Person:
Maloney, William
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
October 3, 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
Proximity to the Frontier, Markups, and the Response of Innovation to Foreign Competition: Evidence from Matched Production-Innovation Surveys in Chile
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-08)This paper employs a matched firm production/innovation panel data set from Chile to explore the response of firm innovation to the increased competition arising from the China shock. In addition to covering a wider range of innovation inputs and outputs than previously possible, the data allow generating measures of markups and efficiency (physical total factor productivity) that correspond more closely to the concepts of rents and technological leadership envisaged in the Schumpeterian literature. Except for the 10 percent most productive plants, increased competition depresses most measures of innovation. Falling rents exacerbate declines among laggards, while rising rents further increase innovation among leaders. -
Publication
The Promise of Integration: Opportunities in a Changing Global Economy
(World Bank, Washington DC, 2023-04-04)The Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region has proved to be relatively resilient in the face of increased debt stress, stubborn inflation, and uncertainty arising from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Income and employment have largely recovered from the pandemic, poverty has receded, and markets remain guardedly optimistic about the near future. However, global uncertainty is rising, including a recent wave of bank failures in the US and Europe. Strengthening resilience, both on the health and macroeconomic fronts, will be paramount. Progress remains pending in both vaccination coverage and health system preparedness, while the institutionality of macroeconomic policy in some countries is being questioned. The evolution of the global economy is providing two new areas of opportunity for the region: the trend toward nearshoring-moving production closer to the US and European markets-and the imperative to combat climate change, which is giving the region a new comparative advantage in sun, wind, hydro, and natural capital. Taking advantage of these will require greater integration into the global economy. Yet, paradoxically, in the face of these opportunities. LAC is becoming less integrated. Trade intensity has largely stagnated, and foreign direct investment (FDI) to most countries has declined. Beyond the long-term structural reforms needed to reduce systemic risk, raise the level and quality of education, invest in infrastructure, and ensure well-functioning financial markets, this report calls to preserve the reputational gains of the past 20 years in terms of macro stability and streamlining regulation dealing with customs and transport to lower the cost of doing business in the region. Export promotion agencies and investment promotion agencies can also help as they have proven track records. A comprehensive approach to both shorter- and longer-term reforms could move LAC toward a renewed and more dynamic engagement with the global economy. -
Publication
Learning to Learn: Experimentation, Entrepreneurial Capital, and Development
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-12)This paper models an entrepreneur’s choice between investing in a safe activity or experimenting with a new risky one, and how much to invest in the “entrepreneurial capital” that would permit more effective use of the arriving information on the latter- how much to learn how to learn. Optimal investment in entrepreneurial capital depends the expected return on the risky activity. It can lead to three learning regimes, two of which can generate a development trap where firms and countries are unable to assess the potential of newly arriving technologies and hence grow more slowly. The first arises purely because it is too expensive to learn to learn, the second because the returns to the new activity are so high that they obviate the need to distinguish between activities and hence invest in entrepreneurial capital. The paper draws on historical evidence to show how the model offers insights into three understudied features of the industrialization process in the Western Hemisphere at the beginning of the 20th century: the disproportionate influence of immigrant/foreign entrepreneurs in driving industrialization in Latin America; the emergence of selective exceptions to this pattern, as well as episodes of entrepreneurial retrogression; and the differing effects of similar economic structures across countries that suggest the possibility of a learning-displacing resource curse. The model can simulate the respective decline and boom in the Chilean and US copper industries at the turn of the century, arising either from initially high relative returns or low initial endowments of entrepreneurial capital in the latter. -
Publication
Latin America and the Caribbean Economic Review, October 2023 - Wired: Digital Connectivity for Inclusion and Growth
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-10-04)Latin America and the Caribbean continues to face adverse global headwinds: high interest rates, modest G-7 growth, soft commodity prices and uncertain prospects in China will all depress growth. Well-grounded policy responses have led to largely recovering employment and income losses from the pandemic and falling rates of inflation. However, the region faces the mutually reinforcing triple challenges of low growth, limited fiscal space, and citizen dissatisfaction. Expanding digital connectivity offers a possibility to make progress on all three fronts. To maximize the social benefits of connectivity as well as to ensure that it does not exacerbate spatial, educational, gender or racial inequalities, three challenges are important to address: first, expanding coverage to the remaining unconnected areas as well as improving the quality of service; second, increasing the productive use of existing infrastructure, and; third, as with any other infrastructure "hardware," investments in "software" - such as digital and traditional skills, managerial capabilities, supportive regulatory frameworks, and deeper financial markets are critical. -
Publication
Harvesting Prosperity: Technology and Productivity Growth in Agriculture
