Participation in global value chains is a key element in the industrialization strategies of many developing nations. This paper investigates the role of services liberalization in promoting participation in global value chains.
... See More + Using the gravity framework, it examines the impact of services trade agreements on gross trade and global value chain trade (backward and forward participation) in goods. It finds that services trade agreements promote both, but especially global value chain trade, although the effects are heterogeneous: the impact is greater for developing nation exporters. Moreover, services agreements that allow the export of services without local presence (non-establishment rights) are particularly important in fostering participation in global value chains.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8475 JUN 14, 2018
Education conditional cash transfer programs may increase school attendance in part due to the information they transmit to parents about their child's attendance.
... See More + This paper presents experimental evidence that the information content of an education conditional cash transfer program, when given to parents independently of any transfer, can have a substantial effect on school attendance. The effect is as large as 75 percent of the effect of a conditional cash transfer incentivizing parents, and not significantly different from it. In contrast, a conditional transfer program incentivizing children instead of parents is nearly twice as effective as an "information only" treatment providing the same information to parents about their child's attendance. Taken together, these results suggest that children have substantial agency in their schooling decisions. The paper replicates the findings from most evaluations of conditional cash transfers that gains in attendance achieved by incentivizing parents financially do not translate into gains in test scores. But it finds that both the information only treatment and the alternative intervention incentivizing children substantially improve math test scores.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8476 JUN 14, 2018
De Walque,Damien B. C. M.; Valente,ChristineDisclosed
Automation will be a boon or a catastrophe depending on whom you listen to. This paper proposes an overlapping-generations model with endogenous school choice in which the quality of a country's education system determines how well skill supply can respond to increased demand from automation and subsequently whether automation will be beneficial or detrimental.
... See More + In this sense, education quality in the model offers a bridge between the optimistic and pessimistic perspectives on automation. In testing the model's assumptions, the paper finds evidence that educational attainment, cognitive skills, and select noncognitive skills are associated with avoiding automation-prone occupations. Consistent with the model's predictions, census data indicate that countries have historically relied most on these types of occupations at middle-income status. The model and empirical findings suggest that it is middle-income countries that are most vulnerable to automation if their education systems are unable to affect cognitive and noncognitive skills sufficiently. As a result, automation may herald a much different growth model for developing countries: one in which developing these skills is central.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8474 JUN 14, 2018
Bentaouet Kattan,Raja; Macdonald,Kevin Alan David; Patrinos,Harry AnthonyDisclosed
This report is a second assessment of the mLabs (mobile application labs) program following the 2014 assessment: Do mLabs Make a Difference? This second assessment focuses on essentially the same three questions as the first assessment.
... See More + In September 2016, the infoDev mLab program engaged Sonjara, Inc. to perform this rapid assessment in Armenia (mLab Eastern Europe, South Caucasus, and Central Asia), Kenya (m:lab East Africa), Senegal (CTIC/mLab West Africa), and South Africa (mLab Southern Africa). This second assessment is based on an examination and visits to each mLab, with more than 160 field interviews and facilitated focus group discussions. The team analyzed more than 70 mLab-supported companies, conducting in-depth interviews with 59 mLabs start-ups as well as with mLab staff, investors, comparable start-ups, customers, and others in the ecosystem. The team also performed a review of documents, data, and materials provided by the mLabs and companies, as well as collecting leading practices and background research from industry and stakeholder sources. The report findings show that, since their launch in 2010 and since the 2014 assessment, mLabs have coevolved with their ecosystems, both influencing and being influenced by rapidly changing environments, marked by increased involvement by the private sector in both incubation and investment, and the rapid changes and improvements in technology infrastructure. The mLabs’ impacts on start-ups, start-up customers and on the digital entrepreneurship infrastructure are discussed. Recommendations are given strengthening program management among other things.
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This report is an assessment of the relevance of the CodeBus Africa project from the perspective of local partners. CodeBus Africa organized beginner level computer programming workshops in collaboration with 15 African partners in 10 Sub-Saharan African countries in 2017.
