This paper analyzes the changes in Saudi employment and unemployment between 2009 and 2018 and argues that a supply-demand skill mismatch exacerbated by insufficient job creation, and prevalent Saudi preferences and beliefs about employment underpin the high unemployment problem that coexists with low Saudi employment in the private sector in the country.

We studied the geography as well as the demographic and socio-economic characteristics of 1.7 million members of the global Colombian diaspora (34% of the total estimated Colombian diaspora) using census and survey data from major host countries, and 3.5 million Twitter users located around the world presumed to be of Colombian origin. We also studied the locations and industries of Colombian senior managers and directors outside Colombia, using a global database of over 400 million companies. Moreover, we studied the migration journeys, the diaspora’s attachment to Colombia, the level of diaspora engagement and interest in engaging, the intentions to return back home, the interest in diaspora government policy, and the overall sentiment of the diaspora towards Colombia, through a survey which received 11,500 responses from the diaspora in well over 100 countries in less than two months. We additionally interviewed 12 Colombian transnational entrepreneurs and professionals, to understand what attracts them professionally to Colombia, and what may stand in the way of more diaspora engagement and professional growth.

The Growth Lab at Harvard University, with funding provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, has undertaken this investigation with the aim of identifying the existing productive capacities in Loreto, as well as the economic activities with potential to drive the structural transformation of its economy. This paper is part of a broader investigation – Promoting Sustainable Economic Growth and Structural Transformation in the Amazon Region of Loreto, Peru – which seeks to contribute with context-specific inputs for the development of national and sub-national public policies that promote productive development and prosperity in this Peruvian state.

The Government of Western Australia (WA), acting through its Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD), invited the Growth Lab of the Center for International Development at Harvard University to partner with the state to better understand and address constraints to economic diversification through a collaborative applied research project. The project seeks to apply growth diagnostic and economic complexity methodologies to inform policy design in order to accelerate productive transformation, economic diversification, and more inclusive and resilient job creation across Western Australia.

This report is organized in six sections, including this brief introduction. Section 2 is an Executive Summary. Section 3 explains the methodologies of Growth Diagnostics and Economic Complexity, including its theoretical foundations and main concepts. Section 4 describes the main findings of the Economic Complexity Report, including a characterization of Western Australia’s complexity profile. This is done at the state, regional, and city levels. Additionally, this section identifies diversification opportunities with high potential and organizes them into groupings to capture important patterns among the opportunities. This section also contextualizes the opportunities further by identifying relevant viability and attractiveness factors that complement the complexity metrics and consider local conditions. Section 5 highlights the main findings of the Growth Perspective Report. This section describes the economic growth process of Western Australia — with a focus on the past two decades — and identifies several issues with the way that growth has occurred. This section highlights three key channels through which negative externalities have manifested: labor market imbalances, pro-cyclicality of fiscal policy, and a misalignment of public goods. The section provides perspectives on the ways in which each of these channels have hampered the quality of growth and explores the deep-rooted factors that underpin these adverse dynamics. Section 6 introduces a policy framework that can be leveraged by WA to capitalize on revealed diversification opportunities and address the factors that impact the quality of the growth process of the state.

The Government of Western Australia (WA), acting through its Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD), invited the Growth Lab of the Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard University to partner with the state to better understand and address constraints to economic diversification through a collaborative applied research project. The project seeks to apply growth diagnostic and economic complexity methodologies to inform policy design in order to accelerate productive transformation, economic diversification, and more inclusive and resilient job creation across Western Australia.

This Economic Complexity Report is organized in six sections, including this brief introduction. Section 2 explains the methodology of economic complexity, including its theoretical foundations and main concepts, as well as the adjustments that were required to obtain the required export data at a subnational level and incorporate the service sector to the analysis. Section 3 describes the structure of the WA economy, identifying its productive capacities and exploring its complexity profile. This is done at the state, regional, and city levels. Section 4 identifies industries with high potential and organizes them into groupings to capture important patterns among the opportunities. Section 5 contextualizes the opportunities further by identifying relevant viability and attractiveness factors that complement the complexity metrics and consider local conditions, as well as a criterion for regional participation in the state-wide diversification strategy. Finally, Section 6 summarizes the main findings of this report and discusses implications for Government of WA strategy and policy toward capitalizing on these revealed opportunities.

The Government of Western Australia (WA), acting through its Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD), invited the Growth Lab of the Center for International Development at Harvard University to partner with the state to better understand and address constraints to economic diversification through a collaborative applied research project. The project seeks to apply growth diagnostic and economic complexity methodologies to inform policy design in order to accelerate productive transformation, economic diversification, and more inclusive and resilient job creation across Western Australia. As its name implies, this Growth Perspective Report aims to provide a set of perspectives on the process of economic growth in WA that provide insights for policymakers toward improving growth outcomes.

