Ricardo Hausmann: [00:01:42] Welcome welcome, I’m Ricardo Hausmann, I’m the Director of the Growth Lab at Harvard University, and we have here our star-studded panel of research fellows at the Growth Lab that has conducted research on the diasporas of countries that we work on. In the Growth Lab, we are very focused on trying to uncover the secret of growth and prosperity, and we’re seeing a really, really important role to the productive, know how the productive knowledge society uses. And we always like to say that technology is really productive knowledge and that it takes three forms, embodied knowledge and tools, codified knowledge and codes, recipes, formulas, protocols, how to do manuals, and tacit knowledge in brains. And of these, it’s easy to move tools in containers. It’s easy to email codes. But the know-how resides only in brains, and it’s very hard to move know-how from brain to brain. Malcolm Gladwell likes to say that takes 10000 hours to become good at something. And we don’t have too many ten thousand hour chunks in our lives to become good at too many things and so on. So it takes a long time to acquire know-how. And so we know-how into brains is a slow process. Moving brains is a much quicker process. And then and so we’ve been very focused on studying the mobility of know through the mobility of people, through migration, through business, travel, through people working in companies and the FDI going into your country, your own companies establishing activities abroad, etc… But many countries have a diaspora and diaspora can play a very important role in terms of connecting society to the knowledge that is out there. And then a particular diaspora stands to understand two societies and they can see the gaps, the technological gaps, the market opportunities, et cetera, and they can potentially play a very important role. And this became very obvious to us when, through one of our Fellows, O’Brien was doing research on companies in Albania. And they all happen to be returnees from the diaspora. And they learned there because their business idea by working abroad and then realized that they could bring those ideas home and so on. So that got us into thinking that maybe diasporas have a role to play and that the literature wasn’t there too focused on the literature, had a lot of focus on remittances and things like that. But that they may have a more substantive role to play in connecting society to the technologies, the markets, the professional networks, the links to the rest of the world that this would happen not because the government is connecting to somebody on top, but because the whole society has members of of of of the family living in some other place in some other communities. So that’s what inspired all our work. And we’ve had the opportunity to think about these issues in the context of Albania, in the context of Sri Lanka, in the context of Ethiopia, and in the context of Colombia. We also have had a chance to study the very, very recent, and rapidly growing Venezuelan diaspora. But there but the issues there are not issues about technological diffusion back home yet. I’m sure they will eventually be. But but but not yet. So in in in in doing these things, I’m going to call on research managers and fellows at the lab. I’m going to start by asking two questions to Ljubica Nedelkoska, Ljubica has been a research manager, a research fellow at the Growth Lab. She managed the Albania project for several years. She has been doing academic research, very important areas of the skills acquisition and development and occupations and tasks and so on and she oversaw the Albania project and now has overseen and has managed the projects in the Diaspora Project in Colombia, so Ljubica, I wanted to ask you, what are the tools and techniques that you have deployed in the study of Diaspora’s? [00:07:24][342.0]

Ljubica Nedelkoska: [00:07:27] Hello, everyone. I’m thrilled to see such an audience and such an audience from also outside our center. So it’s my pleasure to be here. So in terms of methods and tools, we have been very open-minded in the sense that I personally started a lot of the research on Diaspora between 2014 and 2015. And we never said like there is one right way of studying the diaspora. We always started with the research questions and we adjusted our methodology according to what would bring us to answers most quickly and to the best answers. So let me give you some examples of the countries where we engage. Their very basic question is, where is our diaspora? What are they doing? So that’s an exercise of mapping the diaspora. And in that way, it requires really good statistics from host countries. So for that purpose, we started using a lot of microdata like censuses and surveys that have good coverage of the foreign population of a place. Now, more recently, we, as we were learning about the pros and cons of using this data for mapping the diaspora, we started complementing this work with also data from social media like Twitter and Facebook and Ricardo, you yourself have written more than one work using Twitter data or Daniela work with Facebook data. And while each one of these is not enough to answer the full range of issues that we’re interested in when mapping the mapping, when mapping the diaspora, they really complement each other. Just to give you an example, for instance, national statistics will never give you an example of where you will it will never give you an estimate of how often the diaspora travels back home. But tracing where people tweet from and how often they tweet from their host country and from their home country can give you a fairly good estimate of how often they travel back home without you having to personally interview or survey these people. Now, other ranges of questions require different approaches. So, for instance, another very another set of very important questions is how engaged is my diaspora? What is the sentiment of the diaspora towards my country or towards certain policies? And what are their intentions to return? Can I get them engaged? What drives them back home? So those set of questions are really, really hard to answer with any existing data out there. And for that reason, we have engaged very actively in designing diaspora surveys. So hopefully we have reached a very fine version of a Diaspora survey that Daniela, Ana, and I have been involved in, one for Albania that Daniela lead and one for Colombia, that Ana and I lead. So in the third source of data that’s that has proven incredibly important is actually doing interviews. There are certain things that you can not ask enough in the form of a survey that only allows for, you know, that many questions and not very open-ended questions. And therefore, we conduct a lot of interviews, especially with outliers from the diaspora, which we call the agents of change. Examples are transnational entrepreneurs, professionals of certain Ethnical origin that have ties both with home and at least one host country. So in this sense, we really use a range of methods that we borrow from sociology, economics, even demographic research to form a very comprehensive view of where one’s diaspora is, what their interests are, how engaged they are, what their intentions to return are, and so on. Let me stop there for this question. [00:12:47][320.0]

Ricardo Hausmann: [00:12:48] Thank you. Thank you. Let me ask you a follow-up question, Okay so. So you’ve worked on Albania, on Sri Lanka, on Colombia from a say thirty thousand foot view. What are your takeaways from your experience analyzing Diasporas? [00:13:09][20.6]

Ljubica Nedelkoska: [00:13:12] Yeah, that’s a great question. So there is so much we have learned from engaging in different countries. I think one of the most important things is that for a meaningful engagement and in particular meaningful economic engagement, many stars need to be aligned. There are many diasporas that engage in a meaningful way back home, even in the absence of government intervention. And then there are many diasporas that would not be engaged in a meaningful way in spite, even if the government would intervene. And the question is why? So what conditions need to be in place so that we can see a productive engagement of the diaspora? And I don’t mean remittances here. Remittances always happen. That’s one thing we know. But what I mean with meaningful engagement is mainly the kind of engagement that enables the transfer of knowhow, enables the diffusion of technologies, enables the expansion of business activities from host countries to home countries. And some of the things that we learn are the following. So what conditions need to be in place? One thing, one aspect that’s very important about the engagement is the reasons for the formation of the diaspora. And so some diaspora were formed because of economic hardship. And these parts of the diaspora that the left, because of economic necessity, it turns out that are less likely to engage back home compared to a diaspora that left because of seeking opportunities or, for instance, diasporas that were out of conflict in that part of the diaspora is less likely to return back home than diaspora that voluntarily formed outside. Cultural homogeneity of the diaspora helps for engagement. So in countries like Albania and Colombia, where the diaspora is much more culturally homogeneous, they find easier ways to connect with each other abroad and easier ways to connect back home. In Sri Lanka, we saw we saw the opposite because a lot of the diaspora is not only conflict-driven, but also the Tamil community, which forms a large share of the diaspora, does not see and is not aligned in terms of interest with a lot of the governments, which are our Sinhala majority. So. Another factor that’s very important is the geographic distribution of the diaspora, high geographic concentration of a diaspora, especially of professional communities, helps a lot be that the concentration of Indian software engineers in Silicon Valley or the Columbian construction engineers in Atlanta, Georgia. These kinds of communities just find it easier to develop, to develop ties within the host country with each other within the diaspora, and then reach out home as well. Another factor I think it’s number five on my list is simply opportunities back home. There is a reason why there is a lot of engagement in emerging economies like India and Taiwan from the diaspora, and there is less engagement in economies that are still troubled in many ways and do not offer the business opportunities and the certainty that emerging economies do. And two last factors I’d like to mention. One is complementary assets. So in Albania, we saw that when Albanian migrants in Greece were forced to return back home because of losing their jobs in the midst of the economic crisis in 2009 in Greece, they found it relatively easy to start businesses, agricultural businesses in their hometowns in Albania. These were not high, highly skilled migrants. These were low to medium-skilled migrants. They returned and their complementary asset was the land that they owned so they could rapidly plant new crops and expand business opportunities in their own community while bringing new technology like greenhouses that they learned how to build and run back in Greece. In the case of Columbia, the complementary assets are good quality engineers, and a lot of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs of Colombian origin nowadays is that operations in Colombia to make use of the great engineers that they can hire at 60 percent of the price that they are in the United States. And finally, it very much depends on how attached diasporas are to home for foreign engagements. So second-generation diaspora tends to engage less than first-generation diaspora individuals whose families have migrated fully abroad versus individuals whose family members are still at home are less likely to engage. I think Mark Kozmo here, who is a third-generation Albanian diaspora, defies everything I’m saying because he’s hyperactive and theoretically should not be engaged at all. But for most people we have seen in the diaspora, attachment to home really, really matters. So let me stop on that here and. And see what Ricardo has to say next. [00:20:02][410.4]

Ricardo Hausmann: [00:20:03] And so. Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m going to come back to you later on and let me know and move to Daniela Muhaj. Daniela is is a research fellow at the Growth Lab. She has a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins. She is originally from Albania, and while she has worked in a bunch of other countries, while at the Growth Lab, she was very enthusiastic about doing the work on the Albanian diaspora. So tell us, Daniela, what have you learned from studying or giving your teeth more in-depth on the Albanian diaspora? [00:20:42][38.9]

