the structure effect include child dependency ratio and effectiveness of household adult male labor and inorganic fertilizer. The gender gap increases across the productivity distribution, ranging from 22 percent at the 10th percentile to 37 percent at the 90th percentile. While it is explained predominantly by the endowment effect in the first half of the distribution, the contribution of the structure effect towards the gender gap increases steadily above the median, standing at 34 percent at the 90th percentile
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  • 51
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (33 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Newman, John L Setting Reasonable Performance Targets for Public Service Delivery
    Abstract: Reaching agreement on a reasonable performance target is a challenge, with costs associated with getting it wrong. Attention in the literature has focused on the potential negative effects of gaming or of creaming. However, even if there is no gaming or creaming taking place, there can still be costs associated with setting a level of the performance target that is either too low or too high. On the one hand, if the negotiated performance target is too low, there is a strong risk that the target would be met without any change in behavior or performance from what would have been realized without a performance management system. In that case, there would be no benefit-only the cost of covering the administrative costs associated with developing the monitoring and management systems. On the other hand, if the negotiated performance target is too high, there could also be significant costs. The exact nature of the costs depends on which one of two unattractive options the principal chooses to follow once it becomes apparent that the performance targets were set unrealistically high. If the principal chooses simply to waive any possible repercussions for the agents for not meeting the performance targets, this can undermine the credibility of the system. If the principal insists on holding agents to meeting the performance targets-no matter how unrealistic they were-this can breed resentment and adversely affect future productivity. This paper considers some approaches to target setting that have been used in the literature and proposes an approach based on the use of quantile regressions to construct a Characteristic Adjusted Performance distribution of performance to guide the selection of targets. The paper then presents two concrete examples of applications of this approach related to the setting of targets on School Test Scores and Improvement in Homicide rates in Police Districts in the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil
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  • 52
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (25 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Hamilton, Kirk Human Capital, Tangible Wealth, and the Intangible Capital Residual
    Abstract: Since income is the return on wealth, the total wealth of any given country should be on the order of 20 times its gross domestic product. Instead the average observed ratio from the balance sheet accounts of the System of National Accounts is a factor of 2.6 to 6.6, depending on whether natural resource stocks are included in the balance sheet. The clear implication is that the System of National Accounts wealth accounts are incomplete, with the most obvious omission being human capital. Estimating the value of human capital using the lifetime income approach for a sample of 13 (mostly high-income) countries yields a mean share of human capital in total wealth of 62 percent-four times the value of produced capital and 15 times the value of natural capital. But for selected high-income countries in the sample there is still an average of 25 percent of total wealth that is unaccounted-it is neither produced, nor natural, nor human capital. This residual intangible wealth is arguably the "stock equivalent" of total factor productivity-the value of assets such as institutional quality and social capital that augment the capacity of produced, natural and human capital to support a stream of consumption into the future
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  • 53
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (38 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Bastos, Paulo Rain, Agriculture, and Tariffs
    Keywords: Wetter ; Agraraußenhandel ; Strategische Handelspolitik ; Optimalzoll
    Abstract: This paper examines whether and how rainfall shocks affect tariff setting in the agricultural sector. In a model of strategic trade policy, the authors show that the impact of a negative rainfall shock on optimal import tariffs is generally ambiguous, depending on the weight placed by the domestic policy maker on tariff revenue, profits and the consumer surplus. The more weight placed on domestic profits, the more likely it is that the policy maker will respond to a rainfall shortage by reducing import tariffs. These findings are robust to alternative assumptions about market structure and the timing of the game. Using detailed panel data on applied tariffs and rainfall for 70 nations, the authors find robust evidence that rainfall shortages generally induce policy makers to set lower tariffs on agricultural imports
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  • 54
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (50 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Gersovitz, Mark What is a Civil War?
    Abstract: The authors argue that the academic literature, both qualitative and quantitative, has mislabeled most episodes of large-scale violence in Africa as civil war; these episodes better fit their concept of regional war complexes. The paper seeks to highlight the fundamental flaws in the conception of civil war in the econometric literature and their implications for econometric specification and estimation, problems that this literature is inherently incapable of rectifying. The authors advocate the comparative study of regional war complexes in Africa based on historical narratives
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  • 55
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (43 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Kandpal, Eeshani Measuring the Effect of a Community-Level Program on Women's Empowerment Outcomes
    Abstract: This paper uses primary data from rural north India to show that participation in a community-level female empowerment program significantly increases access to employment, physical mobility, and political participation. The program provides support groups, literacy camps, adult education classes, and vocational training for rural women in several states of India; the data are from Uttarakhand. The paper uses instrumental variables and truncation-corrected matching on primary data to disentangle the program's mechanisms, separately considering its effect on women who work, and those who do not work but whose reservation wage is increased by participation. The analysis also finds significant spillover effects on non-participants relative to women in untreated districts. It finds consistent estimates for average treatment and intent to treat effects
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  • 56
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (65 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Cho, Yoonyoung Entrepreneurship Programs in Developing Countries
    Abstract: This paper provides a synthetic and systematic review on the effectiveness of various entrepreneurship programs in developing countries. It adopts a meta-regression analysis using 37 impact evaluation studies that were in the public domain by March 2012, and draws out several lessons on the design of the programs. The paper observes wide variation in program effectiveness across different interventions depending on outcomes, types of beneficiaries, and country context. Overall, entrepreneurship programs have a positive and large impact for youth and on business knowledge and practice, but no immediate translation into business set-up and expansion or increased income. At a disaggregate level by outcome groups, providing a package of training and financing is more effective for labor activities. In addition, financing support appears more effective for women and business training for existing entrepreneurs than other interventions to improve business performance
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  • 57
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (35 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Khandker, Shahidur R How Does Competition Affect the Performance of MFIs?