This Growth Perspective Report describes both the economic growth process of Western Australia — with a focus on the past two decades — and identifies several problematic issues with the way that growth has been structured. In particular, this report traces important ways in which policies applied during the boom and subsequent slowdown in growth over the last twenty years have exacerbated a number of self-reinforcing negative externalities of undiversified growth. The report analyzes three key channels through which negative externalities have manifested: labor market imbalances, pro-cyclicality of fiscal policy, and a misalignment of public goods. The report includes sections on each of these channels, which provide perspectives on the ways in which they have hampered the quality of growth and explore the reasons why problematic externalities have become self-reinforcing. In some cases, new issues have emerged in the most recent iteration of WA’s boom-slowdown cycle, but many issues have roots in the long-term growth history of WA.

Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) have been for most countries the key policy instrument utilized to contain the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this article, we conduct an empirical analysis of the impact of these policies on the virus’ transmission and death toll, for a panel of 152 countries, from the start of the pandemic through December 31, 2020. We find that lockdowns tend to significantly reduce the spread of the virus and the number of related deaths. We also show that this benign impact declines over time: after four months of strict lockdown, NPIs have a significantly weaker contribution in terms of their effect in reducing COVID-19 related fatalities. Part of the fading effect of quarantines could be attributed to an increasing non-compliance with mobility restrictions, as reflected in our estimates of a declining effect of lockdowns on measures of actual mobility. However, we additionally find that a reduction in de facto mobility also exhibits a diminishing effect on health outcomes, which suggests that lockdown fatigues may have introduce broader hurdles to containment policies.

Podcast: Do Lockdowns Work? Eduardo Levy Yeyati discusses the research with Sam Munson of the Octavian Report.

With the exception of some flashpoints in Northern and Southern Africa, the continent has been largely spared from the direct health effect of Covid-19. However, the African economy has been significantly hurt by the economic consequences. This eBook summarises recent research on the economic effect of the Covid-19 pandemic in the continent covering a wide array of topics focusing on the response of firms, households, governments, and international organisations.

Countries seldom grow rich by producing the same things more productively. They usually change what they produce in the process of development. Structural transformation is the process whereby countries move to new economic activities that are more productive and thus are able to pay higher wages. This process is very important for growth: countries that are able to upgrade their exports by developing new economic activities tend to grow faster (Hausmann and Rodrik, 2003; Hausmann, Hwang, and Rodrik, 2006).

The purpose of this paper is to apply new methodologies to analyze the history of and future opportunities for structural transformation in the Caribbean. We first look at the composition of exports from the Caribbean, and show that the region is specialized in relatively unsophisticated, ―poor-country‖ export products, and this is not simply a consequence of their small size or specialization in tourism and financial services.

We then review the concept of the ―product space‖ and determine where the Caribbean countries are specialized within this space. The results show that generally these countries export peripheral products that are intensive in capabilities with few alternative uses. In addition, we consider what effects regional integration would have on this opportunity set and show that future opportunities for structural transformation are much higher for the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) as a perfectly integrated zone—higher than for any of its members on their own.

The final section discusses the policy implications of these results. We show that for almost all countries in the Caribbean there is a need to move to new export activities. Some countries in the region have a set of nearby activities they could exploit, including in the services sector, which suggests a parsimonious approach to promoting new activities is appropriate. This approach involves the government better orienting itself to learn what emerging sectors need in the way of publically provided inputs. But for many countries in the region, there are few nearby activities, suggesting a more proactive search process is necessary. In the appendix we apply the product space data to this search for nearby and more distant export activities for Belize and Jamaica. However, such data is merely a starting point for what must be a continuous process of high-bandwidth dialogue with the private sector to learn what is needed for new activities to emerge. We provide general design guidelines for such a dialogue, both for nearby and more distant activities, and we outline some specific initiatives as examples.

Belize’s economic history shows marked periods of growth accelerations and recessions. There have been two such expansions and collapses in the past two decades, with disturbingly similar features. While not always initiated by public spending, these booms quickly became public-investment led, until ballooning budget, trade, and current account deficits and the resulting shrinking reserves and growing debt required home-grown adjustment programs. The huge cuts in public investment and sharp increases in reserve requirements created marked recessions. In addition, the second acceleration happened after a significant collapse in private savings, and ended up creating a huge debt overhang which has eliminated public savings. As a consequence, Belize is a country with a low savings, little access to international finance, and an extremely high domestic cost of finance. Access to finance is the binding constraint to economic growth.