Daniela Muhaj: [00:20:44] Thank you so much, Ricardo, and thank you Ljubica for setting that excellent stage to follow up on the learnings on the Albanian side. So like you said, I’m Albanian and I’m part of the Albanian diaspora. So going in, I knew I had strong priors that I had to check at the door in the way we approach this in terms of methods and what we found out. Now, Albania is an interesting case because before the 90s we were very isolated. So we had very little contact with the world. And then you have the diaspora of the 90s, which was mostly motivated by economic and political reasons. And here we see like low income or unemployed Albanians and low skilled generally moving to Greece and Italy, which are neighboring countries. Then in the 2000s, you have the rise of a new diaspora. You have increased demands for better educational and professional opportunities as well as standards of living. So the geography of migration and the reasons behind it are changing. So as the diaspora evolves, it’s also picking up more so the trends of a brain drain. So the discourse around the Albanian diaspora is very much along with the brain gain and brain drain, even within the Western Balkans, Albania stands out for the number of youth and high skilled professionals that continue to leave the country. And there’s a break before the financial crisis and after the period of picking up in acceleration of people either planning to leave or leaving the country. So from the policymaker perspective, this is of concern and the goals are usually how do you prevent the migration, especially of youth and high skilled or how do you encourage them to return in the medium and longer-term? So we wanted to take a slightly different approach because we are academics. We have the luxury of going in and saying we’re interested in understanding and then we will reach the policy gap. So this is why we designed this survey, which was adopted, because, as Ljubica said, we wanted to map the diaspora and traditional sources will give you a point of origin, point of destination stocks, and flows. What they miss is the high-definition detail of the migrant’s journey. What do they do before? What do they do in between in terms of leaving the country and ending up somewhere outside of the country? And especially how do they evolve after? And through the survey, we were able to capture a lot of this high-definition detail. One of the most striking findings was. Perhaps this is obvious after the fact, but internal migration precedes moving abroad. So what we saw from our survey was that there’s a strong tendency for people to move from remote areas of Albania into the capital, which is Tirana, to prepare for migration and this is because higher education institutions and the country’s economy is concentrated in Tirana. And then once people leave, they will settle somewhere in Europe. And before the global financial crisis, the most common destination countries were Greece, Italy and Turkey. After we see that the diaspora continues to migrate and it’s very dynamic. So the geography of migration is changing. Now we see the old countries in terms of destination becoming steppingstone countries into more distant and higher income destinations like the United Kingdom, Germany. We see the Nordic countries coming up. We see Austria, Switzerland, as well as the United States and Canada. And it’s important to understand how this evolution happens if you’re trying to get a better sense of the diaspora and how to engage them. Another very interesting aspect was we were also trying, in addition to the journey to measure the pulse of the diaspora. So what are their sentiments, their sense of attachment to home and especially what are their intentions for the future? And here we noticed that people feel a strong sense of attachment to home in terms of identity, in terms of values, language and culture, and they’re there is a bit of a sense of detachment when it comes to things like corruption, lack of trust in public institutions, lack of meritocracy, and especially services like education and health. But the sentimental and value-based approach compensates for that. And it shows up in the fact that among the diaspora there is a very high rate of already have community engagement and potential for future engagement. What is another surprising aspect was that when we tried to estimate why did people come back in terms of returning, we found that family plays a very large role in that, and that was surprising to us. So people that have family in Albania, either immediate family or some extended family, are more likely to come back regardless of how the conditions in the country are with respect to education or to the political situation or professional opportunities. So that kind of changed our thinking in terms of like how do you capture the diversity of the diaspora, their experiences, their needs, and how do you translate that into policy? And to wrap this up, what became very evident was that. We went in thinking that the Albanian diaspora is culturally homogeneous and we expected that to be reflected in the study we did, and we found out that even within the youth and high skill, the diaspora is very diverse. There are many diasporas within the Albanian diaspora. So when you’re thinking of engaging people as a policymaker, it’s very important to keep in mind both the migrant journey and the life cycle journey because people have different points of origin at home and destination abroad, which is evolving over time. And this shapes their experiences, but also interest to engage in a specific sector or within a specific region in Albania lifecycle because the needs of the Albanians abroad vary drastically like youth needs more support in order to succeed. And then people who are more experienced and closer to retirement are in a much better position to contribute back home. So there’s the need for more targeted and decentralized diaspora initiatives. So you create an ecosystem that can sustain itself over time. But I will leave it there for now. And I’m happy to add more later on. [00:27:36][412.3]

Ricardo Hausmann: [00:27:41] Thank you so much, Daniela. And let me now move on to Nikita Taniparti, Nikita is a graduate of the MPA program at the Kennedy School. She’s been at the Growth Lab for I’m going to guess that over four years or so. She’s been all over the place working in Western Australia and Namibia and Ethiopia and elsewhere. She has and she’s now currently dedicating a lot of time thinking about Ethiopia. So let me ask you, Nikita, what have you learned from thinking about the Ethiopian diaspora? [00:28:22][41.1]

Nikita Taniparti: [00:28:23] Thank you, Ricardo, and I think I’m also really pleased to see everyone here in the virtual Zoom room. I can tell that a lot of you also have your own unique diaspora stories. And to echo what Ljubica and Daniela have mentioned, there’s no single story of a diaspora. And so that heterogeneity of those identities is both difficult to research, but that’s where you can kind of find the opportunity, opportunity to leverage those different engagement channels. And so our project in Ethiopia didn’t start off thinking too much about the diaspora. We actually started off thinking about the macroeconomic imbalances and sort of a structural view of remittances as a source of foreign exchange that led us to want to understand the diaspora more. And Ethiopia is a very unique country in the region in that it had a very small stint of being colonized by Italy. And compared to other countries in the region, its diaspora is very young because before the 70s, you didn’t really find many Ethiopians outside of the Horn of Africa. And in the 70s and 80s, those who fled were conflict-driven migrants. And during this whole time, Ethiopia has always played host to its own inflow of refugees from other countries in the region. And it’s also seen people leave as well. So those kind of add to the picture of the movement of people across the border. And so we looked at the Ethiopian diaspora is not very dispersed across the world, but there are top five destinations where Ethiopians now you can typically find Ethiopians, the US, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Canada, the U.K. and so in understanding who the Ethiopians abroad are, we worked with the Diaspora agency, which is a part of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ethiopia. And we realized very quickly, as Ljubica was saying, we used microdata from surveys and censuses, as well as taking advantage of the fact that we have a project in Saudi Arabia and we have projects in other places where they might have administrative sources of information that we can use to understand different groups there. So we were able to identify who are the Ethiopians in Saudi Arabia, what do they look like? What is the educational and occupational composition of them? Compare that to those in the US and you see some differences and therefore different implications of the way that they can engage Ethiopians in Saudi Arabia. It’s mostly men and they’re mostly employed in lower-skilled elementary occupations. And so here we were thinking about remittances as sort of a low-hanging fruit in terms of the way that Ethiopians and Saudi Arabia can engage. But when you shift and look at Ethiopians in America, it’s much more diverse. There’s a lot of heterogeneity. Most of them were born in Ethiopia because they’re recent migrants and there’s a high potential for different sorts of engagements. The government has also been taking a lot of steps and new initiatives to allow these different kinds of engagements, like investing in a diaspora bond, opening up the capital markets for diaspora, and really recognizing the importance that they can pay, that they can play in both financial and non-financial means. And so we’re still in the process of understanding that diaspora more. And it’s been very interesting because they’re such a large group of people of Ethiopians located in the US. And as Ljubica was saying, we’re really trying to dissect and dig into that heterogeneity a little bit more. But I’ll leave it there and happy to talk about the policy implications of this later. [00:32:13][229.5]

Ricardo Hausmann: [00:32:14] Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m reminded of one return of the diaspora members Abiy Ahmed, the current prime minister who used to live in Colorado, of all places. So thank you. Let me now move on to Ana Grisanti, Ana has been working on the Colombia project she just finished today, the Columbia report, and so let me ask you, what have we learned from experience. Is Ana online, I do not see her on my screen. [00:32:53][39.0]

Ana Girsanti: [00:32:56] I’m here. Sorry. [00:32:56][0.6]

Ricardo Hausmann: [00:32:57] Oh, good. Good. Good morning. What did we learn in Colombia? [00:33:02][4.7]

Ana Girsanti: [00:33:03] Thank you for that introduction and thank you Ljubica and Daniela for already setting the stage for talking about the Colombia Project. So the Colombia Project, we wanted to understand what made Diaspora likely to engage as well with their home country. And we used, as you said, a bunch of different methods to try to understand the diaspora and how they were likely to engage. One of the methods that we use for which I was most involved with the survey. So we got a lot of interesting insights from the survey. We very we benefited a lot from the Albanian survey that already had been in course. But I want to talk about a little bit of the sentiment analysis that we did of Colombians abroad. And I just think that this sentiment analysis brought to light a lot of learnings that we can have from Diaspora and the fact that learning from the diaspora is something that is is they are uniquely positioned to talk about the structural problems that are at a place in their home countries in many different ways. So some of the themes that came up when doing the sentiment analysis, we had a question at the end of the survey that invited the diaspora to speak about anything that we might not have covered in the survey. And first, I want to say that out of thirteen thousand six hundred respondents, there were at least nine hundred nine thousand two hundred people that wanted to share their opinions in some way. So, so so from that, the first thing the first conclusion that I would make is that these people want to give back. They want to provide their opinions as to the structural problems that are happening in their country that made them leave or that keep them away from coming back. Ah, and. I think this goes back to some of the Growth diagnostic methods that we employed in the lab because one of the things that we tried to look at is we tried to look at agents that have overcome constraints and successful stories of firms that have been able to operate in the country. But we always have the difficulty of not being able to look at the cases of agents that we’re not able to make and we’re not able to have that success. And I think that diaspora that left the country because of specific problems that were. That pushed them away are examples of those agents that might have had some economic activity in the country but had to leave because of different issues. So I want to talk a little bit about some of the common themes that came up in doing this sentiment analysis. We did a qualitative codification of some of the responses to the open-ended questions in the survey. And a lot of the things that came up, at least of the Venezuelan diaspora did not surprise me. I think that a lot of people that leave Latin America know that these are issues that have been structural for the region for a long time. And I’m talking about issues of security and crime in the streets and then also issues of corruption, as Daniela mentioned also. And societal issues were a big component. And I define those in terms of also meritocracy and getting work opportunities that were suitable for these people. But then at the same time, a strong sense of identity and pride shines through these comments as well. So from that, I think we can see that, of course, not only do they have important contributions to make about what these structural problems in Colombia are, but they also have a lot to say about how to fix these problems or not fix them because there’s no easy fix, but like at least make contributions to towards solutions. So I think I’ll stop there for now. And if we want to talk more about some of the findings of the survey, I’ll let Daniela speak about that. [00:38:39][336.0]

Ricardo Hausmann: [00:38:40] Thank you. Thank you, Ana. let me go back to you Ljubica, because I was just the first author of the Colombia report and just finished that. Tell us, what’s your take on your learnings and especially what you think are the policy implications of your study, which are? [00:39:04][24.0]