    Abstract: Over the past 20 years, Bangladesh has witnessed strong competition among microfinance institutions. Using program-level panel data from 2005-2010, this paper studies the microfinance institutions' recent competitive roles in their pricing of products, targeting strategies and portfolio shifts, as well as their ability to recover loans. The findings do not support the view that newer microfinance institutions are less risk-averse in their targeting, or that increased borrowing among households due to microfinance institution competition has lowered recovery rates. There is also a considerable urban-rural distinction; although newer microfinance institutions tend to attract riskier clients in urban areas, the opposite is true in rural areas. Loan recovery rates are also the highest among the newest microfinance institutions for women in rural areas, suggesting that microfinance institutions may offer distinct products in these areas to attract better-risk clients. The portfolio of newer microfinance institutions also has a greater share of lending for agriculture, and fewer savings products
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  • 58
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (39 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Fukase, Emiko Foreign Wage Premium, Gender and Education
    Keywords: Eigentümerstruktur ; Geschlechterunterschiede ; Bildung ; Lohn
    Abstract: This paper investigates the differential impacts of foreign ownership on wages for different types of workers (in terms of educational background and gender) in Vietnam using the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys of 2002 and 2004. Whereas most previous studies have compared wage levels between foreign and domestic sectors using firm-level data (thus excluding the informal sector), one advantage of using the Living Standards Surveys in this paper is that the data allow wage comparison analyses to extend to the informal wage sector. A series of Mincerian earnings equations and worker-specific fixed effects models are estimated. Several findings emerge. First, foreign firms pay higher wages relative to their domestic counterparts after controlling for workers' personal characteristics. Second, the higher the individual workers' levels of education, the larger on average are the wage premiums for those who work for foreign firms. Third, longer hours of work in foreign firm jobs relative to working in the informal wage sector are an important component of the wage premium. Finally, unskilled women experience a larger foreign wage premium than unskilled men, reflecting the low earning opportunities for women and a higher gender gap in the informal wage sector
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  • 59
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (48 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: De, Prabir What Does MFN Trade Mean for India and Pakistan?
    Abstract: India and Pakistan, the two largest economies in South Asia, share a common border, culture and history. Despite the benefits of proximity, the two neighbors have barely traded with each other. In 2011, trade with Pakistan accounted for less than half a percent of India's total trade, whereas Pakistan's trade with India was 5.4 percent of its total trade. However, the recent thaw in India-Pakistan trade relations could signal a change. Pakistan has agreed to grant most favored nation status to India. India has already granted most favored nation status to Pakistan. What will be the gains from trade for the two countries? Will they be inclusive? Is most favored nation status a panacea? Should the granting of most favored nation status be accompanied by improvements in trade facilitation, infrastructure, connectivity, and logistics to reap the true benefits of trade and to promote shared prosperity? This paper attempts to answer these questions. It examines alternative scenarios on the gains from trade and it finds that what makes most favored nation status work is the trade facilitation that surrounds it. The results of the general equilibrium simulation indicate Pakistan's most favored nation status to India would generate larger benefits if it were supported by improved connectivity and trade facilitation measures. In other words, gains from trade would be small in the absence of improved connectivity and trade facilitation. The idea of trade facilitation is simple: implement measures to reduce the cost of trading across borders by improving infrastructure, institutions, services, policies, procedures, and market-oriented regulatory systems. The returns can be huge, even with modest resources and limited capacity. The dividends of trade facilitation can be shared by all
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  • 60
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (51 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Dang, Hai-Anh The Decision to Invest in Child Quality over Quantity
    Abstract: 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 new measures of household investment in private tutoring, together with traditional measures of household investments in education. It analyzes data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys and instruments for family size using the distance to the nearest family planning center. The estimation results 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 indicators of educational investment-including general education expenditure and various measures of private tutoring investment-and is robust to various definitions of family size and model specifications that control for community characteristics as well as the distance to the city center. Finally, the results suggest that tutoring may be a better measure of quality-oriented household investments in education than traditional measures like enrollment, which are arguably less nuanced and household-driven
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  • 61
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (37 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Ghani, Ejaz The Exceptional Persistence of India's Unorganized Sector
    Abstract: The transformation of India's unorganized sector is important to its modernization, growth, and attainment of regional economic equality. This paper documents several key facts about India's unorganized sector in manufacturing and services. First, the unorganized sector is large, accounting for more than 99 percent of establishments and 80 percent of employment in manufacturing. Second, the unorganized sector is stubbornly persistent-it accounted for 81 percent of manufacturing employment in 1989 and 2005. Third, this persistence is not due to particular subsets of industries or states, as most industries and states show limited change in unorganized sector employment shares. Fourth, the degree to which localized unorganized activity exists is important as it is associated with weaker production functions for manufacturing firms. Building from these facts, the paper investigates conditions promoting transformation by state-industry. Decomposition exercises find that both within and between adjustments for state-industries weakly reduce unorganized sector shares. The aggregate persistence instead comes from the covariance term, where fast-growing state-industries witness rising unorganized sector activity. Regressions quantify that growth in the organized sector by state-industry reduces the unorganized sector employment share, but only marginally reduces employment levels in unorganized activity. Analysis of the establishment size distribution highlights that entrepreneurship and larger organized sector plants are most important for transitions in the manufacturing sector, while small establishments play a key role in the services sector
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  • 62
