Cirera, Xavier

Person:
Cirera, Xavier

Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Global Practice

Fields of Specialization

Innovation and Entrepreneurship

ORCID

0000-0001-9086-9807

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Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Global Practice

Last updated: June 6, 2025

Biography

Xavier Cirera is a senior economist in the Finance, Competitiveness, and Innovation (FCI) Global Practice of the World Bank. His work focuses on innovation and entrepreneurship. He has led the evaluation of innovation policies, including through the development of public expenditure reviews in science, technology, and innovation implemented in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Ukraine, and Vietnam. He is the coauthor of The Innovation Paradox: Developing-Country Capabilities and the Unrealized Promise of Technological Catch-Up and A Practitioner’s Guide to Innovation Policy: Instruments to Build Firm Capabilities and Accelerate Technological Catch-Up in Developing Countries. His most recent work focuses on the measurement and impact of technology adoption and diffusion. Before joining the World Bank, he served as a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. He holds a doctorate in economics from the University of Sussex.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 34

Reclaiming the Lost Century of Growth: Building Learning Economies in Latin America and the Caribbean
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-06) Maloney, William F.; Cirera, Xavier; Ferreyra, Maria Marta
Latin America and the Caribbean has lost not decades but a century of growth due to its inability to learn—to identify, adapt, and implement the new technologies emerging since the Second Industrial Revolution. Superstars like Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay fell behind peers like France and Germany, while the entire region retrogressed in industries it once dominated and was unable to take advantage of new opportunities that propelled similarly lagging countries to high-income status. The report shows that this remains the case today as the region’s firms continue to lag in assimilating new technologies. However, it argues that Latin America and the Caribbean can reclaim the lost century by building learning economies, creating the human capital, institutions, and incentives needed to increase the demand for knowledge, facilitate the flow of new ideas, and foment the process of experimentation. "This outstanding book tackles one of Latin America’s greatest development puzzles: its failure to build high-income economies. The authors present a comprehensive theory placing knowledge—its creation, assimilation, and use—at the core of the explanation. Drawing on cutting-edge research, they meticulously document the empirical significance of each element and weave the threads together with remarkable precision, leaving no loose ends. In addition, they examine the missed opportunities that could have reshaped Latin America’s trajectory, advocating for a new knowledge-driven approach to industrial policy. A definitive reference on Latin American development, this book is essential reading for scholars, policy makers, and anyone invested in the region’s economic future." — Diego Comin, Professor of Economics, Dartmouth College "Nearly a century ago, Joseph Schumpeter highlighted the importance of the creation, application, and dissemination of knowledge for the prosperity of nations. And across the century that followed, numerous high-growth countries have confirmed his path to success. But, sadly, most of Latin America and the Caribbean has not. In this magnificent new book, readers will find data, information, theory, and arguments that explain why. More importantly, by examining the mechanics of knowledge assimilation and creation at the center of the “innovation machine” that drives growth, interested readers will find in this text a wide variety of tools and mechanisms adapted to our local conditions to boost the region’s economic prosperity." — José Miguel Benavente, Chief Executive Officer, Chilean Economic Development Agency (CORFO)
Technology Sophistication across Establishments
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-28) Comin, Diego A.; Cirera, Xavier; Cruz, Marcio
This paper examines technology sophistication in establishments. To comprehensively measure technology sophistication, a grid is created that covers key business functions and the technologies used to conduct them. Analyzing data from over 21,000 establishments in 15 countries, the authors find that the most widely used technology is usually not the most sophisticated available in the business function. There is significant variation in technology sophistication across and within countries, explaining 31% of productivity dispersion and over half of the agricultural productivity gap. The sophistication of widely used technologies is more relevant for productivity than the most advanced technologies. More sophisticated technologies are appropriate for both developed and developing countries.
Businesses of the State in Brazil: The Impact on Employment and Business Dynamism
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-07) Brolhato, Sara; Cirera, Xavier; Martins-Neto, Antonio