Ljubica Nedelkoska: [00:39:08] Thanks Ricardo. Let me try to speak about policy, not only about Colombia, but more than Colombia, I think judging by the audience that there might be interest there, there might be interest for more of a comparative approach. And so most developing countries by now have large diasporas. However, my impression is from the places where we engaged, is the diaspora policies largely understated, and I think that one of the reasons is, is that, unlike other policies, it doesn’t have an immediate effect, at least not immediate economic effect other than maybe remittances. And actually, Kingsley Akins, who was here in the audience, I’m really honored to see him, a few weeks ago, he said to us that diaspora policy is more like managing serendipity. So it’s like planning your luck. You cannot make it happened but happen. But if you, you know, if you’re prepared, opportunities will come to you down the road. However, what I have learned so far is that the least countries should do is that they should know their diaspora. And let me give you an example of what we saw happening in Albania. So back in 2009, Albania didn’t have any meaningful way of or successful way of engaging the diaspora. Mark may say that’s still the case, but I think they have gone a long way since then. They have a minister for diaspora. They have a much more structured diaspora umbrella, actually. Also, the organization that that market is is is leading. So the diaspora today is nothing like that. The Diaspora organization, is nothing like the one in two thousand nine. But in 2009, when the crisis in Greece happened and large numbers of Albanians all of a sudden decided to return home because they had nowhere to go and they lost their jobs in Greece. Remittances fell and the government was bracing for the impact of the increased pressure on the labor market that they were expecting. Albania itself was entering a recession. There were very few jobs that the economy was churning and everyone was afraid that these migrants will come and compete for those same jobs. Now, the full story of this is much happier because last year of this, migrants did not compete for those jobs, but actually engaged in entrepreneurship and built farms and built more productive farms and generated exports. But the point is that the government had no clue about any of that in hindsight. For instance, if the government would have known their diaspora, what they do, where they are, what they’re capable of doing, they could have prepared much more in terms of policy. Now, in this specific case, in hindsight, support for returnees who want to start businesses would have been very meaningful. There were a lot of returnees that needed grants, that needed financial support, that were able to transfer technology, but did not have the full scope of means that that was needed for for for for these ventures. And I think that’s one example about why countries should at least invest in monitoring their diaspora, where they are, what they do, what the sentiment is, what they’re even what their economic-political aspirations are so that they have some predictability of what the future may bring from this population that’s away, but not really away. Now, the second thing that’s really important in terms of the policy is you have to try to engage them. So if you’re that far and you can free up some bandwidth for diaspora policy, you should try to engage them. There is no one model that fits all. A lot of experimentation is needed. So a few years ago, we liaised with the diaspora organizations and the Albanian government for diaspora organizations from the Albanian diaspora and into government. And for instance, we found out that there was great interest for a Diaspora summit and we ended up helping organize that summit. And it’s now kind of a tradition that happens every two, two years. When we asked the Colombian diaspora, we gave them a list of potential government policies that the government could implement. And the diaspora summit was nowhere to be found. No one had an interest in it. So in Colombia, we have a very different set of policy recommendations. They have very different interests. In Sri Lanka, for instance, there were many there were a lot of evidence seeing that Sri Lanka is not ripe for the kind of diaspora engagement that we think like Colombia is ready for or India is ready for. And there we took a very different approach. Sri Lanka was at that time reviewing their immigration law that was largely outdated. And we tried to push a small step which was allowing for permanent residency of overseas Sri Lankans who had to renounce their Sri Lankan citizenship when they obtained a different one. Just to give you an example, I come from North Macedonia. I used to live in Germany. When I obtained my German citizenship, I had to renounce the Macedonian one. Otherwise, I could not have obtained my German citizenship. There are a lot of people like that that I have lost. Like I have all sorts of controls when I go back home where it’s true my family is because I just lost all the rights as a citizen. And one thing that governments can do where governments that are not ready for a more comprehensive diaspora strategy is to at least make it easier for their people abroad to come in and enjoy the same rights as those people that that’s never left. A couple of more things, I think global networks of impactful entrepreneurs, professionals, and others, are a pretty good start. And one reason why I think this and this is something that we’re putting forward in Colombia is our top recommendation is that when you have a country that has a lot of constraints to business activity and entrepreneurship, this kind of network can actually help domestic entrepreneurs circumvent these obstacles. To give you an example, there might be venture capitalists in the network and there is no venture capital in Colombia whatsoever. So this kind of network can actually match venture capital with domestic entrepreneurs without them having to go to Silicon Valley. Or it can match them with suppliers, with buyers, with mentorship and the like. Another thing that we found, and this is specifically from the Columbia study, is that there is a causal relationship between traveling back home. Even one additional trip back home can spur meaningful engagement. So if a government could, you know, incentivize travel to home, they can actually nudge people towards more engagement. Another thing is public recognition. Publicly recognizing diaspora members that have achieved things goes a long way back home. So one example is recognizing entrepreneurs that have made it in a foreign country. And we had at least one case in Colombia when such public recognition led the entrepreneur to grow there, their network. And now they’re having they have already they’re running a company that has already made one hundred thousand job placements and in at least one business accelerator with over 50 companies. So just by the fact that you’re giving your diaspora public recognition, you can expand their network at home and by expanding their network at home, a lot of good things can happen to these entrepreneurs. And another effect that this has is that all of a sudden you have completely different types of personalities that become the role model of your youth. So now these entrepreneurs are the heroes. And these are and these are the kinds of heroes that the youth wants to be, not the entrenched successful persons that are, for instance, in Colombia. So let me. Stop with that thought and give the floor over to Ricardo. [00:49:32][624.4]

Ricardo Hausmann: [00:49:33] Thank you. Thank you very much. Someone asked me a question from the audience about what happens to Ethiopians that have lost their nationality because they took some of the nationality. And you address the question very, very clearly that at least it’s impossible to give them dual citizenship if it’s not in the Constitution or whatever. You can still give them permanent residency. So so you make them as close as possible and you’re trying to reduce this as much as possible. Nikita, you were eager to continue your own policy implications for your analysis. From your perspective, what other things would you put in the policy and the policy when you think that? [00:50:30][56.7]

Nikita Taniparti: [00:50:30] That’s a great point and these are really great questions and it makes me think about how do you frame the problem? Right. Are we just talking about engagement for engagement? Not really often. There can be different purposes or end goals for diaspora to engage in the home country. So in the case of conflict-driven migrants, maybe you do need to focus on tapping into the potential identity that is not yet leverage because they are still not feeling that sense of connection. And so a lot of research shows that you can create galvanizing symbols or rituals that unite the diaspora within itself in the host country and creates a tie back to the whole country. I’m from India and I don’t just identify with being Indian. I also identify with my state or with the cuisine or with my grandparents’ village. So there are multiple layers of this. And I think when you when you ask what does that mean in terms of policy or what is the policy goal? Is it to increase capital flows and create vehicles and mechanisms for the flow of money to be easier? Or is your policy goal to create a long-term sort of perpetual mechanism for people to travel back and forth and eventually lead to the return migration and set up entrepreneurial activities, returning second and third generation opportunities in the form of education and professions? So I think I would backtrack a little bit when I ask when someone asks about what does this mean for policy in terms of what is the government trying to do and then go from there in terms of dissecting it that way. [00:52:07][96.1]

Ricardo Hausmann: [00:52:08] Thank you, Nikita. Daniela, do you want to come in on the policy questions? [00:52:14][6.2]

Daniela Muhaj: [00:52:15] Yes. Thank you so much, Ricardo. And I’d like to follow up on what Nikita was discussing in terms of the objective matters, but also because we have just been arguing that the diasporas are very rich. They’re heterogeneous, they have different capacities. They have different intentions. They have different histories. They have different journeys. And that has to be reflected in the times, in the types of initiatives, the types of channels and platforms that you create for Diaspora’s to engage. One very interesting thing that we found was that there was a lot of interest for remote engagement or through short-term visits, which Ljubica said are very important because they exposed the diaspora to the country and how the home country is developing. So that also changes their perception around these issues that Ana touched on with sentiment, but they also start seeing new opportunities. So exposure is important, but also the engagement doesn’t have to be one size fits all. So, for instance, Ljubica mentioned that in Albania we have a diaspora summit that’s annual. There is one session that’s dedicated to the youth and that’s not enough. So we could have youth diaspora summit of the smaller to like internship opportunities, both like winter and summer, scholarship opportunities, mentorships. So you increase the flow of ideas, information, but also the movement of people. And then you have a sectoral lens as well. So if you’re looking for, let’s say, IT professionals and more experienced diaspora members, they’re going to have different know how they will know different technologies, they will have different capacities, and how much time they can invest, depending on where they are, what sector they are in. So there might be a need and there is a need for a more sector-centered approach when you’re engaging the professional diaspora and then when you’re thinking along the lines of like home country, the whole country itself is not one package. Nikita very interestingly mentioned that she feels that that to a specific place within her home country. And the same is true we found for the Albanian diaspora like they might not feel strongly about. Contributing to something in Tirana, but they might want to start something in their home country being professionally starting a business or something along those lines, so it’s important to keep the tools and the channels for engagement, do the capacity and the needs of the diaspora itself. [00:54:47][152.0]

Ricardo Hausmann: [00:54:52] Thank you very much. Erm, there’s an interesting question in the chat from Ricardo, and it’s something that maybe we haven’t directly tackled, which is erm the role, the role of cultural organizations of these diasporas. For example, he refers to the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese diasporas in Venezuela when they were migrating into Venezuela, lacked the important cultural institutions in Venezuela. By the way, they are also important now the host of the Venezuelan diaspora. So so not just your diaspora abroad, but other diasporas in your own home country. And that is an interesting question. But on the issue of cultural elements of the diaspora, for example, the Armenians or the Jews or the Greeks have a church and they have language and they have other elements that maybe parents want to transmit to their children and so on. And they have a reason to organize in the whole structure. And other aspects may not have those elements, as I say, in how important to have these issues being in our research debate. And let me ask broadly to just let you know who wants to tackle this. [00:56:35][103.7]

Nikita Taniparti: [00:56:37] I can go first, just briefly, I think it’s a very interesting question, because, for example, in refugee camps in Southeast Asia, there’s a lot of discussion of the tension between cultural evolution and how food systems change over time with migration out of a particular place. That tension, along with the fact that you’re losing out on these traditions and how do you safeguard something that does give you a sense of identity. So now there’s a push by the United Nations to adopt refugee camps so that food systems are more easily retained and preserved among the youth in refugee camps. And obviously, that’s a very different context from a different type of diaspora. But those sorts of small steps in terms of the infrastructure around the place are also very helpful. And I think that cultural capital is a very important element in engaging the diaspora, [00:57:32][54.4]

