During an interview last week on Vizion Plus, Ermal Frasheri discusses the adoption of a major justice sector reform in Albania and the implications on economic development.
Venezuela’s problems are self-inflicted and the country will only recover if it mends its ways. However, there is much that the rest of the world could do to help Venezuela out of its current crisis.
How did we get here? Unfortunately the former president Hugo Chávez did not use the massive oil price boom between 2004 and 2013 to put money aside for a rainy day but instead, over-spent and quintupled the public foreign debt. This left the country in a vulnerable position because when the price of oil declined in 2014 the country was...
Harvard’s Center for International Development (CID) hosted its annual Global Empowerment Meeting (GEM) on April 13th and 14th, 2016. This year’s event was made possible in collaboration with the MasterCard Foundation. In its eighth year, GEM continues to feature cutting-edge research and initiatives in global development and bring together business leaders, policymakers and academics to discuss ideas that revolutionize development paradigms. This year’s theme was on learning—how individuals and societies learn and the vast socio-economic implications of this process.
As Argentina’s protracted and litigious restructuring saga comes to an end, it is natural to ask what lessons the world can draw from this contentious process. While a close look reveals that Argentina’s ordeal has been fairly idiosyncratic, and hence less influential than most people think, the 15-year-long script yields important, albeit unexpected, lessons. Here’s a list.
Super-CACs are great and you should use them (but risks remain) The first lesson has already been learnt and implemented, but it will...
How can we improve the state of the world? How can we make countries more competitive, growth more sustainable and inclusive, and genders more equal?
One way is to have a correct theory of the relationship between actions and outcomes and then to implement actions that achieve our goals. But, in most of the situations we face, we lack such a theory, or if we have one, we are not sure that it is correct. So what can we do? Should we postpone action until we learn about what works? But how will we learn if we do not act? And if we act, how can we learn whether we did the right thing?... Read more about Learning without Theory
Diversification is critical to a country’s long term economic growth plan, especially as many older industries shrink in a world of globalization and rapid technological evolution. But establishing new industries in a region requires access to workers with the right skills and know-how. By definition, local workers lack experience in these new industries. So how do “pioneer” plants, the plants that are the first of their kind in a region, overcome this difficulty? Do they train locals or hire experienced workers from elsewhere? New research at the Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard University finds that pioneers are much more likely than other plants to hire their better-paid, higher-skilled workers from outside the region, lending evidence that mobility of workers is crucial for new industries to diffuse.... Read more about Mobility of Workers Key for Diffusion of Industries
The Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard University has been ranked the 2nd best university think tank and 5th best international development think tank, according to UPenn's new 2015 Global Go To Think Tank Index.
The Index - produced annually by James McGann, director of the Think Tanks and Civil Societies Program at the University of Pennsylvania’...
