Governance Global Practice Book Talks

Arturo Herrera Gutierrez is the Global Director for Governance Global Practice in the Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions Practice Group (EFI) Vice Presidency.

Mr. Herrera, a Mexican National, has extensive experience in governance, as a practitioner and from the development and academic perspectives. He joined the World Bank in 2010 as Senior Public Sector Management Specialist in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region. He held various positions in the Bank including as Sector Manager in LAC, Practice Manager in Governance Global Practice for the LAC and East Asia and the Pacific regions in the Global Unit before leaving the World Bank Group in 2018.

Between 2018 and 2021 he has held leadership positions in the Government of Mexico as Co-Head of the Finance Team in Presidential Transition Team, Deputy Finance Minister and, most recently, as Minister of Finance and Public Credit.

As Global Director for Governance, Mr. Herrera’s priorities include leading the formulation of strategy and engagement of the Bank’s work on public institutions and country-level governance, especially in fragile, conflict and violent settings; maximizing the effectiveness of operational support for public financial management and public procurement; fostering excellence in the Governance Practice’s work on public sector administration and operational support for legal and judicial reforms.

Mr. Herrera has also taught Monetary and Banking and Macro and Micro Economics at both El Colegio de Mexico and New York University where he completed his doctoral studies in Economics.

Professor Alan S. Blinder is Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He has been on the Princeton faculty since 1971, taking time off from January 1993 through January 1996 for service in the U.S. government—first as a member of President Clinton's original Council of Economic Advisers, and then as Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. In addition to his academic writings [books, academic articles] and his best-selling introductory textbook, he has written many newspapers and magazines; columns and op-eds and, in recent years, has been a regular columnist for The Wall Street Journal. He also appears frequently on television on PBS, CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, and others. Dr. Blinder is a Distinguished Fellow and past vice president of the American Economic Association, a past president of the Eastern Economic Association, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Political and Social Science.

Chiara Cordelli is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her main areas of research are social and political philosophy, with a particular focus on theories of distributive justice, political legitimacy, normative defenses of the state, and the public/private distinction in liberal theory. She is the author of The Privatized State (Princeton University Press, 2020), which was awarded the 2021 ECPR political theory prize for best first book in political theory. She is also the co-editor of, and a contributor to, Philanthropy in Democratic Societies (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

Cordelli’s articles and contributions to symposia appeared in the American Political Science Review, Ethics, Journal of Political Philosophy, Journal of Politics, Political Theory, Political Studies, British Journal of Political Science, Critical Review of Social and Political Philosophy, and Political Studies Review, as well as in several edited volumes, including NOMOS. One of her articles, “Justice as Fairness and Relational Resources” was included in the Philosopher’s Annual as one of the ten best articles published in philosophy in 2015 and her chapter “Philanthropy as a Duty of Reparative Justice” won the 2018 Review of Politics Award.

Cordelli earned her BA in philosophy from the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” where she studied aesthetics, critical theory, and the history of political thought. During her MA at University College London, she became interested in analytic philosophy. She earned her PhD in political philosophy from UCL in 2011. Before joining Chicago in 2015, she was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University (2011-2013) and a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of Exeter, UK (2013-2015). She held visiting positions at the Kluge Center at the Library of Congress in D.C. (2009-2010), the Center for Human Values at Princeton (2014-2015), the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford (2012-2013), the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard (2017-2018) and the LIER center at EHESS in Paris (2021-2022).

Cass Sunstein is currently the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He is the founder and director of the Program on Behavioral Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Law School. In 2018, he received the Holberg Prize from the government of Norway, sometimes described as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for law and the humanities. In 2020, the World Health Organization appointed him as Chair of its technical advisory group on Behavioural Insights and Sciences for Health. From 2009 to 2012, he was Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and after that, he served on the President’s Review Board on Intelligence and Communications Technologies and on the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board. Mr. Sunstein has testified before congressional committees on many subjects, and he has advised officials at the United Nations, the European Commission, the World Bank, and many nations on issues of law and public policy. He serves as an adviser to the Behavioural Insights Team in the United Kingdom.

Mr. Sunstein is author of hundreds of articles and dozens of books, including “Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness” (with Richard H. Thaler, 2008), “Simpler: The Future of Government” (2013), “The Ethics of Influence” (2015), “#Republic” (2017), “Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide” (2017), “The Cost-Benefit Revolution” (2018), “On Freedom” (2019), “Conformity” (2019), “How Change Happens” (2019), “Too Much Information” (2020), “Sludge” (2021), and “Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement” (2021). His latest book “How to Interpret the Constitution” will be released in August 2023. 

Oscar Calvo-Gonzalez is the Director of the Human Development and Economic Management Department of IEG (IEGHE), and Acting Director-General, Evaluation, World Bank Group. Prior to joining IEG he was Practice Manager in the Poverty and Equity Global Practice from 2015 to 2019. Previously he was Program Leader in the Central America Country Department where he led lending operations and analytical work. Before working on Central America he was a country economist for a number of countries in the Latin America and the Caribbean and Europe and Central Asia regions. Prior to joining the World Bank he worked as a Principal Economist at the European Central Bank, where he focused on the then EU acceding countries. He has taught at the London School of Economics and Georgetown University and has recently edited the book Behavioral Insights for Development: Cases from Central America. He has published articles in refereed journals on wide-ranging issues such as the effectiveness of public expenditure, the application of behavioral insights in economic policy issues, and the impact of foreign aid.