Ricardo Hausmann: [00:57:34] interesting a number of the questions involving the chat have to do with gastronomy and something that in the literature is also known as the nostalgic market that the people in the whole country want tastes and the flavors and the traditions and the food styles of of of the home country. Has that become a source of business development or a source of cultural involvement? [00:58:06][32.1]

Daniela Muhaj: [00:58:11] There are actually that’s a very interesting point, and there are multiple examples of stuff like how gastronomy is evolving among diaspora communities living in different communities, especially in the United States. There’s multiple before when I came to the US 10 years ago, it was hard to find Albanian food outside of the home. So you had to cook it yourself. Now, in places like New York and New Jersey, but also Boston, you have these Albanian bakeries popping up. You have Albanian restaurants with authentic food. And this is me making a little bit what is what has happened in the country like I said, return migration after the global financial crisis. So we’ve that some migrants who used to work in restaurants in Italy and Greece or had some experience in culinary in the culinary sector, starting agritourism businesses in Albania. And they started this new culture of slow food where they were celebrating the traditions of the country and they were catering to Albanians at home and there was a demand for it. So you saw a little bit of that movement that’s emerging now in the Albanian diaspora community abroad. And very briefly on the culture point that you mentioned earlier, Ricardo, one interesting part of our study was that we did have a section called The Sense of us. So how do people identify as Albanians or as Colombians? And there are two aspects of that. The first is like, what do you think makes you Albanian or Colombian? And here a lot of the aspects of culture comes like language, history, tradition and the like. But the other aspect and this is something we ask for is what do you think makes somebody else Albanian or Colombian? And here we saw things like having the other person speak the same language or having parents from the same country is very important. And those degrees of affinity or distance are pronounced along generations. So like the first generation has a much stronger sense of attachment, and that serves as a glue both among diaspora members abroad in the host country, but an attachment with the home country as well. And once you move to the second generation, you see that link fading a little bit and that plays into engagement. [01:00:31][140.0]

Ricardo Hausmann: [01:00:33] Thank you. Thank you very much. We’re past our bedtime, sort of past our informal time to close. Before I see some final remarks, let me see if any of the panelists want to have a final word. [01:00:49][16.4]

Ljubica Nedelkoska: [01:00:51] May I just say that if Katya makes sure that we get the chat and if we have people’s addresses, maybe we can reply to their questions directly? There are more questions than we can handle today. Yeah. [01:01:07][15.5]

Ricardo Hausmann: [01:01:08] Definitely so in a let me just say this, this has been a very interesting discussion. I’m very proud of all the panelists’ very insightful comments. I think this is a very important dimension of how our society is integrated into the world. A society integrates into the world through its own members that are living in other places, and that that constitutes a very, very important dimension of the internationalization of a country, of the embeddedness of the country in the world. And so diasporas have a really, really important role to play in this process. I like to say that there are of the countries I used to travel to before the pandemic and that I hope to get back to as many as I get my second vaccine in a is a, you know, a spectacular gastronomic destination in Albania. And that spectacular gastronomic destination is there not only because there was a history of cooking in Albania, but also because there was a history of Albanians going abroad, learning other cooking techniques and so on in Western Europe and elsewhere, and getting back home and doing a fusion between the Albanian traditions and the new techniques that they learned and creating something that is new. And they think that they post-pandemic. We might see a gastronomic summit in Tirana sometime soon. And I’m sure that that’s just one example of the things that end up happening when, when. And, you know, the relationship between a country and its diaspora is put on a healthy path. So without any further ado, let’s take note of all the questions in the chat, and let me thank all the participants for your interest. Thank you very much. [01:01:08][0.0]

Alicia Galinsky: Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. My name is Alicia Galinsky. I am program coordinator here at the Growth Lab. Also joining us on the Zoom is Andrea Hayes, program manager of the Growth Lab, and we;re really excited to have you all here as sort of a behind the scenes look at what it’s like to be a research fellow. I’ll just start off with a brief introduction of kind of who we are and why we’re here today. So as many of you know, the Growth Lab is an academic research program under the guidance of Professor Ricardo Hausmann. We are housed at Harvard’s Center for International Development. We are made up of a dynamic, diverse team of researchers that studies economic growth and structural change in an effort to understand the challenges of economic development. So with this mission in mind, the Growth Lab engages actively in applying research to its policy engagements, which we will hear more about shortly. And to give you an idea of what our team looks like, I will just share my screen for a minute. You can see the different countries of origins of our research fellows, so where we have our citizenship, clearly spanning across the globe, and we also have where we work, so different countries. So, as I mentioned, we are currently hiring for the position of research fellow to continue to expand our great team. So in this session, you’ll be able to learn more about what it’s like to work at the Growth Lab in this role. And we have four incredible members of our team here today. And I think with all that said, I will kick it over to Nikita to start with the introductions. 

Nikita Taniparti: Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining us. My name is Nikita. I am a research fellow at the Growth Lab. And I am, I graduated from the MPA-ID in 2018. I’m originally from India and I studied economics and before the MPA-ID I worked at JPAL in impact evaluation so the Growth Lab was a big pivot for me. And at the Growth Lab I worked–well, I did my SYPA on the Sri Lanka project and then I worked on the Jordan and Western Australia projects. And now I currently work on Ethiopia, mostly on macro, and I also co-manage the Namibia project that started this year. So if you have questions about any of that, let me know. And I’m really excited to see all of you guys on screen. I will pass the ball to Tim O’Brien. 

Tim O’Brien: Hi, everyone, my name is Tim O’Brien, I’m a senior manager of Applied Research at the Growth Lab. I’m now in my sixth year at the Growth Lab. I’m also a proud graduate of the MPA-ID program. I think all four of us are, but shouldn’t take that as an indication that we only hire from the MPA-ID program, just a bit of a coincidence. Before I was– before I joined the MPA-ID, I studied mechanical engineering actually as an undergrad, and I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Malawi. I worked a few years in environmental engineering and then joined the Kennedy School community and and never left, actually. So I joined the Growth Lab thinking that I still had a lot to learn after I finished the MPA-ID program, which turned out to be true. What I didn’t realize when I joined was how, how much impact the work has here. So so that’s more what kept me, although I am still learning, too. Right now I work on–I co-manage our project in Ethiopia and our project in Jordan and our recently completed project with the state of Western Australia. And I also work on our Albania project. And in the past I co-managed our Sri Lanka project. And then like all other fellows at the Growth Lab, I also work on a bunch of things that kind of cross all of our country engagements and academic research agenda. I guess we’re passing it on, so I’ll pass it to Semi next. 

Semiray Kasoolu: Hi, everyone, I’m Semi, I’ve been at the Growth Lab for almost two and a half years now, I co-manage the Jordan project with Tim and also the Saudi Arabia project. And before that, I was working in asset management operations at Goldman Sachs, so talk about pivoting. That’s me. And I think what drove me to the Growth Lab is essentially the same thing that drove me to the MPA-ID. And those are a deep interest in economic development, an interest in using data and evidence based methods to help policymakers achieve better development outcomes. And coming from, I’m originally from Bulgaria and from that region of the world, the only political system that I knew was a transitional one. So there’s a deep seated cynicism about what governments can do in that part of the world. So I was very motivated to prove that wrong. And I think that… I attended an open day in 2014 and happened to visit Ricardo Hausmann’s class and the things that he was talking about immediately clicked, which were the need for an evidence based policy methods and hypothesis driven way of doing development and using cool data science or just data analysis methods to arrive at good conclusions about what a country can do to develop faster and have a sustainable and inclusive growth. So since that day, I knew that I wanted to work at the Growth Lab and as Tim said, I think one of the things that kept me here is the impact. There are a lot of development jobs that have can have impact, but the scope–I don’t want to be critical, but—in a more, to be objective. I think there are many, many ways you can be impactful in developmen, but those things, and especially if you are interested in certain areas where I was interested in SMEs before and I quickly realized that the impact that will have a limited scope, but at the Growth Lab we actually developed strategies for whole countries and that impact and the probability that even a fraction of the things that we arrive at as recommendations can be implemented is just very powerful and very humbling. So that’s very motivating and that’s why I’m still here. 

Frank Muci: Hi, everyone, my name is Frank Muci, I’ve been at the Growth Lab for five years, two of which were during the MPA-ID program when I was working sort of part time. This is my MPA-ID T-shirt. But as they said, there are non-MPA-IDs, so don’t be scared. I joined the lab actually not in Cambridge, but in Tirana, the capital of Albania, where I lived and worked for a year. I had prior experience on Wall Street covering fixed income in emerging markets. So I had read all about government’s fiscal policy, all of these big deficits and debt accumulation. And then I moved to the basically the office of the finance minister and saw it happen in real time, in an electoral year, the political pressures for spending. So before I was sort of like reading about policymaking, having these relationships with these governments, I was much closer to the action. That was a year in Albania, then I came to Cambridge. I was a research assistant for a year in Cambridge, then the MPA-ID program, and now I rejoined the lab as a fellow. And I’ve worked on the project of Loreto in Peru. So that’s a state that’s Amazon rainforest, it has big challenges to sustainable development. It’s very isolated. It’s disconnected from the rest of the country. And I’ve also done a lot of work on the Venezuela project, which is thinking about the policies that might help the country to move forward if and when it ever decides to rationalize economic policy. So that’s my story, thrilled to be here. Happy to answer questions. 

Katya Gonzalez-Willette: OK, so to kick us off, I will give the first question to Nikita and then I think we can go around the virtual table. The first question I have for you all is what is your favorite part about working at the Growth Lab? And then what would you say is the most challenging part about working at the Growth Lab? 

Nikita Taniparti: That’s a good question. I think my favorite part, apart from pre-COVID, having Semi as my office roommate, is… I think this also answers why I wanted to work at the Growth Lab. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do after the MPA-ID, and I knew I enjoyed all of my MPA-ID classes and I wanted to do a little bit of everything in any given day. And I think what I really love about working on projects is in a single day you can do some data analysis, you can talk to policymakers and you can brainstorm ideas about macroeconomics, or you can just talk to other MPA-IDs. And it’s a very holistic approach to development, on any project, whether you’re working in Jordan or in Latin America or in India. And I think my favorite part is how dynamic the work feels at any given day. And there is no such thing as a boring day at the Growth Lab. I think that’s also the most challenging part, because at any given time, you’re wearing multiple hats, you’re wearing the hat of an economist who is trying to make sense of scrappy data. You’re also trying to put yourselves into the shoes of a policymaker who has to make very difficult decisions, that doesn’t really care about the analytical approach you might have used that day. And you’re also trying to balance competing… like the trinity in the MPA-ID is very relevant even in real life. And I think it’s been a tool, but also something that is very humbling, as Semi was saying, to see how challenging this work actually is in real life. So it’s both exciting and challenging. That’s, that’s what I think. 