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (49 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Eden, Maya International Liquidity Rents
    Keywords: Internationale Liquidität ; Kapitalmobilität ; Wachstumstheorie ; Neoklassische Theorie ; Theorie
    Abstract: This paper presents a model of global liquidity shortages. Liquid claims are enforceable promises that play a transaction role. Since developed economies have a comparative advantage in creating liquidity, they export liquid claims to emerging economies, resulting in a permanent current account deficit. This model suggests that unrestricted liquidity flows are (a) welfare reducing for emerging economies and (b) Pareto inefficient. The inefficiency results both from excessive investment for the purpose of creating collateral-backed liquid claims, and from excessive global fragility with respect to collateral shocks
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  • 63
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (46 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Calì, Massimiliano The Labor Market Impact of Mobility Restrictions
    Abstract: Using data on Israeli closures inside the West Bank, this paper provides new evidence on the labor market effects of conflict-induced restrictions to mobility. To identify the effects, the analysis exploits the fact that the placement of physical barriers by Israel was exogenous to local labor market conditions and uses a measure of conflict intensity to control for the likely spurious correlation between local unrest, labor market conditions, and the placement of barriers. The study finds that these barriers to mobility have a significant negative effect on employment, wages, and days worked per month. The barriers had a positive impact on the number of hours per working day. These effects are driven mainly by checkpoints while other barriers, such as roadblocks and earth mounds, have a much more limited impact. Only a tiny portion of the effects is due to direct restrictions on workers' mobility, suggesting that these restrictions affect the labor market mainly by depressing firms' production and labor demand. Despite being an underestimation of the actual effects, the overall costs of the barriers on the West Bank labor market are substantial: in 2007, for example, these costs amounted to 6 percent of gross domestic product. Most of these costs are due to lower wages, thus suggesting that the labor market has adjusted to the restrictions more through prices than quantities
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  • 64
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (23 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: De la Fuente, Alejandro The Poverty Impact of Climate Change in Mexico
    Abstract: This paper examines the effects of climate change on poverty through the relationship between indicators of climate change (temperature and rainfall change) and municipal level gross domestic product, and subsequently between gross domestic product and poverty. The evidence suggests that climate change could have a negative impact on poverty by 2030. The paper proposes a two-stage least squares regression where it first regresses temperature and rainfall (along with geographic controls and state and year fixed effects) on municipal gross domestic product per capita for 2000 and 2005 The resulting gross domestic product per capita is used in a second equation to estimate municipal poverty on the same years. The authors then incorporate projections of temperature and rainfall changes by 2030 into the estimated climate-gross domestic product coefficients to assess the effects of climate change in economic activity and how this in turn will influence poverty. At the same time, they account for the potential adaptive capacity of municipalities through higher population densities and economic growth. Both would reduce poverty by 31.72 percentage points between 2005 and 2030 with changing climate. However, poverty could have been reduced up to 34.15 percentage points over the same period had there been no climate change. This suggests that climate change slows down the pace of poverty reduction. An alternative reading is that poverty is expected to increase from 15.25 percent (without climate change) to 17.68 percent (with climate change) by 2030. Given the existing population projections for 2030, this represents 2,902,868 people remaining in poverty as a result of climate change
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  • 65
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (19 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Glachant, Matthieu Greening Global Value Chains
    Abstract: Using novel data on patents, trade of equipment goods, and foreign direct investments and insights from the economic literature, the paper seeks to lay out the state of knowledge on the role of innovation and the diffusion of technologies in the greening of global value chains as well as some of the main policy issues. A special emphasis is put on developing countries-distinguishing emerging economies and least-developed countries-and on climate-mitigation technologies. Emerging economies are already reasonably well integrated in the global economy. As a consequence, technologies flow in through the imports of capital goods and local investments by multinational enterprises owning technologies. Pushing further technology transfer requires strengthening intellectual property rights, lowering barriers to trade and investments and improving technological absorptive capacities. In contrast, their role in innovation is limited. Standard tools of innovation policy - public research and development, public support to private research and development, better access to finance - should develop. But studies also suggest that governments should introduce more stringent environmental policies with proper enforcement at home to go beyond the adoption of foreign technologies. The situation of least-developed countries is very different: they do not import green technologies and low barriers to trade and foreign direct investment or strict intellectual property rights are unlikely to trigger technology transfer. In these countries, the focus should be on building technological capacities
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  • 66
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (26 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Varela, Gonzalo J Export Diversification in Twelve European and Central Asian Countries and the Role of the Commodity Boom
    Abstract: This paper examines export diversification along the product and market dimensions for selected countries in the Europe and Central Asia region and, more generally, export performance. While the latter is extraordinary, with average export growth rates above 10 percent, the evidence on diversification is less impressive, and hints at a role played by the interaction of natural resource abundance and the commodity price boom. A cross-country analysis including 171 economies suggests that the region's resource rich countries are less diversified than would be expected given their resource endowments, level of development, and size. The commodity boom period was associated with an increase in concentration for the resource rich along the product dimension: they did not increase the number of products exported and became more reliant on oil and gas. During the same period, the resource poor increased their export product scope while maintaining other concentration indices unchanged. A similar but milder pattern is found for diversification along the destination dimension
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  • 67
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (52 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Fitzsimons, Emla Can Conditional Cash Transfers Compensate for a Father's Absence?