... See More + The overall purpose of the project was to promote and inspire equal participation of girls and boys in technology education, to build local capacity for teaching student-centered beginner-level programming and to boost collaboration between Finnish and African innovators. The study considers the extent to which a short-term collaboration such as CodeBus Africa, along with its offering of basic technical bootcamps, is deemed useful and valuable by African technology hubs. The findings suggest that the outcomes the partners mostly valued were: extension of networks, adopting a new coding education program (Sonic Pi), developing a new student-centered teaching practice for technology education, public visibility, and organizational learning including tech education management and teacher training skills among the local partners’ staff. For designing a scalable technology training program, the study highlights the following findings and recommendations: the need to dedicate personnel to focus on the youth training program and pedagogical development, to include business model development as a core activity, to identify local and global organizations as funding partners, to develop a local partner network for implementation, and to continue collaborating with CodeBus partners - Finnish embassies, Nokia and World Bank.
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Bureaucratic performance is a crucial determinant of economic growth. Little is known about how to improve it in resource-constrained settings.
... See More + This study describes a field trial of a social recognition intervention to improve record keeping in clinics in two Nigerian states, replicating the intervention -- implemented by a single organization -- on bureaucrats performing identical tasks in both states. Social recognition improved performance in one state but had no effect in the other, highlighting both the potential and the limitations of behavioral interventions. Differences in observables did not explain cross-state differences in impacts, however, illustrating the limitations of observable-based approaches to external validity.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8473 JUN 13, 2018
Small area poverty maps allow for the design of policies based on spatial differences in welfare. They are typically estimated based on a consumption survey reporting on poverty and a census providing the spatial disaggregation.
... See More + This paper presents a new method which allows for the estimation of up-to-date small area poverty maps when only a dated census and a more recent survey are available and predictors and structural parameters are subject to drift over time, a situation commonly encountered in practice. Instead of using survey variables to explain consumption in the survey, the new approach uses variables constructed from the census. The proposed estimator has fewer data requirements and weaker assumptions than common small area poverty map estimators. Applications to simulated data and to poverty estimation in Brazil show an overall good performance.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8472 JUN 12, 2018
Uganda has a complex land tenure system. Four tenure systems officially recognized by the 1995 Constitution coexist: freehold, Mailo, leasehold, and customary tenure.
... See More + While undocumented customary tenure dominates in the country (UNPS 2013/2014 data estimates that 84 percent of parcels are held customarily), Mailo tenure is predominant in the central and parts of the western regions. Around 10 percent of Uganda's land (in surface) is held under Mailo tenure, possibly more.
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The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the World Bank’s corporate goals of ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity call for specific attention to the poor and vulnerable.
... See More + The overarching objective of the SDGs is to end poverty in all its forms, but their key difference from the earlier Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is the integration of social, economic, and environmental goals (UN 2015). This has significant implications for reforms aimed at improving service delivery. With this understanding as its guiding compass, the Water Supply, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) Poverty Diagnostic Initiative focuses on what it will take to reduce existing inequalities in WASH services worldwide. This report, a synthesis of that global initiative, offers new insights on how data can be used to inform allocation decisions to reduce inequalities and prioritize investment in WASH to boost human capital. It also offers a fresh perspective on service delivery that considers how institutional arrangements1 affect the incentives of a range of actors. When it comes to improving services, politics matters as much today as it did in the London of the mid-19th century. Importantly, as will be discussed below, the report does not offer prescriptive global solutions for service delivery challenges. Instead, it seeks to encourage a dialogue on ways to think and work differently, using a problem-driven approach and engaging with the constraints imposed by the broader governance environment. Built on in-depth country-level analysis, the WASH Poverty Diagnostic Initiative aims to provide data-driven recommendations to help policy makers, stakeholders, and donors plan more strategically and equitably. The present report synthesizes multisectoral research from 17 low and middle-income countries and the West Bank and Gaza, undertaken since 2015. It presents new evidence on inequalities in access to WASH services, examines the impact of unequal services on the poor, and explores context-specific constraints that go beyond technical issues to understand why service delivery continues to be inadequate and inefficient. It highlights findings from individual countries, involves substantial reanalysis of existing data sets in new and innovative ways, brings new evidence on spatial inequalities at the subnational level, and shares insights on SDG parameters that were previously invisible. The work confirms some prior findings, even as it challenges water sector practitioners and decision makers to do business differently.
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Recent literature has shown evidence of positive contributions of export promotion agencies around the world in raising exports, through the intensive and extensive margins of trade.