Oscar holds a BA from the University of Leicester and MSc and PhD degrees from the London School of Economics.

Joel Slemrod is the David Bradford Distinguished University Professor and the Paul W. McCracken Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan. They have both received the National Tax Association’s Holland Medal for their lifetime contributions, and both are former presidents of the International Institute of Public Finance.

Governments have always struggled to tax in ways that are effective and tolerably fair. Sometimes they fail grotesquely, as when, in 1898, the British ignited a rebellion in Sierra Leone by imposing a tax on huts—and, in repressing it, ended up burning the very huts they intended to tax. Sometimes they succeed astonishingly, as when, in eighteenth-century Britain, a cut in the tax on tea massively increased revenue. In this entertaining book, two leading authorities on taxation, Michael Keen and Joel Slemrod, provide a fascinating and informative tour through these and many other episodes in tax history, both preposterous and dramatic—from the plundering described by Herodotus and an Incan tax payable in lice to the (misremembered) Boston Tea Party and the scandals of the Panama Papers. Along the way, readers meet a colorful cast of tax rascals, and even a few tax heroes.

While it is hard to fathom the inspiration behind such taxes as one on ships that tended to make them sink, Keen and Slemrod show that yesterday’s tax systems have more in common with ours than we may think. Georgian England’s window tax now seems quaint, but was an ingenious way of judging wealth unobtrusively. And Tsar Peter the Great’s tax on beards aimed to induce the nobility to shave, much like today’s carbon taxes aim to slow global warming.

William F. Maloney is Chief Economist for the Latin America and the Caribbean region at the World Bank. Previously he was Chief Economist for Equitable Growth, Finance and Institutions, and Trade and Competitiveness; he was also Global Lead on Innovation and Productivity. Prior to the Bank, he was an assistant professor of Economics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (1990-1997) and then 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).

He has published in general academic journals on issues related to international trade and finance, developing country labor markets, and innovation and growth including The Review of Economic Studies, American Economic Review: Insights, The Review of Economics and Statistics, The Economic Journal, and The Journal of the European Economic Association as well as the leading field journals in development and trade. He has also written several flagship publications of the Latin American division of the Bank, including 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.

As part of the World Bank Productivity Project that he directs he published The Innovation Paradox: Developing Country Capabilities the Unrealized Potential of Technological Catch-Up, Harvesting Prosperity: Technology and Productivity Growth in Agriculture as well as Place, Productivity, and Prosperity: Spatially Targeted Policies for Regional Development.

His work has been referenced in the New York Times, the Financial Times, The Economist as well as in press throughout Latin America and Asia. He has appeared on CNN en Español, National Public Radio, Vietnamese National Television among other venues. According to Research Papers in Economics (RePec), Maloney is ranked among the top 10% of economists worldwide, based on publications and scholarly citations.

Sebastian Edwards is the Henry Ford II Distinguished Professor of International Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. From 1993 to 1996 he was Chief Economist for Latin America and the Caribbean at the World Bank. He has published 15 books, and over 200 scholarly articles. He was the Co-Director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s “Africa Project.” He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an Honorary Professor at the Universidad de Chile. Professor Edwards has been an adviser to numerous governments, financial institutions, and multinational companies. He is a frequent commentator on economic matters in CNN and other cable outlets, and his op-ed pieces have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, El País (Spain), La Vanguardia (Spain), Clarín (Argentina), El Mercurio (Chile), and other newspapers from around the world.  Professor Edwards has been an expert witness in a number of legal cases in the United States and other nations. He is a frequent speaker at financial and industry meetings. Sebastian Edwards is a member of a number of corporate and nonprofit institutions boards. His latest book is “The Chile Project: The story of the Chicago Boys and the downfall of neoliberalism” (Princeton University Press, 2023). Other books include “American Default: The untold story of FDR, the Supreme Court and the Battle over Gold” (Princeton University Press, 2018), “African Successes,” (co-edited with Simon Johnson and David Weil; University of Chicago Press, 2016); “Toxic Aid: Economic Collapse and Recovery in Tanzania” (Oxford University Press, 2014); “Left Behind: Latin America and the False Promise of Populism” (University of Chicago Press, 2010), and “Crisis and Reform in Latin America: From Despair to Hope,” (Oxford University Press, 1995). Sebastian Edwards has published two novels and a book of memoirs in Spanish. “El Misterio de las Tanias” (Alfaguara 2007) was on the best sellers list in Chile for 29 weeks. “Un día perfecto” (Norma 20100 was on the list for 14 weeks. The memoir “Conversación Interrumpida” (2016) was also a best seller.

Professor Edwards is a past President of the Latin American and Caribbean Economic Association (LACEA), and a former member of the Scientific Advisory Council of the Kiel Institute of World Economics, Kiel-Germany. He was a member of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Council of Economic Advisors.  In 2013 Professor Edwards was awarded the Carlos Díaz-Alejandro Prize in recognition for his research on the Latin American economies. Other awards include the Raul Yver Prize, the CINDA Prize, and the Economista del Año Prize. Professor Edwards was educated at the Universidad de Chile and Universidad Católica de Chile. He received an MA in economics in 1978, and a Ph.D. in economics in 1981, both from the University of Chicago.