Person:
Maloney, William Francis
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Innovation,
Labor Economics,
Trade,
Productivity,
Private Sector Development,
Financial Sector,
Spatial economics
Degrees
Departments
Office of the Chief Economist Latin America and the Caribbean Region
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
April 4, 2023
Biography
William F. Maloney is Chief Economist for the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region. Mr. Maloney, a U.S. national, joined the Bank in 1998 as Senior Economist for the Latin America and Caribbean Region. He held various positions including Lead Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist for Latin America, Lead Economist in the Development Economics Research Group, Chief Economist for Trade and Competitiveness and Global Lead on Innovation and Productivity. He was most recently Chief Economist for Equitable Growth, Finance and Institutions (EFI) Vice Presidency. From 2011 to 2014 he was Visiting Professor at the University of the Andes and worked closely with the Colombian government on innovation and firm upgrading issues. Mr. Maloney received his PhD in Economics from the University of California Berkeley (1990), his BA from Harvard University (1981), and studied at the University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia (1982-83). His research activities and publications have focused on issues related to international trade and finance, developing country labor markets, and innovation and growth, including several flagship publications about Latin America and the Caribbean.He has published in academic journals on issues related to international trade and finance, developing country labor markets, and innovation and growth as well as several flagship publications of the Latin American division of the Bank, including Informality: Exit and Exclusion; Natural Resources: Neither Curse nor Destiny and Lessons from NAFTA, Does What you Export Matter: In Search of Empirical Guidance for Industrial Policy. Most recently, he published The innovation paradox: Developing Country Capabilities the Unrealized Potential of Technological Catch-Up and Harvesting Prosperity: Technology and Productivity Growth in Agriculture as part of the World Bank Productivity Project.
Publication Search Results
1 - 8 of 8
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Publication
Convergence to the Managerial Frontier
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-03)Using detailed survey data on management practices, this paper uses recent advances in unconditional quantile analysis to study the changes in the within country distribution of management quality associated with country convergence to the managerial frontier. It then decomposes the contribution of potential explanatory factors to the distributional changes. The United States emerges as the frontier country, not because of better management on average, but because its best firms are far better than those of its close competitors. Part of the process of convergence to the frontier across the development process represents a trimming of the left tail, much is movement of the central mass and, for rich countries, it is actually the best firms that lag the frontier benchmark. Among potential explanatory variables that may drive convergence, ownership and human capital appear critical, the former especially for poorer countries and that latter for richer countries suggesting that the mechanics of convergence change across the process. These variables lose their explanatory power as firm and average country management quality rises. Hence, once in the advanced country range, the factors that improve management quality are less easy to document and hence influence. -
Publication
Heterogeneity in Subjective Wellbeing : An Application to Occupational Allocation in Africa
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-10)Using an extraordinarily rich panel dataset from Ghana, this paper explores the nature of self-employment and informality in developing countries through the analysis of self-reported happiness with work and life. Subjective job satisfaction measures allow assessment of the relative desirability of different jobs in ways that, conditional wage comparisons cannot. By exploiting recent advances in mixed (random parameter) ordered probit models, the distribution of subjective well-being across sectors of employment is quantified. There is little evidence for the overall inferiority of the small firm informal sector: there is not a robust average satisfaction premium for formal work vs. self-employment or informal salaried work, and owners of informal firms that employ others are on average significantly happier than workers in the formal private sector. Moreover, the estimated distribution of parameters predicting satisfaction reveal substantial heterogeneity in subjective well-being within sectors that conventional fixed parameter models, such as standard ordered probit models, cannot detect: Whatever the average satisfaction premium in a sector, all job categories contain both relatively happy and disgruntled workers. Specifically, roughly 67, 50, 40 and 59 percent prefer being a small-firm employer, sole proprietor, informal salaried, civic worker respectively, than formal work. Hence, there is a high degree of overlap in the distribution of satisfaction across sectors. The results are robust to the inclusion of fixed effects and alternate measures of satisfaction. Job characteristics, self-perceived autonomy and experimentally elicited measures of attitudes toward risk do not appear to explain these distributional patterns. -
Publication
Does What You Export Matter? In Search of Empirical Guidance for Industrial Policies
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012)Does the content of what economies export matter for development? And, if it does, can governments improve on the export basket that the market generates through the shaping of industrial policy? This book considers these questions by reviewing relevant literature and taking stock of what is known from conceptual, empirical, and policy viewpoints. A large literature answers affirmatively to the first question and suggests the characteristics that distinguish desirable exports. More prosaically, but no less controversially, goods which are intensive in unskilled labor are thought to promote 'pro-poor' or 'shared growth,' whereas those which are skilled-labor intensive are thought to generate positive externalities for society as a whole. Concerns about macroeconomic stability have led to a focus on the overall composition of the export basket. This book revisits many of these arguments conceptually and, wherever possible, imports heuristic approaches into frameworks where, as more familiar arguments, they can be held up to the light, rotated, and their facets examined for brilliance or flaws. Second, the book examines what emerges empirically as a basis for policy design. Specifically, given certain conceptual arguments in favor of public sector intervention, do available data and empirical methods allow for actually doing so with a high degree of confidence? In asking this question, the book assumes that policy makers are competent and seek to raise the welfare of their citizens. This assumption permits sidestepping the debate about whether government failures trump market failures generically: In this sense, the book attempts to 'give industrial policy a chance.' -