    Abstract: This paper investigates how the permanent departure of the father from a household affects children's school enrollment and work participation in rural Colombia. The results indicate that the permanent departure of the father decreases children's school enrollment by approximately 5 percentage points and increases child labor by 3 percentage points. This paper explores the rollout of a conditional-cash-transfer program during the period of study and shows that this program counteracts these adverse effects. When coupled with other evidence, this finding strongly suggests that the channel through which the father's departure most affects children is by reducing the income of very poor households, which tightens their liquidity constraints. This finding also highlights the important safety-net role played by welfare programs with respect to disadvantaged households, particularly because these households are unlikely to have formal or informal mechanisms with which to insure themselves against such vagaries
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  • 68
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (40 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Artuc, Erhan PPML Estimation of Dynamic Discrete Choice Models with Aggregate Shocks
    Abstract: This paper introduces a computationally efficient method for estimating structural parameters of dynamic discrete choice models with large choice sets. The method is based on Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood (PPML) regression, which is widely used in the international trade and migration literature to estimate the gravity equation. Unlike most of the existing methods in the literature, it does not require strong parametric assumptions on agents' expectations, thus it can accommodate macroeconomic and policy shocks. The regression requires count data as opposed to choice probabilities; therefore it can handle sparse decision transition matrices caused by small sample sizes. As an example application, the paper estimates sectoral worker mobility in the United States
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  • 69
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (48 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Dahiya, Sandeep The Role of Private Equity Investments in Public Firms
    Abstract: This paper compares the raising of external equity capital from private equity investors via private investments in public equity (PIPEs) and seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) using a sample of 456 PIPEs and 1,910 SEOs drawn from nine Asian countries. Consistent with the idea that insiders attempt to time the markets, firms issuing SEOs are preceded by a significantly higher run-up in stock price compared with those issuing PIPEs. This result is consistent with the undervaluation hypothesis that states that firms are more likely to issue PIPEs when they perceive their stock to be undervalued. In contrast to the United States where this undervaluation appears to be driven by financial distress and asymmetric information, the results show PIPE and SEO issuers to be statistically undistinguishable from each other. The announcement of a PIPE offering is on average associated with a significantly higher stock market reaction compared with an issue of a SEO, suggesting that private equity investors may play a certification or monitoring role. However, a comparison of PIPE issuers' operating performance and stock market returns in the pre-issue and the post-issue periods does not detect any significant improvements
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  • 70
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (40 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Kraay, Aart Misunderestimating Corruption
    Abstract: Estimates of the extent of corruption rely largely on self-reports of individuals, business managers, and government officials. Yet it is well known that survey respondents are reticent to tell the truth about activities to which social and legal stigma are attached, implying a downward bias in survey-based estimates of corruption. This paper develops a method to estimate the prevalence of reticent behavior, in order to isolate rates of corruption that fully reflect respondent reticence in answering sensitive questions. The method is based on a statistical model of how respondents behave when answering a combination of conventional and random-response survey questions. The responses to these different types of questions reflect three probabilities-that the respondent has done the sensitive act in question, that the respondent exhibits reticence in answering sensitive questions, and that a reticent respondent is not candid in answering any specific sensitive question. These probabilities can be estimated using a method-of-moments estimator. Evidence from the 2010 World Bank Enterprise survey in Peru suggests reticence-adjusted estimates of corruption that are roughly twice as large as indicated by responses to standard questions. Reticence-adjusted estimates of corruption are also substantially higher in a set of ten Asian countries covered in the Gallup World Poll
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  • 71
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (42 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Cuesta, Jose Social Spending, Distribution, and Equality of Opportunities
    Abstract: Existing evidence forms a body of "conventional wisdom" on the redistributive impact of fiscal policies that has been recently questioned by more disaggregated analyses. This paper proposes an additional extension to the traditional benefit incidence analysis to explore further the extent to which the conventional wisdom holds, as well as to provide effective guidance in fiscal decision making. The benefit incidence analysis extension includes linking fiscal policies with the concept of equality of opportunities. The paper describes this approach and showcases the application of the proposed "opportunity incidence analysis" to six pilot countries: Liberia, Cote d'Ivoire, Zambia, Tajikistan, Thailand, and Paraguay. Three main contributions stand out: first, opportunity incidence analysis complements traditional benefit incidence analysis by applying its mechanics to a more forward looking concept of equal opportunity. Second, opportunities can be used to target public spending with higher precision. Third, micro-simulations can be used to understand the cost-effectiveness of alternative spending interventions that seek to improve equality of opportunities. All of these results complement the diagnosis produced by traditional incidence analysis and provide useful information to guide specific policy decisions
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  • 72
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (44 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Kaminski, Bartlomiej Increase in Protectionism and Its Impact on Sri Lanka's Performance in Global Markets
    Abstract: Sri Lanka's external performance defies global trends on two counts. First, the level of openness as measured by the ratio of trade in goods and services, after a strong increase in 1987-95 and stagnation in 1996-2004, sharply fell in 2005-10 to the levels experienced during the era of import substitution. Second, the share of clothing in manufactured exports has remained largely unchanged over the past 25 years. Had there been no economic growth, this would not have been puzzling. The paper argues that these unique features can be traced to (a) the duality of Sri Lanka's economic regime-the legacy of unfinished structural reforms of a socialist economic regime-and (b) high and growing protectionism in the 2000s. Sri Lanka's experience shows that the lack of stability in trade policy combined with recently expanding protectionism and the state's micromanagement of investment does not create an institutional/policy setting conducive to rapidly evolving composition of exports and their fast growth. The practice of dealing with weaknesses in trade policies and the business environment through granting exemptions to various activities deemed desirable by the authorities only exacerbates distortions and creates more fertile ground for rent seeking. Without a radical overhaul of the current policy framework shaping interaction of Sri Lankan businesses with global markets, economic growth may be reduced, if not reversed
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  • 73
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (51 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Auriol, Emmanuelle Powering up Developing Countries through Integration?
