Person:
Herrera, Santiago

Middle East and North Africa
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Fields of Specialization
Macroeconomics, Egypt, International Finance, Expenditure Efficiency Measurement and Benchmarking, Latin America
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ORCID
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Middle East and North Africa
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Last updated: February 1, 2023
Biography
Santiago Herrera Aguilera is the Lead Country Economist for Egypt in the Middle East and North Africa region at the World Bank. He has been in this position since September of 2008. He first joined the Bank in May of 1998 as a Senior Economist working for the Latin America and Caribbean Region. In February of 2004 he became the Lead Economist for economic policy at the Poverty Reduction and Economic Management Network in Washington. Prior to joining the Bank, Aguilera was the Deputy Minister of Finance in Columbia from 1995 to 1996. Before that, he was the Director of the National Budget also at the Columbian Ministry of Finance. Aguilera holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Economics from Columbia University in New York. He also holds a Masters degree in Economics from the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Columbia.

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Publication
    The Impact of Food Inflation on Urban Poverty and Its Monetary Cost : Some Back-of-the-Envelope Calculations
    (2008) Dessus, Sebastien; Herrera, Santiago; De Hoyos, Rafael
    This article uses a sample of 72 developing countries to estimate the change in the cost of alleviating urban poverty brought about by the recent increase in food prices. This cost is approximated by the change in the poverty deficit (PD), that is, the variation in financial resources required to eliminate poverty under perfect targeting. The results show that, for most countries, the cost represents less than 0.2% of gross domestic product. However, in the most severely affected, it may exceed 3%. In all countries, the change in the PD is mostly due to the negative real income effect of those households that were poor before the price shock, while the cost attributable to new households falling into poverty is negligible. Thus, in countries where transfer mechanisms with effective targeting already exist, the most cost-effective strategy would be to scale up such programs rather than designing tools to identify the new poor.
  • Publication
    Efficiency of Infrastructure : The Case of Container Ports
    (2008) Herrera, Santiago
    This paper gauges efficiency in container ports. Using non-parametric methods, we estimate efficiency frontiers based on information from 86 ports across the world. Three attractive features of the method are: 1) it is based on an aggregated measure of efficiency despite the existence of multiple inputs; 2) it does not assume particular input-output functional relationships; and 3) it does not rely on a priori peer selection to construct the benchmark. Results show that the most inefficient ports use inputs in excess of 20 to 40 percent. Since infrastructure costs represent about 40 percent of total maritime transport costs, these could be reduced by 12 percent by moving from the inefficient extreme of the distribution to the efficient one.