Financial Management Specialist

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VPU Context:

The World Bank Group serves 33 client countries in Latin America and the Caribbean Region (LCR). Clients range from large rapidly growing sophisticated middle-income clients to IDA countries to small Caribbean states to one fragile state, and to varying degrees face three key challenges - low productivity and growth, low quality jobs and low resilience to shocks. The region is tackling these challenges with a strong WBG approach, underpinned by selectivity and complementarity between the value added of public and private arms, and in strong partnership with relevant regional development partners.

A. The challenge of low growth. After recovering lost output, the region is returning to pre-pandemic low growth and productivity scenario. After a solid post-pandemic rebound in economic activity (7.2% and 3.9% growth in 2021 and 2022 respectively), GDP growth returned to the pre-pandemic low growth around 2.2% in 2023 and 2024, with a medium-term outlook of 2.5%. With an average Gini co-efficient of [0.52] LAC remains also one of the most unequal regions in the world. It is a region where the bottom 50% earn 27 times less than the top 10%. It also represents stark differences in opportunity, a child born today in the poorest 20% quintile in LAC will on average be 17 percentage points less productive than a child born in the richest 20%.

B. The challenge of quality jobs: the need for better quality jobs is paramount, with 6.2% unemployment rates, these low levels mask a deeper issue of job quality. Reflecting stagnating living standards, labor earnings have only grown by 1% or less per year in most countries over the past decade, and some 19% of workers in the region are earning incomes below the poverty line.

• Investing in foundational infrastructure critical to job creation, LAC needs to invest at least 3.1% of GDP in infrastructure investments per year, yet it only invests 2%, which is significantly lower than the world average of 5.4% of GDP. This underinvestment in physical infrastructure, including in key infrastructure sectors (including resilient transport, water, energy etc.) is holding back potential for better jobs. The region is supporting clients by supporting selective transformative infrastructure projects (e.g. urban mobility, regional transport and connectivity). On human infrastructure challenge, firms in the region continue to cite skills shortages (55% of firms in LAC vs 45% in MIC regions) as a key barrier to growth and job creation. A child born in LAC is expected to reach only 56 percent of their productive potential. Three out of four 15-year olds fail basic math proficiency and cannot read adequately the soft side involves supporting clients revamp their education and health sectors. The region is supporting clients to revamp their education and health care sectors.
• The LAC region also needs to foster a predictable, business-enabling policy and regulatory environment. These include ensuring macro stability, eliminating restrictive business regulations in product and factor markets, and improving access to finance, especially long-term capital. Labor market regulations in LAC are noted to be on par with the most restrictive labor market regimes among OECD countries. Further, enforcement of competition policy needs to be supported due to high levels of market concentration in LAC markets: the 50 largest firms in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Chile have revenues greater than 30% of GDP. At 55% of GDP, domestic credit to the private sector remains much lower than EAP (178%).
• Private capital needs to be appropriately incentivized to support the provision of public goods and investments in key sectors, especially those that have the highest potential to enable and/or create better quality jobs. However, at only 19.8% of GDP, gross capital formation remains lowest among all regions (EAP is at 38% and South Asia at 30%). Private capital mobilization in the region is being held back by shallow capital markets, lack of long-term finance, high cost of capital, regulatory and institutional barriers (including in PPP frameworks). Based on country contexts, the WBG will support investments in productive clusters (energy/mining, value added manufacturing, agribusiness, tourism, etc) across the public-private spectrum.

C. The challenge of vulnerability to shocks. Building resilience of the countries to shocks, including natural disasters, through contingent financing and other innovative risk management platforms at country and regional levels is critical given the high exposure to climate-related disasters and natural hazards. The Central America and the Caribbean have recurrent hurricanes that have impacts on GDP significantly higher than the regional average of 1.7%. Several countries are experiencing deep, long droughts, increasingly intense storms, and floods that disrupt economic activities and affect livelihoods, with impacts on the most vulnerable populations.

Governance Global Practice Context:

An effective and accountable governance framework, in the form of functioning institutions, is a necessary precondition for sustainable poverty reduction. Fragile, ineffective, or inexistent institutions have long been put forward as explaining the relative underperformance of economies. Furthermore, poor governance and structural deficiencies in public and private institutions are often prevalent in fragile and conflict-affected states. On the other hand, cross-country empirics have confirmed that higher institutional quality is correlated with higher levels of per capita income and greater economic growth. Thus, governance mechanisms and institutions are critical to sustained growth and poverty alleviation.

The Governance Global Practice (GGP) brings together professionals in financial management, public investment management, procurement, taxation, regulatory policy, transparency, digital governance, justice, anticorruption, and social accountability to develop innovative, integrated solutions to pernicious institutional problems. The GGP utilizes a problem-driven, diagnostic approach, combining global comparative knowledge of reform successes and failures with keen understanding of the institutional challenges and opportunities of developing countries. For more information, visit https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/governance

Unit Context:

The Financial Management (FM) unit of the GGP in LCR has the following key functions: (i) carrying out high quality financial management services (i.e. project preparation and implementation support) in Bank-financed operations and advancing the use of country Public Financial Management (PFM) systems to enhance development effectiveness; (ii) supporting partner countries in enhancing their PFM performance and capacity, working collaboratively with other Global Practices (GPs) and regional and corporate Bank units; and (iii) supporting partner countries in developing their professional accountancy institutions, and corporate financial reporting performance (including accounting and auditing standards).

The Unit intends to recruit a Financial Management Specialist (FMS) based in Quito, Ecuador. The FMS will be part of the regional GGP staff and will report to the Practice Manager of the Unit.

Duties and Accountability:

The FMS will work on all financial management (FM) aspects of the Bank's operations in Ecuador. These will include:

Part I. Fiduciary Assurance Functions:

• Assessing the adequacy of project financial management arrangements; Providing implementation support and supervising projects financed by loans and grants.
• Ensuring compliance with the Bank's audit and other FM requirements.
• Ensuring that the project operations are carried out in accordance with sound financial management practices.
• Performing analytical work on financial management and accountability issues.
• Carrying out capacity building activities as part of the Governance team; and
• Contributing to corporate tasks such as the preparation of country briefs, policy and thematic notes, and regional, Global Practice, and corporate knowledge products.

The FMS is expected to take a proactive role in providing advice and support to clients and for identifying agile and innovative approaches to strengthening fiduciary assurance over the use of funds.

Part II. Public Financial Management (PFM) Functions:

Relevant knowledge and professional experience in public sector financial management; and supporting partner countries in enhancing their PFM performance capacity, would be an distinctive advantage.