    Abstract: Power market integration is analyzed in a two-country model with nationally regulated firms and costly public funds. If the generation costs between the two countries are too similar, negative business stealing outweighs efficiency gains so that the subsequent integration welfare decreases in both regions. Integration is welfare enhancing when the cost difference between two regions is large enough. The benefits from export profits increase the total welfare in the exporting country, whereas the importing country benefits from lower prices. In this case, market integration also improves incentives to invest compared to autarky. The investment levels remain inefficient, however, especially for transportation facilities. Free riding reduces incentives to invest in these public-good components of the network, whereas business stealing tends to decrease the capacity to finance new investment
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  • 74
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (52 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Giles, John Expanding Social Insurance Coverage in Urban China
    Abstract: This paper first reviews the history of social insurance policy and coverage in urban China, documenting the evolution in the coverage of pensions and medical and unemployment insurance for both local residents and migrants, and highlighting obstacles to expanding coverage. The paper then uses two waves of the China Urban Labor Survey, conducted in 2005 and 2010, to examine the correlates of social insurance participation before and after implementation of the 2008 Labor Contract Law. A higher labor tax wedge is associated with a lower probability that local employed residents participate in social insurance programs, but is not associated with participation of wage-earning migrants, who are more likely to be dissuaded by fragmentation of the social insurance system. The existing gender gap in social insurance coverage is explained by differences in coverage across industrial sectors and firm ownership classes in which men and women work
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  • 75
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (29 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Jarotschkin, Alexandra Aid, Disbursement Delays, and the Real Exchange Rate
    Abstract: Aid donors and recipients have long been concerned that aid inflows may lead to an appreciation of the real exchange rate and an associated loss of competitiveness. This paper provides new evidence of the dynamic effects of aid on the real exchange rate, using an identification strategy that exploits the long delays between the approval of aid projects and the subsequent disbursements on them. These disbursement delays enable the isolation of a source of variation in aid inflows that is uncorrelated with contemporaneous macroeconomic shocks that may drive both aid and the real exchange rate. Using this predetermined component of aid as an instrument, there is little evidence that aid inflows lead to significant real exchange rate appreciations
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  • 76
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (46 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Knack, Stephen It's Only Words
    Abstract: This study analyzes the validity of the World Bank's Country Policy and Institutional Assessments governance ratings, an important factor in allocating the Bank's concessionary International Development Association funds. It tests for certain biases in the ratings, and examines the quality of the written justifications that accompany the ratings. The study finds no evidence of bias in favor of International Development Association-eligible countries, despite a potential moral hazard problem inherent in the ratings process. However, there is some evidence of an upward bias in ratings for one region, relative to the other five regions. The study finds significant regional differences in the quality of the written justifications accompanying the six World Bank regions' proposed ratings. The length of these write-ups has exploded over time. Although higher-quality write-ups are also longer on average, there is wide dispersion in the word count at any given quality level, and some long write-ups provide little relevant information. Higher quality write-ups are associated with a lower likelihood that central unit reviewers will either disagree with proposed ratings, or request additional information to assess the proposed rating. Controlling for quality, longer write-ups are associated with a greater probability that central reviewers will disagree with a proposed rating. Although checks and balances built into the process appear to work reasonably well, the author concludes that a more proactive role for central unit reviewers and regional chief economists' offices could further enhance the quality of write-ups and reduce regional bias
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  • 77
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (54 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Van de Walle, Dominique Long-Term Impacts of Household Electrification in Rural India
    Abstract: India's huge expansion in rural electrification in the 1980s and 1990s offers lessons for other countries today. The paper examines the long-term effects of household electrification on consumption, labor supply, and schooling in rural India over 1982-99. It finds that household electrification brought significant gains to consumption and earnings, the latter through changes in market labor supply. It finds positive effects on schooling for girls but not for boys. External effects are also evident, whereby households without electricity benefit from village electrification. Wage rates were unaffected. Methodologically, the results suggest sizeable upward biases in past estimates of the gains from electrification associated with how past analyses dealt with geographic effects
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  • 78
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (30 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Coulibaly, Souleymane Solow in Transition
    Abstract: This paper analyzes and reconciles macro and micro evidence on savings and factors that affect savings, as well as possible policy implications. At the aggregate level, the main question is how savings are affected by growth and macroeconomic policies and variables (fiscal policy, exchange rate, for example) and the breadth of financial markets. Some of these macro determinants can be reconciled with microeconomic evidence of the savings behavior of households. Using macroeconomic quarterly data and household survey data, the analysis explores the determinants of the savings rate at the macroeconomic and microeconomic levels, using the typical econometric models used in the literature (long-term co-integration relation and short-term error correction model for the macro determinants; linear multivariate models for the micro determinants). The long-term relationship indicates that a 10-percent increase in gross domestic product per capita would add 3.7 percentage points to the savings rate in the long run. The short-term relationship depicts a strong catch-up process to the long-run equilibrium, with quarterly changes in gross domestic product per capita and openness strongly correlated with quarterly changes in the savings rate. The characteristics of households that represent the volatility of expected income, such as education and access to borrowing or remittances, significantly impact saving rates. The macroeconomic and microeconomic analyses of the determinants of saving rates in Armenia point to three policy areas: the macroeconomic environment, the financial sector, and the role of remittances
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  • 79
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (63 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Gertler, Paul Labor Market Returns to Early Childhood Stimulation
    Abstract: This paper finds large effects on the earnings of participants from a randomized intervention that gave psychosocial stimulation to stunted Jamaican toddlers living in poverty. The intervention consisted of one-hour weekly visits from community Jamaican health workers over a 2-year period that taught parenting skills and encouraged mothers to interact and play with their children in ways that would develop their children's cognitive and personality skills. The authors re-interviewed the study participants 20 years after the intervention. Stimulation increased the average earnings of participants by 42 percent. Treatment group earnings caught up to the earnings of a matched non-stunted comparison group. These findings show that psychosocial stimulation early in childhood in disadvantaged settings can have substantial effects on labor market outcomes and reduce later life inequality
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  • 80
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (24 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Oberhofer, Harald Determinants of Job Creation in Eleven New EU Member States
    Abstract: This paper builds on the analysis of job creation developed in World Bank (2013) to provide an empirical investigation of the industry and firm-specific determinants of the job creation process in eleven new European Union (EU11) economies. It relies on the Amadeus dataset of firms during 2002-2009. The main results indicate that during the years prior to the global financial crisis, traditional industries were crucial for the net creation of jobs in EU11. However, traditional industries were the ones most severely affected by the financial crisis. By contrast, services firms were less vulnerable to the economic downturn. At the firm level, small and young firms registered the highest employment growth rates. The empirical results also indicate that more productive firms tended to be less vulnerable to economic downturns. Moreover, the results demonstrate that the perceived quality of the business climate by the EU11 enterprises is correlated with not only the firms' employment growth, but also their productivity. In the post-crisis period, poor business restrictions were negatively associated with the creation of jobs. All these findings hold for the group of high-growth firms that disproportionately accounted for the creation of new jobs in the EU11 economies