Tim O’Brien: So my response, I think, is going to be fairly similar to Nikita’s, but also a lot of what she said also reflects on how our work is really all oriented around partnering with governments to solve problems, at least in our applied country projects. So there’s a lot of variability in what I do day to day, which keeps things exciting. There’s a lot of room for creativity in how we go about research and communicating research and building connections with people in government in order to be helpful, because it’s all fundamentally about helping solve problems, helping understand and solve problems. I also really enjoy the kind of, the levels that we work on. So we work simultaneously with top officials in government and with kind of your–your lower level bureaucrats. So we simultaneously work at the high level trying to inform and think through economic strategy, but also with permanent staff and trying to help them learn new skills and apply skills around key problems. So I really like that– that balance. I–it was an eye opener when I first joined a few weeks in about the kind of space where we work when Ricardo asked me to work on a memo to the prime minister of Albania. And I was like, wow, this is, this is not just me learning, but this is about actually helping informed decisions. And then since then, I’ve gotten to present to other prime ministers, the prime minister of Sri Lanka. I got to meet the king of Jordan. So so that space where your work is applied is is really fulfilling. But on the flip side, the challenge is, is that that kind of flexibility to be helpful in solving problems means that you never really have a roadmap to follow. You’re always creating you’re always trying to put yourselves in somebody else’s shoes. You hit barriers in communicating some research, so you have to figure out a way to do it differently so that that kind of challenge of being flexible is the flip side of basically everything I like about working here. 

Semiray Kasoolu: For me, by far, is the people, whether it’s the people that we have at the Growth Lab or the people that we have access to as experts or affiliates of the Growth Lab or as friends of the Growth Lab, as we like to call them, and also people in government and the counterparts that we have in the different countries that we work in. I think that it’s very motivating and fulfilling to know that there’s a lot of capacity and skills that are applied to something that that is the way in which people are trying to achieve something good for a broad for a broad population. And it’s also a good opportunity to keep constantly learning. I think it’s a rare job in which you do something that you deeply believe in. You can contribute to its mission in meaningful ways, but also at the same time, keep learning. One of the things that at my friends tell me is that it’s great to be paid to learn. So that’s another aspect of the job that that is really good, that keeps your development as well, along with you helping others. 

Frank Muci: I want to echo the learning part, I was just and I want to show–show it with an example, I was just staffed on the Namibia project, which is this– it’s a country that’s very large with very few people just north of South Africa. And there, mining plays a big role. It’s a large share of exports, a large share of GDP, a large share of tax revenue. And so as the Growth Lab, if we’re going to be thinking about that country, we need to have a clear understanding of the mining sector. So the mandate that I got just in this week is, Frank, tell us all about mining, read everything there is to read about it, the academic literature, what are the best policy frameworks? How much do they have in reserve? So–it’s the learning is is like you really do just deep dive deeply into these random subjects that are super interesting. So I, I don’t know. I find that to be to be super fun. And the challenge sometimes at least is is is telling the story, oftentimes for communicating with policymakers at the highest levels. They don’t have time to see  regression tables. They don’t have time to read the axes of the graphs. They don’t have time to read through 10 page reports. So you need to have a succinct narrative, something to convey your points and communicate them effectively. So I think that’s that’s a challenge. It’s also super fun because you have to you have to get creative. How are you going to tell the story? 

Katya Gonzalez-Willette: Thank you all so much for those answers, I’m going to call on Rigzon next, who’s had her hand raised. 

Rigzon: I thank you so much for hosting this, so I’m an MPA-ID one, along with a lot of my classmates here. So we’re just– I have two questions, actually. So we’re just starting to get exposed to the whole growth diagnostic literature and stuff. So we’re just starting out like taking baby steps. But I was just really curious about, like, you know what the life of a project or lifecycle of a project or a program looks like, one. And my second question is about like your work environment. Like what? How big are your teams, the kind of organizational support you get, the kind of mentoring? So I’ve been hearing a lot about how much you guys have been able to learn. But I would also want to understand how. Thank you. 

Katya Gonzalez-Willette: I think we can start with Tim and then if anybody else wants to chime in, go ahead. 

Tim O’Brien: OK, so let me tackle the first part on the project life cycles, and then somebody else can chime in on the teams and and how how we learn over time together. The projects all can take somewhat different forms. It all depends on how they materialize. Normally, there’s a period before a project starts where we get approached. It’s always we get approached these days because there’s more demand for our projects then we can supply. So there’s a, there’s typically a pipeline of potential projects and we have early discussions with government leaders to try to explore how we can fit in, how we can be helpful to them and sketch out what the timeline is. And sometimes the projects are short, a few months, sometimes they’re multiple years, sometimes the multi-year ones extend. So we’ve been working in Albania since 2013 nonstop. In Jordan, we had like one and a half year project. It ended. And then when COVID hit, we were asked to come back. So now we’re in the midst of a second project. We like the longer ones because they give us a time to really learn, to work through a diagnostic, to build connections. And ideally we, we’re working and we’re solving problems so that a constraint is addressed. And then we have to identify the next constraint and try to work together with governments to solve that. And so the structures all vary too. We have different counterparts in governments, depending on the way the power structures kind of work in different governments and who approaches us and and who the best fit is for the methods of growth diagnostics and economic complexity that we always start by applying. So it’s… it really varies. And sometimes–sometimes the projects are all about starting with a blank slate country level, understanding what the growth problem is and going from there. Sometimes they’re more specific. They have a concept in mind where we think we can be helpful, like developing a diaspora strategy or something like that. 

Nikita Taniparti: I will chime in a little bit on the structure of our teams, because I think that’s a very relevant question. We’re not a consulting firm where you’re just kind of told what project you’re going to be staffed on. And you also might have noticed that a lot of us work in more than one specific area of expertise. And so on the one hand, I think each team has people who can work around the table of macroeconomics, diversification, labor markets. But on the other hand, because we all did the MPA-ID program and even those who didn’t are very familiar with methods across different topics. One person can be wearing many hats. And so I think that makes our teams very unique in being dynamic and flexible, just like any government official is as well. But the other hand, I’m always learning from these experts and more senior researchers– I think Semi brought up before where we bring in professors or other consultants or people with sector specific focus areas like public procurement or investment promotion or minerals and natural resource management. And so that’s a very staple feature of some of our projects. And so you have different levels of experience, kind of all working together. We also interact a lot. And so even in the era of COVID, we are all constantly working together, whether that’s brainstorming together or working on an analysis together or presenting together. And so it’s I think there isn’t often a time that I’m not learning from one of my team members. And I think also a related question, maybe one that gets to a question in the chat is our projects are sometimes very short where it’s just six months and it’s very specific and geared at one kind of report or outcome or a diversification opportunity for the space. But many of our projects are often two to three years long. And the first year is a really heads down deep analysis into a lot of the analytical understanding and frameworks of what makes the economy tick. And how do you think about transformation? And then after that, you really get your hands dirty with what does this look like in practice, what’s feasible, what’s supportable, what further analysis do we need to do to dig even deeper? So even on that spectrum of learning, it’s a lot of general learning in the beginning and then a lot of really deeper learning as you go. 

Tim O’Brien: I should just clarify, too, that not all of our applied products are with countries, they tend to be place specific so we can understand a specific context and solve problems in a specific context. But they can be country, state, city, region. And our current projects, I think, run, run across all of those. 

Semiray Kasoolu: I can add some some color about the second question, which was about mentoring and how do we structure learning? I think that’s that’s a really important question, especially for us, which we are an organization that started out small and is rapidly growing. And that’s a question that we constantly keep thinking about, because the reality is that we have access to a lot of resources to learn, but it’s usually on us to reach out and find those resources and structure them for ourselves. But having said that, that is also rapidly changing because we can’t sustain that as we grow bigger, and that requires more structured ways and programs within the Growth Lab to facilitate that. And I think a good example of how we try to do that was with our research assistants. One day when we had two new research assistant starting a couple of years ago, we were very good at pairing them with fellows so that they have the support and the mentorship as they grow in their role and as they learn how to navigate and perform their role well. And currently we’re thinking about how to do that for fellows, whether that is a stocktaking exercise of the talent that exists here so that we facilitate reaching out and learning better or constantly thinking about how do we help new fellows integrate well and onboard them well as well. But the short answer is that there are a lot of resources and you can use them well and all doors are open to you. We’re still a very much flat organization where everyone is very much keen on helping others. 

Frank Muci: Yeah, I just want to echo that I would say that there’s a big opportunity in the knowledge that’s inside everyone’s brain and it’s up to you to take advantage of it in some sense. So, like, if you want to know more about labor markets and labor market analysis, household surveys, how to do Mincer regressions, talk to Semi or talk to Ljubica Nedelkoska. If you want to know more about trade data and exports and complexity, talk to Sebastian Bustos or Ricardo himself. If you want to know about macro, talk to your Latin Americans that have had their macro, you know, be destroyed and so they’ll know a lot about the balance of payments and fiscal impulse of all different kinds of fiscal policies. And so, like within the Growth Lab, we sort of know who knows what and who’s good at what. And so it’s up to the fellows to seek out those people and ask for their advice and guidance. And those people are super open to helping out, giving some input, here’s a do file of how I did this labor market analysis, or here’s an Excel file where I looked at the balance of payments. And so so there are experts within the organizations, so people who have specialized that you can reach out to and learn more from it. So that’s there’s a big opportunity there. 

Katya Gonzalez-Willette: Thank you, everybody, Clement, you’ve had your hand raised for a while, if you’d like to voice your questions, please feel free, OK? 

Clement: Sorry. Thanks. I’m I’m an MPA-ID two. And actually I had two questions, but they’re both super quick. The first is about the, you talked to about the projects you’ve been involved in. So we have now an idea about what’s what’s been running, what’s still running now and what’s been running in the past. But you have an idea about what’s coming up. You have any exciting stuff in the pipeline? That would be my first question. And the second question is more super basic, stupid question about more like H.R. related. MPA-ID twos, a bunch of us, we actually graduate in December ’21 because we’re dealing with a flex model at HKS. I was wondering if there would be opportunities to basically, for instance, start part time and then switch to full time when we graduate. How would that work if anybody’s thought of that already? Thank you. 