Publication
Income Risk, Income Mobility and Welfare
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-10)This paper develops a framework for the quantitative analysis of individual income dynamics, mobility and welfare. Individual income is assumed to follow a stochastic process with two (unobserved) components, component representing measurement error or transitory income shocks and an Autoregressive (AR(1)) component representing persistent changes in income. The analysis uses a tractable consumption-saving model with labor income risk and incomplete markets to relate income dynamics to consumption and welfare, and derive analytical expressions for income mobility and welfare as a function of the various parameters of the underlying income process. The empirical application of the framework using data on individual incomes from Mexico provides striking results. Much of measured income mobility is driven by measurement error or transitory income shocks and therefore (almost) welfare-neutral. A smaller part of measured income mobility is due to either welfare-reducing income risk or welfare-enhancing catching-up of low-income individuals with high-income individuals, both of which have economically significant effects on social welfare. Decomposing mobility into its fundamental components is thus seen to be crucial from the standpoint of welfare evaluation. -
Publication
Heterogeneity in Subjective Wellbeing : An Application to Occupational Allocation in Africa
(Elsevier, 2015-01-03)By exploiting recent advances in mixed (stochastic parameter) ordered probit estimators and a unique longitudinal dataset from Ghana, this paper examines the distribution of subjective wellbeing across sectors of employment. We find little evidence for the overall inferiority of the small firm informal sector relative to the formal salaried sector at the conditional mean. Moreover, the estimated underlying random parameter distributions unveil substantial latent heterogeneity in subjective wellbeing around the central tendency that fixed parameter models cannot detect. All job categories contain substantial shares of both relatively happy and disgruntled workers. -
Publication
Is Automation Labor-Displacing in the Developing Countries, Too? Robots, Polarization, and Jobs
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2019-07-25)This paper uses global census data to examine whether the labor market polarization and labor-displacing automation documented in the advanced countries appears in the developing world. While confirming both effects for the former, it finds little evidence for either in developing countries. In particular,the critical category corresponding to manufacturing worker, operators and assemblers has increased in absolute terms and as a share of the labor force. The paper then uses data on robot usage to explore its impact on the relative employment evolution in each sample controlling for Chinese import penetration. Trade competition appears largely irrelevant in both cases. Robots, however, are displacing in the advanced countries, explaining 25-50 percent of the job loss in manufacturing. However, they likely crowd in operators and assemblers in developing countries. This is likely due to off-shoring that combines robots with new operators in FDI destination countries which may, for the present, offset any displacement effect. Some evidence is found, however, for incipient polarization in Mexico and Brazil. -
Publication
Productivity Revisited: Shifting Paradigms in Analysis and Policy
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018-10-25)The stagnation of productivity in the developing world, and indeed, across the globe, over the last two decades dictates a rethinking of productivity measurement, analysis, and policy. This volume presents a 'second wave' of thinking in three key areas of productivity analysis and its implications for productivity policies. It calls into question the measurement and relevance of distortions as the primary barrier to productivity growth; urges a broader concept of firm performance that goes beyond efficiency to quality upgrading and demand expansion; and explores what it takes to generate an experimental and innovative society where entrepreneurs have the personal characteristics to identify new technologies and manage risk within an entrepreneurial ecosystem that facilitates them doing so. It also reviews arguments surrounding industrial policies. The authors argue for an integrated approach to productivity analysis that incorporates both the need to reduce economic distortions and generate the human capital capable of identifying the opportunities offered to follower countries and upgrade firm capabilities. Finally, it offers guidance on prioritizing policies when there is uncertainty around diagnostics and limited government capability. -
Publication
Are Automation and Trade Polarizing Developing Country Labor Markets, Too?
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-12)The automation and out-sourcing of routine, codifiable tasks are seen as driving polarization in labor markets in high-income countries. This paper first offers several explanations for why developing countries might show differing dynamics, at least for the present. Census data then confirms this, showing on average no evidence of polarization in developing countries. However, incipient polarization in a few countries as well as major drives to automate in some large, labor intensive producers suggests this may not remain the case. This raises concerns first about the impact on equity within those countries, but second the possibility that the traditional flying geese pattern" -- whereby low skilled jobs are progressively off-shored to poorer and poorer countries -- may be short circuited.