Ricardo Hausmann for Project Syndicate

While developing countries have been catching up to their richer counterparts on some key metrics, they appear to be falling behind on others. Most worrisome is a growing gap in the local capabilities needed to make the most of new technological innovations.

Ricardo Hausmann for Project Syndicate

Vigorous economic competition certainly has a place in today’s world. But economists may currently be overly reliant on this default approach, attributing to a lack of discipline outcomes that may instead result from insufficient solidarity and concern.

Ricardo Hausmann, Growth Lab research in Daily Maverick

The economist Ricardo Hausmann has set out very clearly what an economy like South Africa can do to work its way out of the current crisis. Hausmann and his team of MIT-Harvard economists developed an enormous dataset contained in the Atlas of Economic Complexity, freely available on the internet.

The concept of economic complexity holds that wealth is created not so much by one particular industry, but by a dense network of industrial...

Read more about South Africa’s lack of economic complexity is our real problem, and it’s driven by cadre deployment and the unions

Ricardo Hausmann in the European External Action Service (EEAS) blog

Last Monday we asked Ricardo Hausmann, Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, to give a presentation to several hundred EEAS staff members about the global dynamics of the COVID-19 pandemic and the way out. We need indeed to draw inspiration from the most advanced thinking from academia and think tanks.

Ricardo Hausmann began by drawing our attention to the many unknowns associated with the evolution of the pandemic. In particular, it is necessary to remain very vigilant in countries where the... Read more about COVID-19 pandemic and the way out: food for thought with Ricardo Hausmann

Atlas of Economic Complexity in the Wall Street Journal

The uncertainty and the ensuing pandemic have dramatically slowed business investment. Gross fixed investment from both the government and business fell 4.6% during 2019, Mr. López Obrador’s first full year in power, and then another 18.2% in 2020, according to figures from the national statistics institute. Foreign direct investment for the past two years has been down about $5 billion a year to $30 billion.

Mexico's economy has diversified substantially since opening up more than three decades ago....

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Metroverse in SDP Noticias

Después de festejar, el próximo lunes, los alcaldes electos de las principales ciudades de México tendrán que hacer frente a la realidad. Diseñarán sus estrategias de transición, conformarán sus equipos y se prepararán para iniciar sus gobiernos. Aquí hay una buena noticia para ellos.

El “Growth Lab” (laboratorio de crecimiento) de la Universidad de Harvard anunció el miércoles pasado el lanzamiento de Metroverse” , un navegador de información urbana diseñado para proporcionar datos económicos sin precedentes para más de 1,000...

Read more about Los nuevos alcaldes necesitarán “Metroverse”

Ricardo Hausmann for Project Syndicate

Decarbonization will transform global production and trade patterns so radically that new growth opportunities are bound to arise for the Global South. The goal for them should not be to stop global warming by restricting domestic emissions, but rather to carve out a role for themselves in a rapidly greening world economy.

Ricardo Hausmann for Project Syndicate

We should be planning to vaccinate the world annually, but we are on track to take twice as long, not least because vaccine developers are withholding their intellectual property so that they can recoup costs. Yet there is a straightforward solution that would leave everyone better off.

Ricardo Hausmann for Project Syndicate

In recent decades, economics has gone from defining itself as a set of questions to defining itself as a set of methods, all based on individuals making decisions. By doing so, it has undermined its own ability to make progress.

Frank Muci for Project Syndicate

Brazil seems determined to test the limits of financial markets' tolerance for debt accumulation. It is not hard to come up with scenarios in which the country's debt burden reaches 125% of GDP or more by 2025.

Patricio Goldestein for VoxEU

Non-pharmaceutical interventions have been key to containing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This column examines whether the effectiveness of lockdowns on the virus’s spread and death toll has changed over the past year, using data from 152 countries from the onset of the pandemic through 31 December 2020. Initially, lockdowns are associated with a significant reduction in the spread of the virus and the number of related deaths, but this effect declines over time. Lockdown does not work as a continuous containment policy in the...

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Ricardo Hausmann with Age of Economics

This interview series is aimed at addressing fundamental issues related to global capitalist civilization with 8 basic questions. The objectives of this project are to shed light on the most salient challenges facing human civilization, explore the role of economics and the inner workings of capitalism, and heighten people’s awareness of both the economic system in which they live and work, and the role of economics in understanding this ever-changing system.

The Atlas of Economic Complexity in El Mundo

Hay una herramienta económica que debería ocupar un lugar central en la definición de los proyectos que aspiren a los fondos europeos de recuperación y resiliencia que gestiona el Gobierno: el Atlas de Complejidad Económica, un proyecto de la Universidad de Harvard que coloca las capacidades industriales y los conocimientos técnicos de un país en el centro de sus perspectivas de crecimiento. Este mapa permitiría concentrar esfuerzos en sectores con alto potencial para el país.

Ricardo Hausmann for Project Syndicate

Like the proverbial man with a hammer who sees every problem as a nail, economists study the world through the lens of incentives, and have developed a rich understanding of how market participants make decisions. But although incentives are important, developing countries must do more than institute the right ones.

Ricardo Hausmann for Project Syndicate

CAMBRIDGE – Poor countries are cheap. In 2019, a dollar could buy more than twice as much in Argentina, Morocco, South Africa, and Thailand as it could in the United States. It could buy more than three times as much in Vietnam, India, and Ukraine, and more than four times as much in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and Egypt. If a country is cheap, it should be more competitive and thus able to catch up with richer...

Read more about Can Cheap Countries Catch Up?