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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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 - 5 of 5
  • Publication
    Public Expenditure and Growth
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-10) Herrera, Santiago
    Given that public spending will have a positive impact on GDP if the benefits exceed the marginal cost of public funds, the present paper deals with measuring costs and benefits of public spending. The paper discusses one cost seldom considered in the literature and in policy debates, namely, the volatility derived from additional public spending. The paper identifies a relationship between public spending volatility and consumption volatility, which implies a direct welfare loss to society. This loss is substantial in developing countries, estimated at 8 percent of consumption. If welfare losses due to volatility are this sizeable, then measuring the benefits of public spending is critical. Gauging benefits based on macro aggregate data requires three caveats: a) considering of the impact of the funding (taxation) required for the additional public spending; b) differentiating between investment and capital formation; c) allowing for heterogeneous response of output to different types of capital and differences in network development. It is essential to go beyond country-specificity to project-level evaluation of the benefits and costs of public projects. From the micro viewpoint, the rate of return of a project must exceed the marginal cost of public funds, determined by tax levels and structure. Credible evaluations require microeconomic evidence and careful specification of counterfactuals. On this, the impact evaluation literature and methods play a critical role. From individual project evaluation, the analyst must contemplate the general equilibrium impacts. In general, the paper advocates for project evaluation as a central piece of any development platform. By increasing the efficiency of public spending, the government can permanently increase the rate of productivity growth and, hence, affect the growth rate of GDP.
  • Publication
    Policy Mix, Public Debt Management and Fiscal Rules : Lessons from the 2002 Brazilian Crisis
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-02) Herrera, Santiago
    Despite significant progress in economic reform throughout the 1990s, and an exemplary development of the policymaking framework in the second part of the decade, Brazil suffered a major public debt and currency crisis in 2002. Though the political origin of the uncertainty cannot be ignored, the author identifies other sources of uncertainty emanating from the policymaking framework: fiscal policy was not responsive to the shocks, public debt instruments were used with several objectives (to stabilize the currency and to lengthen maturity) and there was inadequate supervision of agents holding public debt. Most of the flaws have been fixed following the crisis: a) The primary fiscal balance has been increased, sending the signal that it is a flexible instrument that will be used to ensure commitment of the sovereign to honor its obligations. b) The central bank formally transferred to the Treasury the remaining debt-issuance functions, facilitating a more adequate balancing of different risks involved in debt management. c) Mutual funds' public debt holdings are better regulated, ensuring that end-investors have the proper information to assess the risk of the institutions in which they invest.
  • Publication
    The Quality of Fiscal Adjustment and the Long-Run Growth Impact of Fiscal Policy in Brazil
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2006-09) Blanco, Fernando; Herrera, Santiago
    The authors describe the main trends of Brazil's fiscal policy during the past decade and analyze (1) the ability to raise the primary surplus in response to external shocks, (2) the pro-cyclical nature of fiscal policy, and (3) the long-run impact of government expenditure composition and taxation. They analyze the use of the primary balance as a policy tool within the Drudi-Prati model, wherein the government uses the primary balance to reveal its commitment to service its debt. The authors verify that both the debt ratio and the primary balance are determinants of spreads and credit ratings in Brazil. But the relationship is nonlinear: the impact of the primary balance on spreads is amplified as the debt ratio increases. Using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach, the authors analyze the relationship between the primary balance and economic activity, finding a positive correlation in the long run. However, in the short run fiscal expansions are associated with primary balance reductions and vice-versa during output contractions, confirming the procyclical nature of fiscal policy in the short run. The authors use two approaches, ARDL and a cointegrating value at risk (VAR), to analyze the interaction between public expenditure composition and taxation on growth. Similar results are obtained: large elasticities of output with respect to capital stocks, a significant negative impact of taxation on long-run GDP, and a negative impact of increasing government consumption and transfer payments on GDP. These results shed light on the contribution of fiscal policy to disappointing growth performance in Brazil during the past decade.
  • Publication
    Tropical Bubbles : Asset Prices in Latin America, 1980-2001
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2001-11) Perry, Guillermo; Herrera, Santiago
    The authors test for the existence of asset price bubbles in Latin America in 1980-2001, focusing mainly on stock prices. Based on unit root and cointegration tests, they find that they cannot reject the hypothesis of bubbles. They arrive at the same conclusion using Froot and Obstfeld's intrinsic bubbles model. To examine empirical regularities of these bubble episodes in the region, the authors identify periods of significant stock price overvaluation. They quantify the relative importance of different factors that determine the probability of bubble occurrence, focusing on the contrast between the country-specific variables and the common external factors. They include as country-specific variables both the level and the volatility of domestic credit growth, the volatility of asset returns, the capital flows to each country, and the terms of trade. As common external variables, they consider the degree of asset overvaluation in the U.S. stock and real estate markets and the term spread of U.S. Treasury securities. To quantitatively assess the relative importance of each factor, they estimate a logit model for a panel of five Latin American countries from 1985 to 2001. In general, the authors find that the marginal probabilities of common and country-specific variables are of roughly the same order of magnitude. This finding contrasts with those of previous studies that real asset returns in Latin America are dominated by local factors. Finally, the authors explore the main channels through which asset prices affect real economic activity, with the most important being the balance sheet effect and its impact on bank lending. They show how the allocation of bank lending across different sectors responded sensitively to real estate prices during the boom years in countries that experienced banking crises. Thus asset price bubbles have long-lasting effects in the financial sector and, through this channel, on growth. Another channel through which asset prices-particularly stock market prices-affect long-run growth is through their effect on investment. The authors find a strong positive association between stock prices and investment and a negative effect of stock price volatility on investment. An additional motive for the central bank to monitor asset prices is the general coincidence of the crash episodes identified by the authors with currency crises in the region in the past two decades.
  • Publication
    Output Fluctuations in Latin America : What Explains the Recent Slowdown?
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2000-05) Perry, Guillermo; Herrera, Santiago; Quintero, Neile
    The authors explain Latin America's growth slowdown in 1998-1999. To do so, they use two complementary methodologies. The first aims at determining how much of the slowdown can be explained by specific external factors: the terms of trade, international interest rates, spreads on external debt, capital flows, and climatological factors (El Nino). Using quarterly GDP data for the eight largest countries in the region, the authors estimate a dynamic panel showing that 50-60 percent of the slowdown was due to these external factors. The second approach allows for effects on output by some endogeneous variables, such as domestic real interest rates, and real exchange rates. Using monthly industrial performance data, the authors estimate country-specific generalized vector auto-regressions (GVAR) for the largest countries. They find that during the sample period (1992-98) output volatility is mostly associated with shocks to domestic factors, but the slowdown in the sub-period 1998-99 is explained more than 60 percent by shocks to the external factors.