... See More + The number of export promotion agencies has increased substantially over the past two decades, and most of them focus on assisting exporters in understanding and finding markets for their products. This paper describes the characteristics of export promotion agencies around the world, using a novel database from the World Bank, in collaboration with the International Trade Center in Geneva, covering 2005-10. In addition, it presents a short summary of the literature on the impacts of export promotion agencies.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8470 JUN 07, 2018
Vargas Da Cruz,Marcio Jose; Lederman,Daniel; Zoratto,Laura De CastroDisclosed
The empirical case for trade as an engine of growth has now been established on solid empirical grounds. There has been a protracted controversy in the literature on the econometrics of trade and growth.
... See More + Nonetheless, most recent estimates suggest that a major episode of liberalization provides a permanent boost in growth on the order of 1 to 2 percent. Concomitantly, and largely on practical grounds, most low- and middle-income countries, with very few exceptions, have substantially lowered their trade barriers, eliminating the most egregious forms of trade protection (tariff peaks, quantitative restrictions, and other command-and-control instruments). Yet, by all accounts, trade costs remain high. Using an approach that consists of inverting the gravity equation and inferring trade costs from the relative size of external versus internal trade, Arvis and others (2013) and Novy (2013) show that trade costs have failed to fall as much for low-income countries as they have for others, reinforcing their economic ‘remoteness.’ Several multilateral initiatives have been set up to help low- and middle-income countries low-income ones, to integrate better in world trade. For instance, the Aid-for-Trade initiative was launched in 2005 to help low-income countries to cope with their Uruguay Round commitments, which were, in turn, expected to improve their ability to draw benefits from World Trade Organization (WTO) membership. More recently, the Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) signed in December 2013 in Bali and entered into force in February 2017, was designed to help low and middle-income countries to focus on reducing non-tariff barriers (NTBs) to trade such as border delays, cumbersome regulations, and so on. The TFA is expected to focus governments’ attention on the various aspects of trade facilitation, including some that go beyond the written mandate of the TFA. Some of those aspects are technical issues of border management, such as reducing delays, computerizing customs transactions, and streamlining verification and payment procedures. Some others are more genuinely economic, such as streamlining NTBs and improving regulatory design through cost-benefit analysis. This volume discusses some of the analytical methods that can be used to accompany this process. Chapter two discusses the broad economic rationale for improving the design of NTMs. Chapter three illustrates the main forms of quantifying NTMs and their effects, including inventory approaches, price-based approaches, and quantity-based approaches. It also proposes a new analytical and measurable concept of regulatory distance to help in guiding deep integration efforts at the regional level. Chapter four discusses the effects of NTMs on household expenditures, poverty, and firm competitiveness. Chapter five illustrates how analysis of NTMs can be used to inform policy advice. Chapter six concludes.
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Optima helps HIV decision-makers and planners determine an optimal distribution of investments to best serve their country`s need by analyzing epidemic, program, and cost data.
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The recovery from the global crisis that erupted in 2007 shows that the decoupling between real and financial variables during the business cycle can lead to negative and long-lasting consequences for the economy.
... See More + A key feature of the past global crisis in many countries is that the recovery in aggregate output has not been accompanied by a contemporary pick-up in lending flows to the private sector, rendering the recovery credit-less. This paper uses data on output and credit to study the relative roles of demand and supply drivers of credit growth during economic recoveries on a sample of advanced and emerging countries between 1980 and 2014. Using a simple endowment economy model, the paper shows that credit-less recoveries are correlated with liquidity shocks in real and financial markets and with the pace of private sector deleveraging. The empirical analysis shows that during these episodes demand-side frictions played a relatively larger role in predicting the occurrence of the episodes, reflecting weak demand for liquidity by the private sector in the aftermath of the crisis.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8465 JUN 05, 2018
This paper estimates a panel model in which the relationship between inequality and gross domestic product per capita growth depends on countries' initial incomes.
... See More + Estimates of the model show that the relationship between inequality and gross domestic product per capita growth is significantly decreasing in countries' initial incomes. The results from instrumental variables regressions show that in low-income countries, transitional growth is boosted by greater income inequality. In high-income countries, inequality has a significant negative effect on transitional growth. For the median country in the world that in 2015 had a purchasing power parity gross domestic product per capita of around US$10,000, instrumental variables estimates predict that a 1 percentage point increase in the Gini coefficient decreases gross domestic product per capita growth over a five-year period by over 1 percentage point; the long-run effect on the level of gross domestic product per capita is around -5 percent.
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Policy Research Working Paper WPS8467 JUN 05, 2018
Optima helps HIV decision-makers and planners determine an optimal distribution of investments to best serve their country`s need by analyzing epidemic, program, and cost data.
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