The European Union's ambitious new Green Deal promises to make the bloc carbon-neutral by 2050, while creating new jobs and raising living standards. But, given that Europe accounts for only 10% of global carbon emissions, the true test of its green agenda lies in its willingness to help others with their own sustainable development.
A Harvard study has pinpointed the secret to career success: choosing the right coworkers. The researchers looked at everyone in Sweden (then nine million people) over 10 years, tracing their educations, jobs, and coworker histories. They found that coworkers with complimentary skills and educations earned higher wages, and that those wages rose even further for workers with teammates who had few skills similar to their own. “...
Cambridge, Massachusetts - In today’s world, most workers are highly specialized, but this specialization can come at a cost – especially for those on the wrong team. New research by Harvard’s Growth Lab uncovers the importance of teams and coworkers when it comes to one’s productivity, earning potential, and stays of...
he People’s Party of Canada (PPC), a cousin of the populist movements springing up in many advanced democracies, got badly trounced in the recent federal election. Maxime Bernier, the self-styled populist leader and founder of the PPC, even lost his seat in Beauce, Quebec, in the process. The PPC polled less than 2 percent of the popular vote, finished sixth among national political parties, and is now expected to close shop.
The PPC’s stark failure stands in contrast to populist success in other Western...
Eric Protzer, Paul Summerville - letter to Financial Times
Benedict Mander’s report “Chile’s inequality ignites unrest” (October 22) effectively articulates some of the frustrations behind the protests in Santiago: growth that is not inclusive, and a sense of being left behind. But like so much commentary on contemporary political unrest, it then makes the leap of assuming this anger can be chalked up simply to inequality of income and wealth.
This is a common mistake. In fact, behavioural science shows that people do not systematically dislike unequal...
Bangladesh, Cuba, Iran, Mali and Turkmenistan share an unexpected connection to Australia, and it isn't membership of a tourist destination hot list.
All are among the economies that are so lacking in complexity, and have such limited natural opportunities to develop new products, that Harvard University recommends they adopt industrial policy straight out of the post-colonial developing world: the "strategic bets" approach.
The advice comes from the Harvard Kennedy School's Center for International Development,...
Let’s say you are a government official weighing economic development strategies. Or you’re an entrepreneur looking for the best place to manufacture your new high-tech device. How do you sort through the mountains of available data to figure out which countries have the know-how to achieve dynamic growth — and which do not?
Researchers at Harvard have built a powerful new tool that will do a lot of the work for you.
The Growth Lab, a program of the Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard Kennedy...
Harvard’s Growth Lab today launched Country Profiles, a unique data visualization tool that guides users on an interactive journey through a country’s economic structure and dynamic growth patterns ultimately revealing the strategy necessary to achieve greater prosperity. This first-of-its-kind platform — built into the Atlas of Economic Complexity — revolutionizes how to think about economic strategy, policy, and investment opportunities for more than 130 countries.
“The launch of Country Profiles is a critical step in the evolution of the Atlas of Economic Complexity,” said...
...Ricardo Hausmann of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government has made it his life’s work to understand why some economies grow faster than others, and therefore which countries are likely to grow next. He believes the answer lies in economic complexity. To paraphrase, countries that develop complex industries with transferable skills are able to grow much faster. Countries that do nothing more than extract raw materials and don’t diversify (like Hausmann’s native Venezuela), have little chance of growth. Those that develop know-how...
It is now customary to blame economics or economists for many of the world’s ills. Critics hold economic theories responsible for rising inequality, a dearth of good jobs, financial fragility, and low growth, among other things. But although criticism may spur economists to greater efforts, the concentrated onslaught against the profession has unintentionally diverted attention from a discipline that should shoulder more of the blame: public policy.
Economics and public policy are closely related, but they are not the...
