Rosenblatt, David

Person:
Rosenblatt, David

Strategy and Operations, Development Economics

Fields of Specialization

Macroeconomics, Public Sector and Governance, Development Strategy, Fiscal Decentralization

ORCID

0000-0002-9951-6298

External Links

RePEc

Departments

Strategy and Operations, Development Economics

Last updated: January 31, 2023

Biography

David Rosenblatt is Manager of Strategy and Operations the Development Economics unit of the World Bank. In twenty-five years at the Bank, he has divided his time between operational work in the Latin America and Caribbean region and the World Bank’s Chief Economist’s office/Development Economics Unit, where he has served five Chief Economists. David has worked as a country economist at the junior, senior, and lead levels covering a geographic scope from Argentina to Mexico, and multiple countries in between. He has led teams for numerous policy-based lending operations, analytic reports, and country strategies. In addition to his operational and corporate work, he has contributed a number of research papers. David has a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 12

The State of Economics, the State of the World
(Cambridge, Massachesetts, The MIT Press, 2019-11-25) Basu, Kaushik; Rosenblatt, David; Sepulveda, Claudia; Basu, Kaushik; Rosenblatt, David; Sepulveda, Claudia; Aghion, Philippe; Alger, Ingela; Arrow, Kenneth; Banerjee, Abhijit Vinayak; Blume, Lawrence E.; Calvo, Guillermo; Caselli, Frencesco; Demirguc-Kunt, Asli; Devarajan, Shantayanan; Duflo, Esther; Fankhauser, Sam; Foster, James E.; Gauri, Varun; Gine, Xavier; Giraud, Gael; Gopinah, Gita; Hockett, Robert; Hoff, Karla; Kanbur, Ravi; Kraay, Aart; Kremer, Michael; McKenzie, David; Monga, Celestin; Obstfeld, Maurice; Rashid, Hamid; Ravallion, Martin; Sen, Amartya; Serven, Luis; Shin, Hyun Song; Stern, Nicholas; Stiglitz, Joseph; Sunstein, Cass R.; Toman, Michael; Weibull, Jorgen W.
We live in troubled times. Over the past decade, the world economy has been wracked by financial crises, sovereign debt problems, backlash from political conflict and migrant crises, and, recently, a rise in xenophobia and protectionism. These issues raise major questions about the state of the world and also about the ability of economics to take on such challenges. Are these many economic and political crises and flare-ups symptoms of some deeper, underlying issues? Is economics as a discipline failing us at this time of soul searching? These are the questions that many are asking and that prompted the conference at the World Bank on which this book is based. We decided to bring in some of the finest minds in the profession—economists who have shaped modern economics—to ponder the state of the field and the state of the world in a series of papers. The conference consisted of 2 days of deliberation: The papers were presented, a distinguished group of economists commented on the presentations, and a large audience engaged with them in conversation and debate. This book is the outcome of these 2 days of deliberation.
Should Emerging Markets Worry about U.S. Monetary Policy Announcements?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2017-06) Gupta, Poonam; Masetti, Oliver; Rosenblatt, David
This paper analyzes the spillover effects of U.S. monetary policy announcements on emerging market economies since end-2008, the period coinciding with the use of unconventional policy measures. Monetary policy surprises are measured by changes in two-year Treasury yields in short windows of time around the Federal Reserve Board’s policy announcements. The analysis finds that U.S. monetary policy surprises have a significant impact on emerging economies' exchange rates, equity prices, and bond yields. The impact is larger for surprise tightening of policy than for surprise easing. The impact is disproportionately larger for large surprises, implying that emerging markets are relatively insulated from anticipated policy announcements. The spillover effects of policy announcements of other advanced economies, such as the euro area, Japan, and United Kingdom, are found to be much weaker than those of the United States.
The Credibility of Economic Policy Making in Argentina, 1989-2015
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-10) Rosenblatt, David
This paper explores the hypothesis that the credibility of economic policy making in Argentina (or lack thereof) has impacted the volatility of economic performance. To establish the link, a historical review of economic policy making and economic outcomes over the quarter century is presented, informed by a survey of the literature on credibility and the political economy of reforms. A more fundamental question is why policy shifts are so frequent, and this necessarily relates to the political institutions underlying policy making. A recent literature on citizen engagement and accountability, combined with international experience, is then used to consider policy options that could help reestablish credibility during the new administration.
Middle-Income Traps : A Conceptual and Empirical Survey
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-09) Im, Fernando Gabriel; Rosenblatt, David
In recent years, the term "middle-income trap" has entered common parlance in the development policy community. The term itself often has not been precisely defined in the incipient literature. This paper discusses in more detail definitional issues on the so-called middle-income trap. The paper presents evidence in terms of both absolute and relative thresholds. To get a better understanding of whether the performance of the middle-income trap has been different from other income categories, the paper examines historical transition phases in the inter-country distribution of income based on previous work in the literature. Transition matrix analysis provides little support for the idea of a middle-income trap. Analysis of cross-country patterns of growth provides additional support for the conclusions in the paper, which closes with a general discussion of potential policy implications.
Reform of the International Monetary System : A Jagged History and Uncertain Prospects
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-05) Fardoust, Shahrokh; Lin, Justin Yifu; Rosenblatt, David
This paper analyzes the historical evolution of the international monetary system in the context of the rising role of developing countries in the world economy and the emerging multi-polar growth setting. It evaluates the stability of the current "non-system" and how the global economic context is likely to affect that stability in the coming years with potential adverse effects on both advanced and developing economies. Given the likely trend toward a multi-polar reserve currency system, the paper evaluates the stability of the emerging system, as well as the current proposals for reform of the international monetary system. The paper concludes that more ambitious reforms of the system may be needed to meaningfully reduce future global economic and financial instability.
