The Growth Lab teaches and trains economic development practitioners around the world. Housed at Harvard Kennedy School, we fulfill the HKS mission of improving public policy and public leadership so that people can live in societies that are safer, freer, more just, and more sustainably prosperous.
Teaching
HKS EXECUTIVE EDUCATION
Leading Economic Growth
Ten-week Executive Education program brings together leading experts in economic development with practitioners from around the globe to focus on practical approaches to shared growth and development. Led by Ricardo Hausmann and Matt Andrews, the curriculum provides a framework for understanding economic growth, as well as sophisticated tools for diagnosis, decision making, and implementation.
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We’ve transformed our cutting-edge research and frameworks into easily digestible formats for anyone struggling with the question of growth. You could be working in the private or nonprofit sectors, in government, or for a multilateral organization, focused on a country, region, or city. If you’re saying we need to grow more, we need to grow in different ways, in different locations, for the benefit of different peoples—this course is for you.
HKS MASTERS COURSE
Why Are So Many Countries Poor, Volatile, and Unequal?
This course explores the causes and consequences of three salient and interrelated characteristics of developing countries, namely poverty, volatility, and inequality, and it links them to current themes in development policy.
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The course will characterize the relationships between these three problems and a varied class of proximate and deeper determinants of economic development, including national saving, human capital accumulation, international trade, technology diffusion, demography, geography, economic complexity, and macroeconomic, structural, contractual, and political institutions.
HKS MASTERS COURSE
Development Policy Strategy
This course will integrate the analyses of short- and long-run dimensions of development in the design of an overall development strategy. The course will review various determinants of economic growth, macroeconomic volatility, and income distribution, such as factor accumulation, demography, geography, economic complexity, and institutions.
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It will develop the tools necessary for diagnosing growth constraints, macroeconomic imbalances, fiscal policy, trade, the performance of financial and labor markets, and the sources of inequality and volatility, with an eye toward relevant policy issues.
HKS MASTERS COURSE
The Tools and Methods of Economic Complexity Analysis
This advanced module will present the methods of economic complexity as they can be used for the analysis of places, firms, products, occupations, technologies, scientific research and educational areas, as well as the interactions among them and their evolution over time.
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The world is incredibly complex but understanding requires simplification through tractable models that have fewer dimensions. Much of economics has relied on aggregation as a dimensionality reduction mechanism, summing up the economic components of the world into fewer categories such as GDP, capital and labor. However, aggregation erases information regarding the structure of the economy. Economic complexity tools try to minimize this information loss while preserving tractability.
Courses By Alumni
Growth Lab alumni are teaching our methodologies in graduate programs at top universities around the world.
LEG will reshape your economic development strategy, redefine competition through creativity, and provide you with the unique opportunity to collaborate and learn from people around the world. Let LEG’s incredible leadership team be your guide along a journey you will never forget through practical tools, case studies, and a hall pass to ask 'why' in an effort to tackle economic development’s most complex challenges."
– MAGGIE JONES, ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT FOR TARRANT COUNTY, TX USA