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  • 81
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (41 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Akyeampong, Emmanuel The Contribution of African Women to Economic Growth and Development in Post-Colonial Africa
    Abstract: This paper draws on history, anthropology, and economics to examine the dynamics and extent of women's contribution to growth and economic development in post-colonial Africa. The paper investigates the paradox of increased female enrollment in education and the persistence of gender discrimination in labor force participation; it also considers the overwhelming importance of the informal economy in female economic activity. The first axis the paper studies is whether reducing educational gender gaps enhances growth in per capita gross domestic product and reduces female fertility rates and infant mortality. The question is, why would some African countries resist this pattern? The second axis examines agriculture and home production. Women's economic activities in the informal economy largely represent the commercialization of domestic skills and dependence on social networks. The shunting of female production to the informal sector in the male-dominated colonial economy is easy to understand, but why has the informal economy persisted where female production is concerned well beyond the colonial period? The paper attempts to explain these trajectories by using country case studies on Senegal, Botswana, and Kenya. Although women's contribution to growth and economic development seems to be positive and significant in predominantly Christian and mineral-rich economies, it is more constrained in pronounced Muslim dominated countries and agrarian economies. At the same time, impressive uniform growth in informal sector production in recent years suggests that occupational job segregation and gender inequality remain strong across the region, despite the apparent loosening of traditional norms and cultural beliefs, most notably illustrated by the reduction in educational gender gaps and increased female labor force participation rates
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  • 82
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (40 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Barrera-Osorio, Felipe Incentivizing Schooling for Learning
    Abstract: This paper evaluates a primary school scholarship program in Cambodia with two different targeting mechanisms, one based on poverty level and the other on baseline test scores ("merit"). Both targeting mechanisms increased enrollment and attendance. However, only the merit-based targeting induced positive effects on test scores. The paper shows that the asymmetry of response is unlikely to have been driven by differences between recipients' characteristics. Higher student and family effort among beneficiaries of the merit-based scholarships suggest that the framing of the scholarship mattered for impact. The results suggest that in order to balance equity and efficiency, a two-step targeting approach might be preferable: first, target low-income individuals, and then, among them, target based on merit
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  • 83
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (48 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Cho, Yoonyoung Gender Differences in the Effects of Vocational Training
    Abstract: This paper provides experimental evidence on the effects of vocational and entrepreneurial training for Malawian youth, in an environment where access to schooling and formal sector employment is extremely low. It tracks a large fraction of program drop-outs-a common phenomenon in the training evaluation literature-and examines the determinants and consequences of dropping out and how it mediates the effects of such programs. The analysis finds that women make decisions in a more constrained environment, and their participation is affected by family obligations. Participation is more expensive for them, resulting in worse training experience. The training results in skills development, continued investment in human capital, and improved well-being, with more positive effects for men, but no improvements in labor market outcomes in the short run
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  • 84
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (19 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Ahamada, Ibrahim A Retrospective Analysis of the House Prices Macro-Relationship in the United States
    Abstract: This study provides empirical evidence on the strengthening of the impact of house prices on the US macroeconomy. The stability of the house prices macro-link is tested in a small-dimensional vector autoregressive model over the last fifty years. The estimated break-points are used to split the sample into different segments and a multivariate time series analysis is performed within subsamples. The paper finds a robust structural break in the mid-1980s. In addition, time series analysis across segments provides evidence that the effect of house prices, not only on private consumption, but also on economic activity, has intensified since the mid-1980s
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  • 85
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (18 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Lustig, Nora Deconstructing the Decline in Inequality in Latin America
    Abstract: Inequality in Latin America unambiguously declined in the 2000s. The Gini coefficient fell in 16 of the 17 countries where there are comparable data, and the change was statistically significant for all of them. Existing studies point to two main explanations for the decline in inequality: a reduction in hourly labor income inequality, and more robust and progressive government transfers. Available evidence suggests that it is the skill premium-or, more precisely, the returns to primary, secondary, and tertiary education vs. no schooling or incomplete primary schooling-that drives the decline in hourly labor income inequality. The causes behind the decline in returns to schooling, however, have not been unambiguously established. Some studies find that returns fell because of an increase in the supply of workers with more educational attainment; others, because of a shift in demand away from skilled labor
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  • 86
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (24 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Ghani, Ejaz Urbanization and Agglomeration Benefits
    Keywords: Urbanisierung ; Agglomerationseffekt ; Geschlecht ; Unternehmensgründung ; Informelle Wirtschaft ; Indien
    Abstract: This paper presents an exploration at the intersection of four important themes in the current development discourse: urbanization, agglomeration benefits, gender and informality. Focusing on the important policy objective of new enterprise creation in the informal sector, it asks and answers four specific questions on the impact of urbanization and gender. It finds that (i) the effect of market access to inputs, on creation of new enterprises in the informal sector, is greater in more urbanized areas; (ii) This "urbanization gradient" also exists separately for the creation of female owned enterprises and male owned enterprises; (iii) there is a differential impact of female specific market access compared to male specific market access, on female owned enterprise creation in the informal sector; and (iv) gender specific market access to inputs matters equally in more or less urbanized areas. Among the policy implications of these findings are that (i) new enterprise creation by females can be encouraged by urbanization, but (ii) the effect can be stronger by improving female specific market access, especially to inputs. The analysis in this paper opens up a rich research agenda, including further investigation of the nature of input based versus output based perspectives on agglomeration benefits, and exploration of policy instruments that can improve female specific market access, which is shown to increase female owned enterprise creation
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  • 87
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (36 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Hlasny, Vladimir Top Incomes and the Measurement of Inequality in Egypt
    Abstract: By all accounts, income inequality in Egypt is low and had been declining during the decade that preceded the 2011 revolution. As the Egyptian revolution was partly motivated by claims of social injustice and inequalities, this seems at odds with a low level of income inequality. Moreover, while income inequality shows a decline between 2000 and 2009, the World Values Surveys indicate that the aversion to inequality has significantly increased during the same period and for all social groups. This paper utilizes a range of recently developed statistical techniques to assess the true value of income inequality in the presence of a range of possible measurement issues related to top incomes, including item and unit non-response, outliers and extreme observations, and atypical top income distributions. The analysis finds that correcting for unit non-response significantly increases the estimate of inequality by just over 1 percentage point, that the Egyptian distribution of top incomes follows rather closely the Pareto distribution, and that the inverted Pareto coefficient is located around median values when compared with 418 household surveys worldwide. Hence, income inequality in Egypt is confirmed to be low while the distribution of top incomes is not atypical compared with what Pareto had predicted and compared with other countries in the world. This would suggest that the increased frustration with income inequality voiced by Egyptians and measured by the World Values Surveys is driven by factors other than income inequality
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  • 88
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (68 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Wren-Lewis, Liam Do Infrastructure Reforms Reduce the Effect of Corruption?
