Person:
Goodwin, Tanja
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Competition Policy
Degrees
External Links
Departments
Markets and Competition Policy Team, Macroeconomics Trade and Investment Global Practice
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Tanja Goodwin is a Senior Economist at the World Bank’s Macroeconomics Trade and Investment Global Practice working with the Markets and Competition Policy Team since 2011. Her work focuses on analytics and technical assistance in pro-competition sectoral regulation and on the implementation of competition policy with significant experience in Latin America as well as Northern Africa and East Asia Pacific. Before joining the World Bank, Tanja worked at private and public research institutes in Germany and in Latin America. She holds a Master’s Degree in Economics from the New York University and besides her professional affiliation at the Bank, she has taught in different graduate programs, including the University of Tuebingen and in the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru.
Publication Search Results
1 - 5 of 5
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Publication
Export Competitiveness: Why Domestic Market Competition Matters
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06)This review of the empirical literature shows that industries with more intense domestic competition will export more. Competition law enforcement can be traced to export performance and is complementary to trade reforms. Pro-competition market regulation that reduces restrictions and promotes competition, where it is viable, is an important determinant for trade. The elimination of barriers to entry and rivalry, and a level playing field in upstream sectors contributes to export competitiveness in downstream manufacturing sectors. In some sectors, effective competition policy can directly lower trade costs. -
Publication
Strengthening Argentina's Integration into the Global Economy: Policy Proposals for Trade, Investment, and Competition
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018-04-09)Integration into global markets can improve the efficiency of the Argentinian economy, providing opportunities for private investment to flourish and for the associated benefits to accrue to consumers. Among many policies that are important for integrating into the global economy, particularly relevant are trade, investment, and competition policies. They all share a common attribute: the capacity to shape the incentives of firms to improve resource allocation and to strengthen productivity while integrating into international markets. Once properly combined, investment, trade, and competition polices have mutually reinforcing relationships in the sense that growth dividends stemming from reforms in one policy area are reinforced when properly combined with reforms in the other two. Against this backdrop, this report follows a three-pronged approach. It presents a set of robust empirical analyses – drawing from both general and partial equilibrium exercises - to assess the potential impacts from trade, competition, and investment policy reforms. It offers a new comparative review of international experience with structural microeconomic reform programs to bring insights for Argentina’s design and sequencing of such reforms. Finally, it presents individual reform recommendations for each institution in charge of the three respective policy areas in an integrated step-by-step framework from the firm perspective to illustrate the critical challenges to investment and internationalization for Argentinian firms. -
Publication
Using ORBIS to Build a Global Database of Firms with State Participation
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-12)This paper develops a novel methodology to construct a harmonized cross-country database of the state’s footprint in markets: the Businesses of the State database. The methodology of the database is built on three criteria—(i) a harmonized definition of state-owned enterprises, (ii) identification of direct and indirect state ownership linkages at the national and subnational levels across the corporate sector, and (iii) classification of economic activities depending on their efficiency rationale—which conceptualize a framework to trace state presence in the corporate sector across economic activities. The database is constructed leveraging different firm-level data sources including the ORBIS Global Database, as the primary data source, which is then complemented with supplementary data sources (EMIS Intelligence, Factiva, Worldscope, Pitchbook, among others) to mitigate ORBIS’s data limitations across countries and regions. The Businesses of the State database identifies an unprecedented number of firms with state participation across countries and economic activities, as well as providing novel insights on financial performance, economic performance, and governance of state-owned enterprises. A deep-dive analysis of 36 countries within the Businesses of the State database shows that 69 percent of state-owned enterprises operate in competitive activities (low efficiency-rationale for state participation), 16% are in partially contestable industries (moderate efficiency rationale), and 15 percent are natural monopolies (strong efficiency rationale). Furthermore, this analysis suggests that performance-based productivity of state-owned enterprises (revenue per worker) is negatively correlated with government control variables, such as government shareholding percentage and direct versus indirect government ownership. -
Publication
Are All State-Owned Enterprises Equal ? A Taxonomy of Economic Activities to Assess SOE Presence in the Economy
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-12)This paper proposes a sector taxonomy of the rationale for the presence of state-owned enterprises in specific industries. The taxonomy is conceptualized only on an efficiency-based rationale for state participation in different economic activities, abstracting it from social or political justification of state-owned enterprises, which can be subjective or conditioned to the country context. The taxonomy is leveraged on a standard industry classification, the Nomenclature of Economic Activities Revision 2 four-digit level sector classification, which is sufficiently disaggregated to resemble specific markets, and thus more appropriate for analyzing the presence of state-owned enterprises through the lens of industrial organization. The proposed taxonomy deploys a decision tree, based on efficiency-based criteria, to classify 563 disaggregated sectors into one of three groups: a “competitive” category, for which the presence of state-owned enterprises does not appear to be justified on grounds of economic efficiency/market failure; a “natural monopoly” category, which includes economic sectors whose market structure is characterized by economies of scale and subadditivity costs that could be corrected via the participation of state-owned enterprises; and a “partially contestable” category, which includes economic sectors characterized by some form of market power, externalities, or other market failures that could be addressed through state ownership. The application of the decision tree classifies 11 disaggregated sectors as natural monopolies, 45 as partially contestable, and the remaining 505 as competitive. -
Publication
Trade Liberalization and Integration of Domestic Output Markets in Brazil
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2018-10)This paper describes how different policy distortions have been impeding better integration of Brazil's external and internal product markets and discusses how these distortions have prevented domestic firms from benefiting from multiple sources of efficiency gains. The paper first focuses on the costs of barriers to global integration, followed by an overview of policy induced stringencies hampering domestic integration. Drawing from general and partial equilibrium analyses, the paper also provides evidence of potential impacts of removing some of those distortions and discusses policy options to promote better allocation of resources across the economy. The main conclusion of the paper is that Brazil could gain significantly from opening to foreign trade. Yet, for Brazil to take full advantage of the opportunities that external integration offers, domestic markets also need to function better, so it is key to ensure that the removal of external barriers to integration is coordinated with the removal of internal distortions to domestic market integration.