Tim O’Brien: Sure. I actually see that Ricardo is here, but on you, I want to give him an option to answer the first question about potential new projects. 

Ricardo Hausmann: Good. Well, I’ve been listening here very, very excited to see so many people connected. We are working, so right now we have projects in Namibia, South Africa, Ethiopia, Jordan, Albania, we are kicking off, I mean we’ve been working on Honduras, we have projects in Colombia, couple of interesting projects in Colombia. One is about, you know, mapping out the Colombian diaspora because as you know, Clement, and we think that diasporas are a channel through which things might happen, know-how might move and, and so on. We’re working on projects on Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, and a couple of projects on, on Latin America. We’ll be in countries in Latin America with the Inter-American Development Bank that I’m, I’m waiting to see how they evolve before… Yeah. So that’s what’s in the pipeline. I may have forgotten some. 

Katya Gonzalez-Willette: And I will throw the H.R. admin question to Alicia to see if she has any insights on this. I did receive a few questions privately as well. 

Ricardo Hausmann: Let me answer that. I mean, I did not–I mean, we usually have hired you know in the around the month of May when people graduate and so on, but I didn’t know about I hadn’t stopped to think about this flex thing, but I think we could. We could. I mean, it’s an important piece of information. I think we will be flexible on that. It sounds interesting. That means that you will be part time in your last semester. How does it work, Clement? 

Clement: I mean, again, it’s only it’s only a part of us. But there’s a bunch amongst the MPA-ID twos. Yeah. The last the last semester is is half load plus there’s no SYPA. So I guess it’s really half-load. So I guess, you know, 50 50 would probably be doable depending on, you know, everybody’s preferences. 

Katya Gonzalez-Willette: Great. So we will move along to some more questions. So Ziggy had two questions in the chat for us. The first is if you can talk about some of the professional development opportunities and career trajectory within the Growth Lab for research fellows. And the second I will give to Alicia, maybe we can start with this one if she can tell us a bit more about the hiring process and what that looks like. 

Alicia Galinsky: Yeah, so I can walk you through roughly what our hiring process looks like. So the application is live now. We are accepting applications through December 4th and will be evaluating them on a rolling basis. I would encourage you to mention in your application somewhere, if you are graduating early so we can consider that. From their qualified applicants will move into several rounds of interviews. And we are hoping to wrap that process up around late January, early February. Let me know the answer to the question. 

Katya Gonzalez-Willette: Then, if maybe, Nikita, you want to get started and we can go through and maybe everybody can give a little bit of background just in terms of professional development at the Growth Lab and then career trajectories. Once you’ve been at the Growth Lab for a little bit of time, what that might look like. 

Nikita Taniparti: Sure, I’ll try my best so I might answer it a little differently than the question originally intended. But I think for me, because I didn’t really have much experience with the methods or the scope of our work at the Growth Lab, the first year or so was a really steep learning curve and a lot of new areas of development, economics in general and just actually just economics. And so I originally was working on the Jordan project and then I left the Jordan project, only in practice, not from my heart. And I joined two different country projects. And so for me, it was really important to be able to work on different work streams in different projects. So I didn’t just want to be kind of a sector specific, focused person up front, and that was the trajectory that I kind of chosen fell into. But I think if you speak to other fellows, they have very clear goals. A lot of research fellows end up going on to pursue pursuing the PhD after the Growth Lab. And so they have a lot more of a niche focus. And so I think the question for me is, how do you focus on professional development at the Growth lab and then what happens after the Growth Lab.

Semiray Kasoolu: I can also say that that that development, personal development is an optimization problem right? From our end, we try to be very good at using the technical capabilities that you have and putting them into good use once you’re here. But at the same time, we want to be very mindful of your goals and what subject areas that you want to learn about so that you get a mix of both. Whether probably if you have a macro experience that would be staffed on a micro project in the beginning. And at the same time, if you want to learn about labor markets or complexity, we will try to have that very much in mind. But I also realize that this answering the question about career trajectory is above my pay grade. So maybe I could ask Tim O’Brien or one of the Andreas to chime in as we try to think about this at the Growth Lab as we grow. 

Tim O’Brien: Well, I hate to give the MPA-ID answer of it depends, but it all depends. So people take a number of different paths when they come to the Growth Lab. I think in my particular case, I I came to trying to to learn and be useful in projects. So I ended up developing a lot of different types of skills. And maybe I could consider myself like a generalist, although I got a lot of practice in growth diagnostics for sure. And then as I worked in a number of projects, I started more managing them and working more closely with Ricardo to kind of structure them and strategize about how we should use our teams in the projects. But other people come and they develop like an area of expertise- labor markets, macro. Sometimes people work on applied projects, but also on core academic research and work towards publishing papers. Sometimes people will switch between the two of them. So it really varies. And we’re trying to build structures as we grow that help people figure out what path they’re on and and support them as best as possible along that path. A lot of people come to the Growth Lab as a fellow and then move on to a PhD program. Other people come from a PhD program and try to work in the real world. So it really varies. And and as we grow and see different ways that people learn and grow as they they work through our projects where we’re trying to make our processes support people on all sorts of different career professional development paths. 

Katya Gonzalez-Willette: Thanks so much, Tim, appreciate your insights on that. I’m going to shift the conversation just a bit to go more into the actual application process. So we had one question come in from someone who’s an MPP one and is wondering what are the best ways to prepare sort of in advance. And with that, I’d like to add a couple of questions there just on what you think stands out in resumes or applications for people who are interested in the position, as you all are part of the recruiting process. And just some tips you would give people who are going to start to put their applications together. 

Nikita Taniparti: OK, I’ll go first because I have given this some thought before. But I think for me, when we review applications and talk to people, it’s very easy to see who has done their homework before and who has taken the time to get to know a little bit more about the Growth Lab and the work we do, which doesn’t mean you need to know how to do what we do. But to be genuinely interested, because you’ve read a little bit more about a country project or a specific analysis or you attended a lecture or something that we talked about today you wanted to learn more about. And I think that is it’s a very low bar, but it’s easy to stand out for us to pick out people who’ve done a little bit of homework before. I also think people tend to assume that you need to already be really good at what the Growth Lab does. But we really value people with unique skill sets who are interested in learning new ones. And so I think whether in your application or during the interviews, leveraging just the strengths that you bring to the table and not trying to compensate for ones you think you need but don’t have. So just talking about accomplishments and challenges that you faced in your previous professional and educational background and how you find them to be relevant for your interest in the Growth Lab. And I think just not to be very cliche and cheesy, but that that stands out as being very authentic and genuine compared to people who try to find the right answer. 

Tim O’Brien: Something that that I think is important and it’s important in choosing, if you think that the Growth Lab is a good place for you and then it’s important to reflect as you apply, is the importance of being flexible in the work that we do. Being guided by what’s needed. Being curious to learn about new things and build new skills at the same time as if if there’s something that you have expertize in or you want to develop, expertize in. And you’ve identified a country where we work or past piece of work that we’ve done that aligns with that, that’s great. But we’re always looking for people who are flexible to the challenges that that we encounter in projects. And often I don’t know about other fellows, but myself, I think others as well. You might come here with one idea that I’m really interested in X, but then you see the fundamental problems that a country is facing and you start to become really interested in that as well. And then somewhere down the line, actually, you circle back to X, but you see it in a different way, because if you’ve gotten there by being super focused on a diagnostic perspective and and letting the process lead you to care about the issues that you identify from from doing a diagnostic. 

Katya Gonzalez-Willette: All right. Thank you. We had one question come in about summer internships, which we do offer for a lot of our projects. So that one I will throw first to Nikita. 

Nikita Taniparti: Yes, very important question, because we love having summer interns. They are a very important part of our projects and at least before this summer, they would be all based in the country that we have them paired with. And so, I don’t know, maybe one of the other fellows can talk about the outlook for internships for next year. But if you’re a first year student, we typically have interns working in most of our country projects on the ground there. And I’m trying to see what the question and the opportunities are. So I work on the Ethiopia project and more summers. We have three to four or even more interns working mostly on macroeconomic topics because that’s very pertinent to the binding constraint challenge there. I know that we also have interns on our Jordan project as well as potentially in Namibia next summer. But those are the current projects that I can think of off the top of my head. And we also don’t just hire employees. And so even if you’re in an MPP program or another part of HKS, we…. We’re not just an MPA-ID internship. 

Tim O’Brien: So typically in early January, we’ll put together a list of our expected opportunities for the summer. I think we might even come up with different scenarios for the spring semester, given that this year is a little bit different, but typically in January we come up with a list of what we expect. But then since we’re always adapting to try to meet our government counterparts where they need help, they often evolve between January and April. So we kind of update that list as we go and we start accepting applications and and talking with everybody who applies in like February typically. But we also we love a chance to get to know you even before then. If you see something in our projects and our work that stands out to you, you can even get in touch with us before. And we might be able to think about a potential internship rules in advance. And that might be a match between what you’re interested in and needs that one or more of our country projects has. So, like, everything is very fluid and adaptable, but the typical process is we kind of start at the beginning of the new year. 

Semiray Kasoolu: An unrelated note, the internships, but related to SYPA, it may be too late for the second year students, but something to keep in mind for the first year is that over the past year, organically, we have ended up working or giving data or showing ideas on different projects for students who are interested in a country and a different and a certain topic. So something to keep in mind as you scroll through our project list on the website. If there’s anything a country or an issue of interest to you, we are very open to discuss the type of topics and collaboration that. 

Katya Gonzalez-Willette: Wonderful. Thank you all so much for those answers. I want to, of course, address the current situation that we are all in with the COVID-19 pandemic. So here at the Growth Lab, we have all been working from home since about mid-March. And I wanted to ask our panel, starting with Frank, what has that experience been like for you now that we are all working remotely? Can you give us a sense of what your kind of new normal looks like in this role, but remote? 

Frank Muci: Honestly, I would say it’s not that different. The work continues as normal. We still my country projects me every week, if not more often. There’s Slacks all the time, every day. Zoom has worked out great. I’ve been positively surprised. I have two monitors here at home, so I’m super comfortable. I think everyone’s got the chance to get extra monitors and stuff. So I don’t know. It’s been… my expectation was that there would be a big decline in productivity, but that hasn’t panned out. I think we’ve been as productive as ever in this time. So I don’t know. I kind of like it. 

