Francisco Rodríguez

This profile was current as of 2021, when he was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

Francisco R. Rodríguez is the director and founder of Oil for Venezuela, a nonprofit organization that seeks to provide depoliticized, transparent, and sustainable solutions to the country’s humanitarian crisis. He is considered an expert on the Venezuelan economy and was a Kellogg Institute visiting fellow in the spring of 2005. As the 2020-21 Hewlett Fellow for Public Policy, he will work on a project entitled “The Unraveling of Venezuela’s Populist Experiment: 2013-2019,” which examines the political economy underlying the policy decisions that led to Venezuela’s economic collapse during that time period.

Rodríguez previously served as chief economist of the Venezuelan Congressional Budget Office, headed the research team of the United Nations’ Human Development Report Office, and served as chief Andean economist at Bank of America Merrill Lynch. He is the co-author of Venezuela Before Chávez (Penn State University Press, 2012) and has written more than 50 research papers on economic development, international economics, and Latin American economies. He has taught at several universities.

Rodríguez earned an MA and a PhD in economics from Harvard University.