Businesses of the state (BOS) have regained the public debate in midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially as a source of resilience to shocks and a mechanism for technology development and diffusion. However, little is known about the impacts on the economy. This paper uses a novel dataset that allows exploring the importance of BOS in Brazil, including registered state-owned or mixed enterprises and with indirect state participation in competitive sectors. The paper looks at their impact through two connected perspectives: employment and business dynamism. First, the analysis tests whether BOS pay a wage premium to their employees. Then, it estimates the impacts of privatization on workers’ outcomes and firms’ total employment. The findings indicate that BOS firms pay a substantial wage premium in Brazil and that privatization events lead to a significant decline in workers’ wages. Yet, the analysis does not find robust evidence that privatization results in a decline in total employment. The findings show that BOS tend to use more technical workers, a proxy for innovation, and are larger and grow faster in terms of employment than private companies. Finally, the paper analyzes what the presence of BOS means for the business dynamism of sectors. It finds that a higher presence of BOS in a given sector is negatively correlated with young firms’ participation and exit rates, and job destruction rates. Meanwhile, BOS participation is positively correlated with market concentration, but also job creation rates. The results suggest that BOS have significant impacts on markets, and that assessment of the state’s footprint needs to consider the effects of public investments in private companies, directly and indirectly.
Bridging the Technological Divide: Technology Adoption by Firms in Developing Countries
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-06-15) Comin, Diego; Cirera, Xavier; Cruz, Marcio
Many of the main problems facing developing countries today and tomorrow--growth, poverty reduction, inequality, food insecurity, job creation, recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and adjustment to climate change--hinge on adopting better technology, a key driver of economic development. Access to technology is not enough: firms have to adopt it. Yet it is precisely the uptake of technology that is lagging in many firms in developing countries. The COVID-19 pandemic drove a big uptake of technology, especially digital technologies. Bridging the Technological Divide: Technology Adoption by Firms in Developing Countries takes advantage of this shift to delve into which firms have adopted and use technologies and to what purpose. To do so, it proposes a new approach to measure and understand the adoption and use of technologies by firms. Specifically, it leverages a new data collection instrument, the Firm-level Adoption of Technology (FAT) survey, which provides a very rich characterization of the technologies used and the processes of adoption by firms in developing countries. This book helps open the “black box” of technology adoption by firms. The seventh volume in the World Bank’s Productivity Project series, it will further both research and policy that can be used to support technology adoption by firms in developing countries.
The Role of Technology in Reducing the Gender Gap in Productivity
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-16) Cirera, Xavier; Cruz, Marcio; Martins-Neto, Antonio; Lee, Kyungmin; Nogueira, Caroline
This paper explores new firm-level data to examine the gender gap in technology adoption and the associated effect on firm performance. The data show a small difference in technology sophistication between firms managed by women and those managed by men, but there are larger differences in terms of labor productivity. Firms with female top managers are just as likely to adopt the most sophisticated technologies for general business functions that are common across all firms except for enterprise resource planning. However, firms managed by women adopt advanced technologies less frequently for sector-specific business functions. The study also finds that firms with higher technology sophistication tend to have higher productivity and the returns to the use of more sophisticated technologies are larger in businesses managed by women, which helps to narrow the productivity gap between firms managed by women and those managed by men.
Exporting and Technology Adoption in Brazil
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-06-15) Comin, Diego; Cirera, Xavier; Cruz, Marcio; Lee, Kyung Min; Martins-Neto, Antonio
There is limited evidence on the role of participating in international trade in the diffusion of technologies. This paper analyzes the impact of exporting on firms’ adoption of more sophisticated technologies, using a novel dataset, the Firm-level Adoption of Technology survey, which includes more than 1,500 firms in Brazil. The survey provides detailed information on the use of more than 300 technologies, combined with data from Brazil’s census of formal workers and export data from the Ministry of Trade. To address critical endogeneity concerns, the analysis applies difference-in-differences with multiple periods to examine the effects of entering export markets on technology adoption. The findings show that exporting has a positive effect on firms’ likelihood of adopting advanced technologies in business functions related to business administration, production planning, supply chain management, and quality control, which are important for managing tasks associated with export activities.
The Innovation Imperative for Developing East Asia
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021-02-23) Cirera, Xavier; Mason, Andrew D.; de Nicola, Francesca; Kuriakose, Smita; Mare, Davide S.; Tran, Trang Thu