Tim O’Brien: It’s also important that there’s been kind of correlated events. We started working from home and all of our partners started needing help a lot more at the same time. So there was an initial huge need for us to help them understand the potential ways that COVID would affect each place where we work. And so everybody was very willing to meet with us on Zoom and we kind of developed norms, I think, where we’re able to do a lot of the work that we used to need to travel for, at least for now, we accomplish a lot of it through Zoom. And it’s been amazing that you maybe used to have to schedule a trip halfway around the world to schedule a meeting with a minister to communicate something. But now it’s much easier to just schedule a Zoom call in the next few days. So a lot of things have worked incredibly smoothly that way. That worked out well for us because it was allowed us to respond very quickly to the new needs that we were finding. 

Semiray Kasoolu: It’s also a testament to the fact that we work very well together, which I didn’t realize before. Working remotely, showed me that we actually have a lot of rapport and a good dynamic within the team itself at the Growth Lab. And we can keep all of the initiatives and things that would come up organically are still happening because we put their efforts into staying in touch. But we also have this good understanding and many WhatsApp groups across different channel with Growth Lab people. The funny thing is that at the previous place where I worked and we had many business continuity trainings, so you would go work on a different side, you would wake up and work at a different hour just to be prepared for a situation like that. And to me, it’s funny and nice to see that we actually didn’t need all the planning and bureaucracy and we can still make it work. 

Katya Gonzalez-Willette: Thank you, so I will ask my final question and put out the call to everyone who is still here. Do you have any other questions for our panelists? Feel free to put them in the chat or raise your hand. But my closing question is, if there is one thing that you wish you knew before applying or starting to work at the growth lab now that you’re in the role that you’re in. Looking back, what’s one thing that you wish you knew? And I will give that to Nikita first. 

Nikita Taniparti I was hoping I had more time to think. One thing I wish I knew that once you… OK So I think in general. I wish I knew that once you finish a piece of work in your little Stata window and your computer, it can still outlive that analysis for a year. And I say that because, for example, on the Ethiopia Project, one, I never thought I would work in macroeconomics before the Growth Lab. Then I fell in love with macroeconomics because of Ethiopia. And I’ve learned a lot. But we often work on a small piece of analysis for a couple of months. But it can take a much longer time for the internalization of the key message of that output by policymakers, by other people on the team. And we’ve spent a lot of time today talking about the Growth Lab and our country counterparts. But we’re often also engaging with external people like the IMF or the World Bank or other think tanks around the world. And I think I really value that because we don’t answer to a third party priority of a… we don’t answer to someone else’s priorities. We answer to the research and the questions that matter. And I think that has an impact on the way we’re able to focus on our work, where I might spend, like I was saying, a couple of months doing some analysis and spend a much longer time talking and socializing those results to people in the government. And before the Growth Lab, I had worked with the Ministry of Planning in Brazil for my summer internship with the MPA-ID. And that was a very different experience because when you’re in person, fully embedded in the government, that’s all you’re doing. And sometimes you forget how to do the more analytical, quantitative aspects. But this job, I think blends the two so well that I wish I knew beforehand, not in a way that would have changed anything. But it’s been a pleasant surprise that I’ve learned. 

Semiray Kasoolu The other thing, the two things that I wish I knew were that, first, you don’t need a causal inference to present something and make a difference in the way a government sees policy. So I have been I have my bias have been changed that I should not have internal barriers about the work that I do. And they don’t need to be very technical or very complex sometimes. Just having a look at their big data, having this practice around, it helps policymakers a lot because they don’t have the time. And sometimes the capacity to do that is low within these ministries. So that’s one. I don’t have any internal barriers about your work or high standards about what kind of causal inference mechanisms and things like that. The second part is related to what I said before, and I say to every new joiner, don’t have any internal barriers to reaching out to people and connecting with an external expert. You could you could use this opportunity to the fullest. And if you are more of an introvert, that person like me is the extra way to do that because everyone is very open to connect and share their learnings. 

Frank Muci I would just echo exactly what Semi just said at the end. I don’t know, a lot of people that are at Harvard and at the Growth Lab, we’re A-types, we think that we can solve problems on our own, that we just have to try hard enough. But really, that is a counterproductive impulse. There are a lot of people that know a lot of things and a lot more than you do. So it’s super important to reach out to people, ask them questions. The development economics world is a small world. So you want to meet those people and talk to those people anyways because you’re going to meet them in Washington in 10 years or whatever. So really, really, really reaching out to people is super important, asking them what they’re working on, what they’re doing, what you can learn from them. So for them to share their work, their code, their their everything, it’s super, super valuable in many different ways. So I would just I wish I had done that more in my earlier year and that tomeone had told me how important it is. 

Tim O’Brien My my reflections are very similar. I think that I wish I knew before I started that you don’t have to be an expert in a lot of things. And I wouldn’t have been so intimidated when I started at the Growth Lab. Wwhen I started, there would be an issue that comes up in in Albania and the team would say, we need somebody to to figure this out. And I would say, whoa, I have no idea how to go about that. I have no expertise in that. I’ve never no experience in that. But over the years, I’ve learned that that’s just typically how you go about solving problems. You you get the problem in front of you and then you figure out how people have understood this before. And there are probably gaps in how people have understood it before these in comparison to the context that you’re working in and you try to to make a difference in figuring it out. So that was that took me a while to learn. I wish I learned it sooner to not be afraid of the things that we encounter in our projects. And they’re all learning opportunities. And it’s more important to just know what you don’t know and and work across the great people we have at the Growth Lab to try to triangulate an approach to try to learn what you don’t know. So that was a bit of a revelation to me and I wish I knew it sooner. 

Nikita Taniparti: Katya, can kind of add one more thing here? OK. I also think irrespective of looking at the Growth Lab or whatever you do, when you leave the MPA-ID, you’ll always for the most part, be the Harvard person in the room. And being the Harvard person in the room comes with a lot of responsibility and everyone wants to hear what you have to say. And I wish I knew how that also meant that you could also say, well, why don’t you tell me what you think? And for the most part, people need someone smart and who cares to listen. And so I think your journey of learning and listening does not end after the MPA-ID, In fact, it becomes even more of a responsibility because people will look to you for answers and you have the chance to say, well, let’s ask even more questions. 

Alicia Galinsky: Great, thank you, Nikita, and thank you to all of our panelists and all of you for joining. 

Ricardo Hausmann: Well, good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are connecting to us, it’s a–it’s a pleasure and an honor to be here presenting to you the the Viz Hub. Let me tell you a little bit about–about the Growth Lab. The Growth Lab is a group we created around the year 2006. And–and we do essentially three things. The first thing we do is we do academic research, you know the kind of thing that we write for journals, for academic journals, you know peer reviewed, and all that stuff, and many ideas have come out of there, including the ideas of economic complexity, the product space, growth diagnostics, etc. The second thing we do is we like to partner with countries to figure out about their development strategies. We deploy our theoretical ideas and so on in these applied work, but we also get a lot of our insights into what to research for our academic effort from those engagements. And we’ve engaged over the course of-of these 14 years with about three dozen countries and regions and cities, because we work both at the national level, at the regional level, and att the urban level. And, in those engagements, we typically also develop tools and mechanisms to-to help countries tackle the issues that-that we’re thinking about. It’s been a tradition at the Growth Lab that whenever we do research, we try to see if we can convert that research into some kind of useful tool. So, for example, the research on the product space and economic complexity led to the creation of this Atlas of Economic Complexity. But, And the Atlas of Economic Complexity, many of you would probably know it, it’s constantly improving tool, and it’s probably the reason why-why many people know us because it has received well over a million individual users over the years. But–but that’s, that’s not the only thing we do, actually we try every time we do something to come up with some tool that might make our research more useful. And in the development of those tool, we decided, well, where do we host them? Well, we are now going to host them in the Viz Hub. Annie White is the director of our digital development and design team. And she is the one that transforms the ideas we have on our academic front and our applied front into actual digital tools. And so it is my honor and my pleasure to present to you Annie White, who is going to tell us about the marvels that she has helped create. Annie.

Annie White: Great. Thank you so much, Ricardo. And hello to everybody today. Thank you so much for joining us. As Ricardo said, my name is Annie. I’m the senior product manager at the Growth Lab. I oversee our digital development and design team on which there are four members, so we have front end development, back end development, and design. And actually, for a little bit of background, what I’m going to do is start off by telling you a little bit about our Aatlas of Economic Complexity, which Ricardo had mentioned. So the Atlas, which you should be seeing on your screen now, is our research and data visualization tool that allows people to analyze the economic dynamics of every country in the world and the growth opportunities that exist for these countries. And there’s actually three main entry points into the Atlas, and I’m going to quickly show you each one of them. 

Annie White: So the first is this explore section. And here, one of the easiest ways to engage with the Exploree section is to start by choosing your country. So today I’ll go to the drop–country drop down menu, and I will choose Indonesia. And right off the bat, you can start to see the breakdown of Indonesia’s exports all throughout this treemap. So each colored segment refers to a sector. I can also see Indonesia’s imports as well. And I’m looking at 2018 on the timeline. But you can even explore these trade flows over time to start to get a sense of the dynamics of a country’s economy, so not just what’s happening in a given year, but what’s happening over the decades. One of the newest visualizations that we added to the Atlas is this global share visualization. And here, you can see that the share of the world market for Indonesia’s exports for each one of these 10 sectors, so you can see here that in recent years, agriculture, the yellow line, really leads the way. 

Annie White: Ricardo mentioned the product space as being core to our research agenda. So what we try to do here in the Atlas is we take these exports that we saw on the tree map and we actually put them into a product space where we visualize the relatedness to each other. So here, we’re seeing Indonesia in a product space. And this relatedness refers to the– the products that require similar know how to produce. So for Indonesia, you’re seeing a lot of green circles lit up over here on the right hand side. That’s the textile sector. And you can see that they’re closely connected because the textiles–the textiles industry shares a lot of the same knowhow. And by visualizing this, what we can actually start to do is help to define paths to diversify a country’s economy based on the connectedness of its knowhow. Finally, in the feasibility opportunities graph, we do something a little bit differently here. So what we’re showing here is not the products that a country currently exports, but what it could export, what represents an opportunity for diversification in the future. And just like the past visualizations, each little circle here represents a different product. So this is an extremely fast overview of the explore section. But hopefully what you can see is it kind of has this choose-your-own-adventure feel to it. It covers every country in the world and over 6000 different products and services across multiple decades as well. 

