Financial Times

...That business travel was necessary for business success appeared clear before the Covid crisis. The Growth Lab, a research unit at Harvard’s Center for International Development, looked at international travel spending by holders of corporate credit and debit cards between 2011 and 2016. It found that where there was business travel, there were measurable benefits in growth and employment, both in the countries the travellers came from, but particularly in the countries they travelled to.

The transfer of knowledge was vital to business...

Ricardo Hausmann in Anadolu Agency News

How should the world channel aid to Lebanon in wake of blast? Given the huge humanitarian and economic fallout from the deadly blast, one thing is clear: Lebanon will have to get a large injection of international aid. But with its government in tatters, how, and through whom?

Speaking to Anadolu Agency, Ricardo Hausmann, founder and director of the Growth Lab at Harvard's Center for International Development, said there is no easy solution for doing this without effective government.

CAMBRIDGE, MA – New research from Harvard’s Growth Lab finds a direct link between a country’s incoming business travel and the growth of new and existing industries. The findings, published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, support a Growth Lab hypothesis that moving knowhow, the tacit knowledge accumulated and transferred from brain to brain through a long process of imitation, repetition, and feedback, is critical to economic growth, and business travel plays a key part in that process. The research also raises new concerns about the economic implications of the...

Ricardo Hausmann for Project Syndicate

 Certainty is like a rainbow: wonderful but relatively rare. More often than not, we know that we don’t know. We may seek to remedy this by talking to people who may know what we want to know. But how do we know that they know? If we cannot ascertain whether they actually do know, we must trust them.

Historically, we have bestowed our trust on the basis of science, experience, or divine inspiration. But what if the knowledge we seek does not yet exist, and even science knows that it does not know what is being...