After a half century of transformative economic progress that moved hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, countries in developing East Asia are facing an array of challenges to their future development. Slowed productivity growth, increased fragility of the global trading system, and rapid changes in technology are all threatening export-oriented, labor-intensive manufacturing—the region’s engine of growth. Significant global challenges—such as climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic—are exacerbating economic vulnerability. These developments raise questions about whether the region’s past model of development can continue to deliver rapid growth and poverty reduction. Against this background, The Innovation Imperative in Developing East Asia aims to deepen understanding of the role of innovation in future development. The report examines the state of innovation in the region and analyzes the main constraints that firms and countries face to innovating. It assesses current policies and institutions, and lays out an agenda for action to spur more innovation-led growth. A key finding of the report is that countries’ current innovation policies are not aligned with their capabilities and needs. Policies need to strengthen the capacity of firms to innovate and support technological diffusion rather than just invention. Policy makers also need to eliminate policy biases against innovation in services, a sector that is growing in economic importance. Moreover, countries need to strengthen key complementary factors for innovation, including firms’ managerial quality, workers’ skills, and finance for innovation. Countries in developing East Asia would also do well to deepen their tradition of international openness, which could foster openness in other parts of the world. Doing so would help sustain the flows of ideas, trade, investment, and people that facilitate the creation and diffusion of knowledge for innovation.
Firm-Level Technology Adoption in Vietnam
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-03) Comin, Diego; Cirera, Xavier; Lee, Kyung Min; Cruz, Marcio; Soares Martins-Neto, Antonio
This paper describes the results of a new firm survey to measure technology use and adoption implemented prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam. It analyzes the use and adoption of technology among Vietnamese firms and identifies some of the key barriers to adoption and diffusion. The analysis offers new and important stylized facts on firm-level use of technologies. First, although access to the internet is almost universal in Vietnam, firms had low digital readiness to face the COVID-19 pandemic; and the share of establishments with their own website, social media, and cloud computing is still small. Second, the use of Industry 4.0 technologies is incipient. Third, the technology gap with the use of frontier technologies in some general business functions, such as quality control, production planning, sales, and sourcing and procurement, is large. Fourth, the manufacturing sector faces the largest technological gap, larger than services and agricultural firms. The analysis of the main barriers and drivers to technology adoption and use shows the importance of good management quality for technology adoption, and that there is a technology premium associated with exporting activities. Finally, the analysis also shows that firms are largely unaware of the available public policy support for technology upgrading.
Technology and Resilience
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-03-01) Cirera, Xavier; Comin, Diego; Cruz, Marcio; Lee, Kyung Min; Torres, Jesica
This paper estimates the impact of technology sophistication pre-COVID-19 on the performance of firms during the early stages of the pandemic. It exploits a unique data set covering firms from Brazil, Senegal, and Vietnam, using a treatment effect mediation framework to decompose the results into direct and indirect effects. Increasing pre-pandemic technology sophistication by one standard deviation is associated with 3.8 percentage points higher sales. Both effects are positive, but the direct effect is about five times larger than the indirect effect. The total effect on sales is markedly nonlinear with significantly smaller estimates of the reduction in sales for firms with more sophisticated pre-pandemic technology. The results are robust to different measures of digital responses and matching estimators.
Deconstructing the Missing Middle: Informality and Growth of Firms in Sub-Saharan Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-11) Fattal Jaef, Roberto N.; Abreha, Kaleb Girma; Maemir, Hibret Belete; Cirera, Xavier; Maemir, Hibret Belete; Davies, Elwyn
This paper characterizes the firm size distribution by exploiting establishment-level censuses covering both formal and informal firms in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper finds a "missing middle" in the employment-based size distribution of firms in four Sub-Saharan African countries. This "missing middle" hinges on the inclusion of informal firms, and it is not explained by state- or foreign-owned firms at the top of the size distribution, nor does it emerge from the size distribution of entrants. The paper reconciles these empirical results with a model of firm dynamics with endogenous informality and shows that calibrated values of entry barriers and productivity-dependent idiosyncratic distortions generate a "missing middle" that is consistent with its underlying drivers in the data.