Stimulating growth is the top economic priority for many countries and localities around the world. Yet many are trapped, lacking the productive capability to solve problems and expand to new industries to drive development. New growth strategies need paths, processes and organizations to address this problem.
Leading Economic Growth (Online) brings together leading experts in economic development with practitioners from around the globe to focus on practical approaches to shared growth and development. Led by Professor Ricardo Hausmann and Professor Matt Andrews, the curriculum provides a framework for understanding economic growth, as well as sophisticated tools for diagnosis, decision making, and implementation.
Over the summer, I had the chance to work with the Growth Lab (GL) at Harvard’s Center for International Development (CID) on the Advancing Economic Diversification in Ethiopia project. One of the main reasons I chose to pursue the MPA/ID program at HKS is that I was a counterpart for the GL in my previous work. As such, it was a primary focus of mine to get immersed in the GL work during my time at HKS to get a...
As an intern with the Growth Lab, I was working with the National Bank of Ethiopia on macroeconomic issues. Ethiopia has achieved rapid economic growth from the early 2000s, alongside large capital account and fiscal deficits (when the deficit is broadly defined). In spite of this situation where depreciation would be necessary to clear excess demand for FX, the exchange rate has not been devalued in a manner consistent with the level of deficit monetization. The exchange rate control, together with restrictions on financial account...
As the only road-accessible entry points to the Colombian Amazon, the departments of Caquetá, Guaviare, and Putumayo are facing stark challenges for their future growth. These departments have been at the center stage of the armed conflict and concentrate today...
This blog post originated as a thread on Twitter. Written by Frank Neffke.
At the Growth Lab, an interdisciplinary team of researchers explores the foundations of economic growth from both an academic and applied angle.
Our Economic Complexity approach starts from the assumption that technology takes the form of tools, codes and knowhow. Because each individual can only acquire so much knowhow in a lifetime, a country’s collective knowhow grows by distributing different bits...
The Growth Lab has over 50 faculty, fellows, research assistants, and staff working on development challenges in more than a dozen countries worldwide. Our research in 2020 included modeling pandemic-related tradeoffs, mapping the network of global business travel, identifying foreign exchange constraints in Ethiopia, tracking the migration of the Albanian diaspora, and uncovering environmentally friendly diversification opportunities in Peru. Every project, paper, and presentation brought hundreds of charts, graphics, dashboards, and prototypes. We thought it would be worthwhile to...
The Growth Lab Albania team is working on better understanding the causes and consequences of youth and high skilled migration post 2000s. There is a perception that the loss in knowhow has been exacerbated in the past decade especially for selected professions or skill segments in high demand by more advanced economies. This study aims to understand the magnitude of the...
During large research engagements like the one conducted by the Growth Lab at Harvard’s Center for International Development in Sri Lanka from 2016-18, the research team produces many presentations, research notes, and other deliverables that share research findings incrementally with government counterparts. The Growth Lab team uses a variety of types of deliverables with the aim of developing adaptive collaborative...
According to CID’s growth diagnostic findings on Albania, the country has the need to diversify and increase the complexity of the economic base.
As a Harvard Kennedy School student, I spent last summer as a CID intern working on the initial asset analysis and project selection for the Albanian Investment Corporation (AIC). The main objective of AIC is improving growth in Albania through the generation of the capability to identify, prepare, and develop vital projects for Albania.
Three Master in Public Administration in International Development (MPA/ID) students spent this past summer in Albania as Growth Lab interns, working with local counterparts to develop and implement programs on the ground and making the leap from the classroom to learning policy in practice. Recently, we hosted our interns – Damian Galinsky, Uriel Kejsefman, and Shivani Mishra – in a panel discussion to talk about the work they conducted and its role in the broader Growth Lab Albania strategy. They spoke to their experiences living and working in Albania as well as to lessons learned when trying to translate academic and theoretical insights into policy actions. Key highlights from this conversation are summarized below.... Read more about Learning Policy in Practice: Insights from the Growth Lab Summer Interns in Albania