We show that other potential constraints are not binding. Returns to education are low, and there is little to no infrastructure congestion, suggesting that although Belize is a structurally high-cost country, lacking complementary factors of production are not holding back growth. Furthermore, tax, inflation, exchange rate stability, and law and order do not seem to restrict investment through lowering appropriability. Finally, the country is not being held back by a lack of self-discovery. Although the movement to new export goods is critical for Belize’s growth, this process is being hindered by the cost and availability of finance, both public and private.

The appropriate policy stance is therefore to institutionalize fiscal discipline and gradually reduce the cost of credit. Given that low public savings are presently the result of expensive debt service, and also that foreign debt has created barriers to foreign borrowing and a heightened tax on financial intermediation which are key contributors to the high cost of finance, fiscal sustainability is key for drawing down the cost of finance in Belize. Reforms to prevent a lack of fiscal discipline in the future, particularly surrounding political cycles, are critical to end the past two decade’s ‘stop-and-go’ growth pattern. Finally, the government must address the rapidly rising implicit tax expenditure on investment promotion, as well as the fall in the tax take.

But these reductions in the domestic cost of finance will, as best, be gradual given the size of the debt. In the meantime, there is a need for public investment in areas such as public safety, road maintenance, and rural airports that if ignored, could have deleterious effects on long-term growth. Creative ways to finance such productivity-enhancing investments, which would not increase publicly-guaranteed debt, must be pursued.

In addition, the industrial strategy of the country must adapt to the current financial constraints and focus on attracting investors who aren’t subject to the high domestic interest rate, namely foreign investors. The current industrial strategy is not consistent with Belize’s constraints to growth.

This paper applies new techniques and metrics to analyze Ecuador's past record of and future opportunities for structural transformation. Ecuador's export dynamics and the emergence of new export activities have been the historical drivers of the country's growth, but recently Ecuador's export basket has undergone little structural transformation. The same broad sectors continue to dominate, and the overall sophistication of the export basket has actually declined in recent years. In order to consider why movement to new, more sophisticated export activities has lagged in Ecuador, we examine export connectedness and find that the country is concentrated in a peripheral part of the product space. We quantitatively scan Ecuador's efficient frontier and identify new, high-potential export activities that are nearby in the product space. This sector evaluation provides valuable information for the government to prioritize dialogue and interventions, but it is not meant to be a conclusive identification of "winners". Rather, we provide policy guidelines to facilitate the emergence of these and other new export activities, dealing with the sector-specificity of much of what the government must provide to the private sector to succeed while at the same time avoiding the well-known perils of traditional industrial policies.

Loreto es un lugar de contrastes. Es el departamento más grande del Perú, pero se encuentra entre los de menor densidad poblacional. Su capital, Iquitos, está más cerca de los estados fronterizos de Brasil y Colombia que de las capitales de sus regiones vecinas en el Perú - San Martín y Ucayali. Sólo se puede llegar a Iquitos por vía aérea o fluvial, lo que la convierte en una de las mayores ciudades del mundo sin acceso por carretera. Desde la fundación del departamento, la economía de Loreto ha dependido de la explotación de recursos naturales, desde el boom del caucho a finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX hasta la extracción petrolera y explotación de recursos forestales que predomina en nuestros días. Este modelo ha traído consigo daños ambientales significativos y ha producido un patrón de crecimiento lento y volátil, que ha abierto una brecha cada vez más amplia entre la economía de la región y la del resto del país. Entre 1980 y 2018, Loreto creció a una tasa promedio compuesta anual cuatro veces menor a la del resto del Perú. Es decir, mientras el resto del Perú triplicó el tamaño de su economía, la de Loreto creció algo menos que un tercio.

En la última década (2008-2018), la región también se ha venido distanciando de sus pares amazónicos en el país (Ucayali, San Martín y Madre de Dios), que han crecido a una tasa promedio anual cinco veces mayor. En este período, el ingreso promedio por habitante en Loreto ha pasado de ser tres cuartas partes del promedio nacional en 2008 a menos de la mitad para 2018. Además del rezago económico - o quizás como consecuencia de él -, Loreto también se ubica entre los departamentos con peores indicadores de desarrollo social, anemia y desnutrición infantil del Perú.

En este contexto, el Laboratorio de Crecimiento de la Universidad de Harvard se asoció con la Fundación Gordon and Betty Moore para desarrollar una investigación que proporcionara insumos y recomendaciones de política para acelerar el desarrollo de la región y generar prosperidad de forma sostenible.