William F. Maloney is Chief Economist for Equitable Growth, Finance and Institutions in the World Bank Group. Previously he was Chief Economist for Trade and Competitiveness and Global Lead on Innovation and Productivity. Prior to the Bank, he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (1990-1997) and then joined, working as Lead Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist for Latin America until 2009. From 2009 to 2014, he was Lead Economist in the Development Economics Research Group. 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 he studied at the University of the Andes in Bogota, Colombia (1982-83).
Governments are resource- and bandwidth-constrained, and hence need to prioritize productivity-enhancing policies. To do so requires information on the nature and magnitude of market failures on the one hand, and government's capacity to redress them successfully on the other. This article reviews perspectives on vertical (sectoral) and horizontal (factor markets, cluster) policies with a view to both criteria.
This report brings to bear a battery of new data sources to explore the innovation “paradox": despite the potential for very high returns, developing countries invest far less in adopting and inventing new processes and products than advanced countries.
This paper offers the first systematic historical evidence on the role of a central actor in modern growth theory- the engineer. We collect cross-country and state level data on
the population share of engineers for the Americas, and county level data on engineering and patenting for the US during the Second Industrial Revolution
This talk by Bill Maloney was given at the Conference on Historical Persistence in Comparative Development at Williams College on the role of high level scientific and entrepreneurial human capital in explaining the differential growth rates seen across the Western Hemisphere.
Does what economies export matter for development? And, even if it does, can governments improve on the export basket that the market generates through industrial policies? This report takes up these questions by reviewing relevant literature and taking stock of what we know from conceptual, empirical, and policy viewpoints.
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