A Note on the Simple Algebra of the Shared Prosperity Indicator
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-10) McGavock, Tamara J.; Rosenblatt, David
One of the two goals of the World Bank Group's new strategy is to promote shared prosperity, defined as the income growth of the bottom 40 percent of the population. The simple monitoring indicator then is the income per capita of the bottom 40 percent of the population. The growth of this indicator can be decomposed into two components: the change in the share of total income accruing to the bottom 40 percent and the growth of the average income of the total population. This paper presents: (i) a brief discussion of the properties of the indicator; (ii) the simple decomposition in algebraic form; (iii) a graphical method for displaying the combinations of the two components of the decomposition; (iv) simulations of the decomposition for hypothetical countries; and (v) some illustrative data.
Shifting Patterns of Economic Growth and Rethinking Development
(Taylor and Francis, 2012-07-30) Lin, Justin Yifu; Rosenblatt, David
This paper provides an historical overview of both the evolution of the economic performance of the developing world and the evolution of economic thought on development policy. The twentieth century was broadly characterized by divergence between high-income countries and the developing world, with only a limited number (less than 10% of the economies in the world) managing to progress out of lower or middle-income status to high-income status. The last decade witnessed a sharp reversal from a pattern of divergence to convergence – particularly for a set of large middle-income countries. The latter phenomenon was also driven by increasing economic ties among developing countries and, on the intellectual scale, increased knowledge generation and sharing among the developing countries. Re-thinking development policy implies confronting these realities: twentieth century economic divergence, the experience of the handful of success stories, and the recent rise of the multi-polar growth world. This paper provides descriptive data and a literature survey to document these trends.
Shifting Patterns of Economic Growth and Rethinking Development
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-04) Lin, Justin Yifu; Rosenblatt, David
This paper provides an historical overview of both the evolution of the economic performance of the developing world and the evolution of economic thought on development policy. The 20th century was broadly characterized by divergence between high-income countries and the developing world, with only a limited number (less than 10 percent of the economies in the world) managing to progress out of lower or middle-income status to high-income status. The last decade witnessed a sharp reversal from a pattern of divergence to convergence --particularly for a set of large middle-income countries. The latter phenomenon was also driven by increasing economic ties among developing countries, and on the intellectual scale, increased knowledge generation and sharing among the developing countries. Re-thinking development policy implies confronting these realities: 20th century economic divergence, the experience of the handful of success stories, and the recent rise of the multi-polar growth world. The paper provides descriptive data and a literature survey to document these trends. The paper also provides a brief survey of the role of multilateral institutions -- in particular, the World Bank -- in this changing context and offers suggestions on how they can adapt their strategies to improve development outcomes.
Regional Economic Growth in Mexico : Recent Evolution and the Role of Governance
(2010-07-01) Weiss, Eli; Rosenblatt, David
There has been substantial research in recent years examining the regional evolution of economic growth across states in Mexico -- with a particular focus on the post North American Free Trade Agreement period. There is also a vast literature using cross-country regressions to examine institutional determinants of economic growth, including government transparency, or "corruption," as a key institutional variable. This paper uses more recently available data for Mexican states to both update the general state convergence/divergence literature, and incorporate into the analysis more recently developed state level indicators of institutional factors related to government transparency. The authors do not find a systematic relationship between measures of government transparency and gross domestic product per capita growth in Mexico during 2001-2005; however, they do find that corruption is negatively associated with the level of state gross domestic product per capita. The contrasting results may imply that more years of data are necessary to be able to establish statistically significant relationships between state growth rates and measures of corruption.
Global Redistribution of Income
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-07) Bourguignon, François; Levin, Victoria; Rosenblatt, David
The actual distribution of world income across countries is extremely unequal, much higher than the within country inequality faced by most countries. The question studied in this paper is: How do international policies on aid, trade, and factor movements affect the international distribution of income? To begin to answer this question, the authors calculate the impact by decile of the actual level of aid flows and the effect on potential income of merchandise trade restrictions by high-income countries. They find that aid's distributional impact is equality enhancing. While it is extremely small in terms of changes in standard inequality measures, it is of some importance for the lowest decile of the world's income distribution. The authors also find that some of this impact is counteracted by lost potential income in the lower deciles from merchandise trade barriers imposed by high-income countries. In brief, there is a contradiction in international policies where aid's equality-enhancing effect is somewhat offset by protectionism. They also discuss some of the analytical difficulties with extending this analysis of redistribution to other forms of international factor flows-more specifically, migrant worker and profit remittances. The analysis presented is partial and static and ignores within country distribution. As such, the authors suggest that future research should explore the distributional consequences of the broader general equilibrium effects, dynamic effects, and externalities associated with aid, trade, and factor flows. Future research should also analyze the within country distributional impacts of international policies.