Francisco Rodríguez

Francisco R. Rodríguez is an economist from Venezuela. He is the Rice Family Professor of the Practice of International and Public Affairs at the University of Denver's Josef Korbel School of International Studies and a senior research fellow at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

From 2000 to 2004, he served as the head of the economic and financial advisory of the Venezuelan National Assembly (Spanish: Oficina de Asesoría Económica y Financiera de Asamblea Nacional). Rodríguez led the research team of the United Nations' Human Development Report Office from 2008 to 2011. He was chief economist at Torino Economics, the economic analysis branch of New York-based Torino Capital, between 2016 and 2019, and served as policy advisor for presidential candidate Henri Falcón in 2018.

He was Head of Research at the United Nations Human Development Report from 2008 to 2011. He joined Torino Economics, the economic analysis branch of New York-based Torino Capital in July 2016 as chief economist. He left Torino Economics on 3 September 2019.

In May 2016, Rodríguez was part of a group of economists under an initiative promoted by the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) to present an economic stabilization program to the government of Nicolás Maduro, who until then had refused to implement necessary monetary and fiscal reforms to contain prices, stabilize the exchange rate and foster production recovery. The plan was shelved by the Maduro administration.

Henri Falcón and Rodríguez stated that the 2018 Venezuelan presidential election was not valid.

He was a Visiting Fellow at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame in 2020-21 and in the spring of 2005. Rodríguez served as an International Affairs Fellow in International Economics at the US Council on Foreign Relations and as a Visiting Scholar in the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund during 2021-2022.

He is the Greenleaf Visiting Professor of Latin American studies at Tulane University.

Research career Rodríguez researches contemporary Venezuelan issues. His studies have appeared in the American Economic Journal, Journal of Economic Growth, Journal of Macroeconomics, Journal of Politics, and World Development, among other peer-reviewed journals.

His published work includes "Trade Policy and Economic Growth: A Skeptic's Guide to the Cross-National Evidence", co-authored with the renowned economist and researcher Dani Rodrik. In this study, the authors examine whether countries with lower trade barriers induced by policies grow faster, finding little evidence that open trade policies—in the sense of lower tariff and non-tariff barriers—are significantly associated with economic growth.

In 1999, he co-authored the article "Why Do Resource-Abundant Economies Grow More Slowly?", co-authored with Jeni Klugman and Hyung-Jin Choi. This article examines the concept and key insights gained from the HDI, provides a review of current and past criticisms of the HDI, and discusses recent changes introduced to the HDI formula and indicators.

Rodríguez co-authored the research article "Do Shifts in Late-Counted Votes Signal Fraud? Evidence from Bolivia" with Dorothy Kronick and Nicolás Idrobo. The article examines whether variations in late-counted votes can lead to unfounded claims of electoral fraud. The authors state that these claims exploit the "early counting illusion": the misleading notion that, in the absence of fraud, an initial lead will persist. They characterize this early counting illusion and assess the associated fraud accusations in four contested elections. They state that the key insights are general: the temporal trends of legitimate vote-counting processes are much more varied, and errors in influential analyses much more frequent, than electoral skeptics claim.

Selected bibliography