    Abstract: This paper investigates the interaction between corruption and governance at the sector level. A simple model illustrates how both an increase in regulatory autonomy and privatization may influence the effect of corruption. The interaction is analyzed empirically using a fixed-effects estimator on a panel of 153 electricity distribution firms across 18 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean from 1995-2007. Greater corruption is associated with lower firm labor productivity, but this association is reduced when an independent regulatory agency is present. These results survive a range of robustness checks, including instrumenting for regulatory governance, controlling for a large range of observables, and using several different corruption measures. The association between corruption and productivity also appears weaker for privately owned firms compared to publicly owned firms, though this result is somewhat less robust
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  • 89
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (27 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Aedo, Cristian From Occupations to Embedded Skills
    Abstract: This paper derives the skill content of 30 countries, ranging from low-income to high-income ones, from the occupational structure of their economies. Five different skills are defined.. Cross-country measures of skill content show that the intensity of national production of manual skills declines with per capita income in a monotonic way, while it increases for non-routine cognitive and interpersonal skills. For some countries, the analysis is able to trace the development of skill intensities of aggregate production over time. The paper finds that although the increasing intensity of non-routine skills is uniform across countries, patterns of skill intensities with respect to different forms of routine skills differ markedly
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  • 90
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (22 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Berg, Gunhild Bank Financing of SMEs in Five Sub-Saharan African Countries
    Abstract: This paper provides an overview of the state of access to bank financing for SMEs in five Sub-Saharan African countries and analyzes the drivers behind banks' involvement with SMEs. The paper builds on data collected through five in-depth studies in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, and Tanzania between 2010 and 2012. The paper shows that the share of SME lending in the overall loan portfolios of banks varies between 5 and 20 percent. Reasons for this finding vary, but key contributing factors are the structure and size of the economy and the extent of Government borrowing, the degree of innovation mainly as introduced by foreign entrants to financial sectors, and the state of the financial sector infrastructure and enabling environment
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  • 91
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (40 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Hou, Xiaohui The Heterogeneous Effects of a Food Price Crisis on Child School Enrollment and Labor
    Abstract: Using a panel survey, this paper investigates how the increase in food prices in Pakistan in 2008-2010 affected children's school enrollment and labor. The causal identification relies on geographical variations in the price of food (wheat). The results show that the negative impacts of food price increase on school enrollment differ by gender, economic status, and the presence of siblings. The negative effects on school do not directly correspond to the increase in child labor because the transition from being idle to labor activity or from school to being idle are significant, particularly among the poor girls. The results also show that children in households with access to agricultural land are not affected by higher food prices. The analyses reveal a more dynamic picture of the impact of food price increase on child status and contribute to broader policy discussion to mitigate the impact of crises on children's education
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  • 92
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (28 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Araya, Gonzalo The Effects of Country Risk and Conflict on Infrastructure PPPs
    Abstract: Through an empirical analysis of the relationship between private participation in infrastructure and country risk, the paper shows that country risk ratings are a reliable predictor of infrastructure investment levels in developing countries. The results suggest that a difference of one standard deviation in a country's sovereign risk score is associated with a 27 percent increase in the probability of having a private participation in infrastructure commitment, and a 41 percent higher level of investment in dollar terms. The predictive ability of country risk ratings exists for all sectors of infrastructure and for both greenfield and concessions. On average, energy investments exhibit a higher sensitivity to country risk than transport, telecommunications, and water investments. Concessions are more sensitive than greenfield investments to country risk, although country risk is a good predictor of investment levels for both contractual forms. Although foreign direct investment is found to be sensitive to country risk, the causal relationship is not nearly as sensitive as it is with private participation in infrastructure. Finally, an analysis of private participation in infrastructure patterns for those countries emerging from conflict reveals that conflict-affected countries typically require six to seven years to attract significant levels or forms of private investments in infrastructure from the day that the conflict is officially resolved. Private investments in sectors where assets are more difficult to secure-such as water, power distribution, or roads-are slower to appear or simply never materialize
    URL: Volltext  (Deutschlandweit zugänglich)
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  • 93
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (58 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: De la Torre, Augusto The Foundations of Macroprudential Regulation
    Abstract: This paper examines the conceptual foundations of macroprudential policy by reviewing the literature on financial frictions from a policy perspective that systematically links state interventions to market failures. The method consists in gradually incorporating into the Arrow-Debreu world a variety of frictions and sources of aggregate volatility and combining them along three basic dimensions: purely idiosyncratic vs. aggregate volatility, full vs. bounded rationality, and internalized vs. uninternalized externalities. The analysis thereby obtains eight "domains," four of which include aggregate volatility, hence call for macroprudential policy variants grounded on largely orthogonal rationales. Two of them emerge even assuming that externalities are internalized: one aims at offsetting the public moral hazard implications of (efficient but time inconsistent) post-crisis policy interventions, the other at maintaining principal-agent incentives continuously aligned along the cycle. Allowing for uninternalized externalities justifies two additional types of macroprudential policy, one aimed at aligning private and social interests, the other at tempering mood swings. Choosing a proper regulatory path is complicated by the fact that the relevance of frictions is likely to be state-dependent and that different frictions motivate different (and often conflicting) policies
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  • 94
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (43 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Khandker, Shahidur R Are Microcredit Borrowers in Bangladesh over-Indebted?
