Person:
Saavedra, Pablo

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Last updated: January 31, 2023
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Pablo Saavedra is an economist who has served in several positions of responsibility in various regions and departments at the World Bank. He is currently the World Bank’s country director for Mexico. Previously, he served as manager of the World Bank’s Macroeconomics and Fiscal Management Department for Latin America and the Caribbean and was an economic adviser for the Policy and Strategy Department, a sector leader for Economic Policy, and senior economist for Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus, among other countries. He has conducted research and worked with policy makers in countries around the world to implement reforms on issues related to economic growth, including macroeconomics and fiscal policies, tax and spending policies, and fiscal rules. He holds a PhD from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

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    Fiscal Rules and Economic Size in Latin America and the Caribbean
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-09-23) Blanco, Fernando; Saavedra, Pablo; Koehler-Geib, Friederike; Skrok, Emilia
    Following the collapse of commodity prices in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in 2014-15, many countries in the region were unable to cushion the impact of the shock in order to experience a more gradual adjustment, to a large extent because they had not built adequate fiscal buffers during the commodities’ windfall from 2010-14. Many LAC countries entered 2020 and the COVID-19 crisis in an even more difficult position, with rising debt and limited fiscal space to smooth the negative impacts of the pandemic and adequately support their economies. Fiscal policy in most LAC countries has been procyclical. Public expenditure and debt levels have expanded in good times and contracted in severe downswings due to insufficient fiscal buffers, making crises deeper. Fiscal rules represent a promising policy option for these and other economies. If well-designed and implemented, they can help build buffers during periods of strong economic performance that will be available during rainy days to smooth economic shocks. This book—which was prepared before the COVID-19 crisis—reviews the performance and implementation of different fiscal rules in the region and world. It provides analytical and practical criteria for policy makers for the design, establishment, and feasible implementation of fiscal rules based on each country's business cycle features, external characteristics, type of shocks faced, initial fiscal conditions, technical and institutional capacities, and political context. While establishing new fiscal rules would not help to attenuate the immediate effects of this pandemic crisis, higher debt levels in the aftermath of COVID-19 will demand rebuilding better and stronger institutional frameworks of fiscal policy in LAC and emerging economies globally. Having stronger fiscal mechanisms that include fiscal rules can help countries prepare for the next crisis and should be on the front burner for policy makers in coming years. The findings and lessons discussed apply to economies of different sizes, with some differences under certain scenarios in terms of the technical design and criteria needed for implementation. In this book, policy makers will find that fiscal rules, if tailored to country characteristics, can work and be an essential fiscal tool for larger and particularly smaller economies.
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    Correlates of Success in World Bank Development Policy Lending
    (World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2015-01) Moll, Peter; Geli, Patricia; Saavedra, Pablo
    This paper examines the correlates of success of development policy lending operations of the World Bank between 2004 and 2012. The paper uses a data set constructed of individual loan characteristics and ex-post loan ratings produced by the World Bank's Independent Evaluation Group. Departing from the related literature, the paper focuses mostly on examining the impact of loan characteristics, reform program design features, and task team leader skills, among other variables, on intended development results, while still controlling for country characteristics. It finds that a variable used to reflect congruence or "line of sight" between the policy reforms supported and the results framework is a critical ingredient for success. Task team leader skills in general, and task team leadership by staff affiliated with the former "Economic Policy" department of the World Bank, also increase the chance of success. Conversely, a weaker set of supported reforms in these operations tends to reduce the chance of success. Reforms supported in the energy sector seem to reduce the likelihood of success, perhaps because of the inherent political difficulties of implementing reforms in this sector. The paper also draws important policy and institutional implications from these and other findings.