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020)This book documents frontier knowledge on the drivers of agriculture productivity to derive pragmatic policy advice for governments and development partners on reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity. The analysis describes global trends and long-term sources of total factor productivity growth, along with broad trends in partial factor productivity for land and labor, revisiting the question of scale economies in farming. Technology is central to growth in agricultural productivity, yet across many parts of the developing world, readily available technology is never taken up. We investigate demand-side constraints of the technology equation to analyze factors that might influence producers, particularly poor producers, to adopt modern technology. Agriculture and food systems are rapidly transforming, characterized by shifting food preferences, the rise and growing sophistication of value chains, the increasing globalization of agriculture, and the expanding role of the public and private sectors in bringing about efficient and more rapid productivity growth. In light of this transformation, the analysis focuses on the supply side of the technology equation, exploring how the enabling environment and regulations related to trade and intellectual property rights stimulate Research and Development to raise productivity. The book also discusses emerging developments in modern value chains that contribute to rising productivity. This book is the fourth volume of the World Bank Productivity Project, which seeks to bring frontier thinking on the measurement and determinants of productivity to global policy makers. -
Publication
Place, Productivity, and Prosperity: Revisiting Spatially Targeted Policies for Regional Development
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-01-21)Place matters for productivity and prosperity. Myriad factors support a successful place, including not only the hard infrastructure such as roads, but also the softer elements such as worker skills, entrepreneurial ability, and well-functioning institutions. History suggests that prosperous places tend to persist, while “left-behind” regions—or those hurt by climatic, technological, or commercial shocks—struggle to catch up. This division gives rise to demands to “do something” about the subsequent spatial inequality. Such pressures often result in costly spatially targeted policies with disappointing outcomes because of a lack of analysis of the underlying barriers to growth and structural transformation and a fair appraisal of the possibility of overcoming them. The latest volume of the World Bank Productivity Project series, Place, Productivity, and Prosperity: Revisiting Spatially Targeted Policies for Regional Development makes three broad contributions. First, it provides new analytical and empirical insights into the three drivers of economic geography—agglomeration economies, migration, and distance—and the way in which these drivers interact. Second, it argues that these forces are playing out differently in developing countries than they have in advanced economies: urbanization is not accompanied by structural transformation, leaving cities crowded and accruing all the negative aspects of urbanization without being concentrated productively. Long-term amelioration of poverty in lagging regions requires advancing the overall national agenda of structural change and productivity growth. Third, it provides a heuristic framework with which to inform policy makers’ assessments of place-based policy proposals, helping them identify the regions where policy is likely to have an impact and those that would remain nonviable. The framework enables governments to clarify the implications of various policy options; to think critically about design priorities, including necessary complementary policies; and to navigate the implementation challenges. -
Publication
Growth and Risk: A View from International Trade
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-06)This paper studies the cross-country patterns of risky innovation and growth through the lens of international trade. It uses a simple theoretical framework of risky quality upgrading by firms under varying levels of financial development to derive two predictions. First, the mean rate of quality growth and the corresponding cross-sectional variance of quality growth in a country are positively correlated. Second, both the mean and variance of quality changes are positively correlated with the country's level of financial development. The paper tests these two hypotheses using data on disaggregated (Harmonized System 10- digit) bilateral exports to the United States. The patterns in the data are consistent with the theory. The mean and the variance of quality growth are strongly positively correlated with each other. Countries with greater financial depth are systematically characterized by higher mean and higher variance in the growth of product quality. The findings suggest a mean-variance trade-off in product quality improvements along the development path. Increases in financial depth do not imply lower variability of changes in the product space. -
Publication
Determinants of Social Distancing and Economic Activity during COVID-19: A Global View
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-05)The paper uses Google mobility data to identify the determinants of social distancing during the 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. The findings for the United States indicate that much of the decrease in mobility is voluntary, driven by the number of COVID-19 cases and proxying for greater awareness of risk. Non-pharmaceutical interventions such as closing nonessential businesses, sheltering in place, and school closings are also effective, although with a total contribution dwarfed by the voluntary actions. This suggests that much social distancing will happen regardless of the presence of non-pharmaceutical interventions and that restrictions may often function more like a coordinating device among increasingly predisposed individuals than repressive measures per se. These results are consistent across country income groups, with only the poorest countries showing limited effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions and no voluntary component, consistent with resistance to abandon sources of livelihood. The paper also confirms the direct impact of the voluntary component on economic activity, by showing that the majority of the fall in restaurant reservations in the United States and movie spending in Sweden occurred before the imposition of any non-pharmaceutical interventions. Widespread voluntary de-mobilization implies that releasing constraints may not yield a V-shaped recovery if the reduction in COVID risk is not credible.