    Abstract: Microcredit programs in Bangladesh have experienced spectacular growth in recent years, with a growing number of borrowers availing credit from multiple microcredit agencies. There is a growing concern that if there are not sufficient returns to borrowing from microfinance institutions (MFIS), some borrowers might be taking loans that they will not be able to repay. A household may be considered over-indebted, for example, if its debt liability exceeds 40 percent of its income or assets. Using a long panel of household survey data from Bangladesh, the paper finds that some 26 percent of microcredit borrowers are over-indebted on this measure versus 22 percent of non-microcredit borrowers. Econometric analysis suggests that both MFI competition and multiple borrowing raise indebtedness. However, repeated borrowing, while it affects short-term liability adversely, does affect the long-term debt-asset ratio favorably. That is, repeated borrowing helps increase assets more than debt over time. Microcredit borrowers in Bangladesh are thus not necessarily over-indebted. But when borrowing is seen as protection against shocks such as floods even at the cost of being indebted, MFIs may offer micro-insurance schemes to safeguard borrowers against economic shocks
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  • 95
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (33 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Maslova, Inga Growth and Volatility Analysis Using Wavelets
    Abstract: The magnitude and persistence of growth in gross domestic product are topics of intense scrutiny by economists. Although the existing techniques provide a range of tools to study the nature of growth and volatility time series, these usually come with shortcomings, including the need to arbitrarily define acceleration spells, and focus on a particular frequency at a time. This paper explores the application of "wavelet-based" techniques to study the time-varying nature of growth and volatility. These techniques lend themselves to a more robust analysis of short-term and long-term determinants of growth and volatility than the traditional decomposition techniques, as demonstrated on a small sample of countries. In addition to having desirable technical advantages, such as localization in time and frequency and the ability to work with non-stationary series, these techniques also make it possible to accurately decompose the association between growth trajectories of different countries over different time horizons. Such "co-movement" analysis can provide policy makers with important insights on regional integration, growth poles, and how short and long term developments in other countries affect their domestic economy
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  • 96
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (37 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Safir, Abla Disquiet on the Weather Front
    Abstract: Three recent rounds (2003, 2006, and 2009) of the Family Income and Expenditure Survey are matched to rainfall data from 43 rainfall stations in the Philippines to quantify the extent to which unusual weather has any negative effects on the consumption of Filipino households. It is found that negative rainfall shocks decrease consumption, in particular food consumption. Rainfall below one standard deviation of its long-run average causes food consumption to decrease by about 4 percent, when compared with rainfall within one standard deviation. Positive deviations above one standard deviation have a limited impact. Moreover, for households close to a highway or to a fixed-line phone, consumption appears to be fully protected from the impact of negative rainfall shocks
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  • 97
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (34 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Lim, Jamus Jerome Institutional and Structural Determinants of Investment Worldwide
    Abstract: This paper considers institutional and structural factors associated with investment activity in a panel of up to 129 developed and developing countries. It introduces these factors to a standard neoclassical investment function for open economies, and find that financial development and institutional quality are reasonably robust determinants of cross-country capital formation, with latter displaying more stability in the sign and significance of its coefficient. Indeed, when endogeneity concerns are addressed more explicitly using external instruments, and both interactions and subsamples are considered, institutional quality tends to survive as the causal determinant of investment
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  • 98
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (44 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Adams-Kane, Jonathon Foreign Bank Behavior during Financial Crises
    Abstract: One of the persistent policy problems faced by governments contemplating financial liberalizations is the question of whether to allow foreign banks entry into the domestic economy. This question has become ever more urgent in recent times, due to rapid financial globalization, coupled with the credit contractions experienced as a result of the 2007/08 financial crisis. This paper examines the question of whether opening the financial sector to foreign participation is a good idea for developing countries, using a unique bank-level database of foreign ownership. In particular, the authors examine whether the credit supply of majority foreign-owned financial institutions differ systematically conditional on a crisis event in their home economies. They show that foreign banks that were exposed to crises in their home countries exhibit changes in lending patterns that are lower by between 13 and 42 percent than their non-crisis counterparts
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  • 99
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (23 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Raballand, Gaël Behavioral Economics and Public Sector Reform
    Abstract: Starting with the hypothesis that behaviors are the critical (and often overlooked) factor in public sector performance, this paper explores the notion of how behavioral change (and thus institutional change) might be better motivated in the public sector. The basis for this study is "an accidental experiment" resulting from the World Bank's operational engagement in Cameroon. In 2008, World Bank staff successfully concluded preparation on a project to support the Government of Cameroon to improve transparency, efficiency, and accountability of public finance management. The US
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  • 100
    Online Resource
    Online Resource
    Washington, D.C : The World Bank
    Language: English
    Pages: Online-Ressource (33 p)
    Edition: 2013 World Bank eLibrary
    Parallel Title: Jorgensen, Ole Hagen Efficiency and Equity Implications of Oil Windfalls in Brazil
    Abstract: Large oil reserves off the coast of Brazil may substantially increase the country's oil revenue in the future. A natural resource "curse" could be the consequence if an appropriate share of the oil revenue is not invested. This issue is addressed in this paper for Brazil both theoretically and empirically by focusing on (i) the efficient allocation of oil revenue between investment and consumption; and (ii) because it may be efficient to consume a certain share of the oil revenue, the distributional implications across generations of higher public consumption. The main finding is that, if the Pre-Salt oil revenue brings the aggregate oil revenue in Brazil above 10 percent of gross domestic product, there will be scope for consuming a certain share of it while still maintaining efficiency. But unless oil revenue reaches 10 percent or more of gross domestic product, then all of it should be invested in order for the economy to approach the efficient investment level. If oil revenue as a share of gross domestic product was 10 percent, then the achievable growth in gross domestic product could reach 9.0 percent. The distributional implications are positive for all generations, but vary across generations depending on how much of the oil revenue is invested. As a result, transfer policies could be adjusted to ensure equality in its distribution
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