Annie White: But we know that it can actually be useful to understand a country’s economy within a more structured framework. And so last year, we launched our country profiles, and country profiles are more of an interactive story of a particular country from our perspective. So here you see Columbia. And this is sort of the beginning introduction page of this country, and this country profile takes a much more narrative approach to a country’s growth story across four main sections: its economic structure, its market dynamics, its strategy space, and its growth opportunities. So as you start exploring a country profile, you’ll see that just like the explore section, it’s very visual. And it takes you through much more of a beginning, middle, end of a country story. And all along the way, as you see the visuals, we’ve embedded all kinds of little teachable tools throughout that follow you along for guidance. The last section I’ll show you really quickly is our country rankings. So each year at the Growth Lab, we release our economic complexity index rankings. And this is where we assess the current state of a country’s productive knowledge and rank these countries accordingly. So this year, earlier in the winter, we overhauled this page and introduced brand new visualizations to help understand this ranking a little bit more clearly. So I can come here and kind of this rainbow visualization and see as I hover over, the change in a country’s economic complexity index over time. And I can come in here and actually choose a country that I’m interested in and it’ll highlight for me. So that’s a particularly amazing change to see for Vietnam. And it really comes through in the visualization. I can come down here and use our ranking comparison tool. So this is where we take the ECI ranking of a country, we plot it over time, but we can also choose different countries that we’re interested in comparing against each other and select the timelines as well. And then finally, we take all of this information. a country’s rank, it’s ECI, and the change in that ECI was over five or 10 years, and we plot it all in a table that you can sort. OK, so that–those are sort of the three main entry points into the Atlas and over the past few years we’ve worked a lot on the Atlas. But as Ricardo said, we’ve actually built a lot of other tools, many of them becoming more refined and even more focused on a particular topic or country. So we wanted to make sure that this summer when we were building the Viz Hub, the main objective was to start bringing all of those tools together in one place. But actually, even more than that, we wanted to start linking them across various dimensions so that they’re discoverable according to whatever might interest you. 

Annie White: So I’m going to show you exactly what I mean by that. When you get to Viz Hub, it’s at “growthlab.app.” This is, of course, the landing page you’ll get to. And just by simply scrolling down, you’re presented with this classic grid layout. And this, by one simple scroll, you’ll see just about every single visualization tool that the Growth Lab has created. We keep all of our updated and new tools at the very top. So, of course, the Atlas is here, our country dashboards, and our country profiles. As you can see here, when you mouse over each one of these project cards, you get to the tool with a little bit more information. And of course, you can click through and get to the tool itself. So everything here takes you right out to the tool so that you can use it. One of the coolest features we wanted to build in the this hub is this augmented search, and you can find it here over on the left hand side. And this is where we decided to organize our tools across various themes. So categories, different keywords, the data sources that they’re using, and even the status of the project is in. And so you might come to their base and say, hey, it really is these Atlas tools at the Growth Lab that I’m most interested in. And so you can click on Atlas projects and what you get below are the filtered results of Atlas tools. So of course, here’s the Atlas of Economic Complexity, uur country profiles, our rankings, and actually what’s also here is one of our subnational atlases. So you can click through to here. And what you will find is our Atlas of Economic Complexity for the country of Columbia. So I showed you in the Atlas how the Atlas actually covers two hundred and fifty different countries at the national level. But we’ve also leveraged national and municipal data to build subnational atlases. So this is where we take a really deep dive and examine the economic activity of one particular country all the way down to the municipal level. And so that, of course, is an Atlas project. And you can find it on the Viz Hub. What we know and what we have found to be more and more common across our reach–research is that people often engage with our research with one particular country in mind. And so when we were organizing all of our projects, we made sure that if we have a project specific tool, it got its own keyword. In our work,Albania has some of our newest Viz Hub projects. And so you can, of course, come down to keywords you could click on Albania. And below are some of our projects that we’ve been working on for the country of Albania, and they take different formats. So I’m going to pass it over to my colleague, Tim O’Brien. And he’s actually going to show you some of the newest tools in the Viz Hub. 

Tim O’Brien: Thanks a lot, Annie. So I’m happy to be here to share some of the types of projects that you’ll find in the Viz Hub using Albania as an example. As Annie stated, Albania is one of our oldest country projects, about seven years old. So it’s given us an opportunity to innovate the way that we share some of our research findings. So as Annie showed, if you come to search for Albania and you scroll down, you’ll see some of the tools on the Viz Hub that are general across countries. And then you’ll see some that are particular to Albania. For instance, here is Albania’s industry targeting dashboard. I’ll come back to that one. And down here is what we call a visual story. How to accelerate economic growth in Albania. So let me take you through this one first. This visual story is kind of a new thing that we’re trying, and we’ll hopefully do it with more country projects in the future. It’s an attempt to distill a lot of research that we do in the country along growth diagnostics, economic complexity, other areas, into a kind of output that’s easier to digest than our normal 50-100 page reports and presentations. That is something that can connect with, we hope, policymakers as well as the public, in this case inside Albania and outside of Albania. So let me just scroll through a little bit and show you what these types of online stories will contain. So as I scroll down, you’ll see that some of the graphs kind of reveal themselves. As you scroll, this was a really cool thing that we were able to do by working together with Annie’s digital development and design team to really make these graphs show as much information as possible. So they’re also interactive and that you can hover over data points and see in more detail what you would see in a typical static graph. As you scroll, you’ll learn about Albania’s growth history, current challenges, in visualizations that I hope really tell a compelling story, again where you can hover and reveal things that you wouldn’t be able to reveal if this was a static report. So these visual stories have given us an opportunity to really be more creative in the way that we share information through both what’s written and what’s in the graphs. So I hope you get a chance to-to read through. There are a few visualizations that gives us an opportunity to really think outside the box. This is one in particular that I particularly like that uses FDI markets data to compare sectors in which Albania is receiving foreign direct investment. The scale of that foreign direct investment versus several other somewhat similar countries. And this graph, if you read the article, actually, contains a lot of what we think is an important strategy for Albania moving forward in the context of COVID-19 and after COVID-19 to accelerate its economic transformation. I’ll just continue to scroll through so you can see some of the features that you’ll find in the tool, or in the stories, sorry. Again, the ability to highlight individual data points and really see a lot from these graphs. 

Tim O’Brien: At the end of this story, I’ll actually click over to one of the other tools that you’ll find on the Viz Hub. And we call this the Albania industry targeting dashboard. And for reasons that we discussed in that story, we think that Albania has an opportunity to be much more targeted, strategic, proactive in the way it attracts investment to the country, to take advantage of its comparative advantages and attract companies that will drive its economy forward. So this was an undertaking that we did together again with the design and development team, as our Albania country team, also leveraging tools that Growth Lab has put together for other country projects as well. And the way that this is set up is somewhat like the Atlas in that it’s organized around parts of the economy. But in this case, it’s organized around industries, which has the important benefit that we can look in detail at services. So, for instance, I can go here and look at motion picture, video, and television program activities. And this particular tool assesses this industry in Albania along two dimensions: viability, in other words, how likely is it for this industry to thrive in Albania, and attractiveness, which looks at how attractive this industry would be if it was to expand in Albania and the rest of the tool, it breaks down how these measurements are made. This particular industry is in a good location for proactive investment promotion because it’s both viable and attractive. Something over here, for instance, like manufacture of motor vehicles, and I can click that and it will update the tool, is attractive for some reasons, but not highly viable. And I can also search in this tool if I have something in mind. For instance, plastic. You can click on manufacture of plastic products. So let me show you a little bit more about what this tool contains. Plastic products appears as highly strategic and highly attractive. And as you scroll down, it kind of reveals why. Five viability factors. Two of them are typical complexity indicators that you’ll see a lot in our Atlas of Economic Complexity but kind of recreated to apply to industries. And there’s another dimension of high FDI to peer countries suggesting that other countries that are similar to Albania are attracting this investment. So maybe it will work in Albania, too. And then there are two variables here that connect with our growth diagnostic in Albania. Industries that use a lot of electricity we think are strategic in Albania because it has low electricity costs that will get lower over time, and industries that don’t require a lot of contracting and use of the courts to resolve contracts are a good bet for Albania right now because it’s going through a judicial reform. So for any industry that you pick, it’ll show you the scores for each of these; all of these graphs can be downloaded. Same principle for attractiveness in this case, it uses high wages, high youth employment, high global FDI flows, and high export propensity. All these things are things that are strategic for Albania, and they all come from different data sets that we’ve kind of combined on the back end together with Annie’s team. This tool also has the ability for a user to explore at the company level who you might target as a potential investor in Albania. So the tool is really meant for the use of the Albanian government or other non-government actors that are trying to support investment promotion in Albania. But it’s open to everyone, of course, on the Viz Hub. So the the the tool will show you the flow of investment in this industry over time. It will allow you to see who the biggest players are in different areas, including in the Balkans here. And for users who have a subscription to FDI markets, we’ve actually set this up so that it’s password protected. And if you have that access that you can access more information about where those companies actually have their headquarters. And this is important to Albania because Albania has a network of in economic diplomacy through embassies and ambassadors abroad where they could use this tool to say in Belgium. What are the companies that manufacture plastics that are headquartered there, even to the level of what’s in Brussels? And finally, the tool uses Albanian labor force survey data to look at the industry’s current status in the country, for instance, where jobs are currently located, the education distribution of jobs, occupation distribution. Wages and how they compare to country wages overall. And then finally, it allows you to see what are what other industries are nearby in the complexity sense, for instance, manufacturing of paints, varnishes and similar. And then you might come up to the top and explore one of those related industries. In this case, it’s highly attractive but on the border between viable and less viable. And of course, it’ll show you why. So we really enjoy building tools like this that take our diagnostic finding and actually empower the government in an important way to take steps to resolve a constraint that we think is is constraining faster, more inclusive or more sustainable growth. And you’ll see other instances like this on the Viz Hub and hopefully they’re easy to find now. And we’re really excited to hear everybody’s feedback. So let me welcome Ricardo back for some more comments before we go to questions. 

Ricardo Hausmann: Well, I think those were two excellent presentations, sir. Thanks, Annie and Tim. And, you know, I think I’m eager to hear the questions and the comments from from the audience. Thank you. Thank you very much. 

Chuck McKenney: While we take some more questions, I want to ask Annie if she could maybe elaborate a bit on the process behind putting, putting one of these tools together. Maybe something like the country profiles. You want to share some of that? 

Annie White: Yeah. Our process, if there’s a word to describe our process, it’s extremely collaborative. So it always starts with a research and discovery phase. And one of the advantages of having in-house software development at the Growth Lab is that we can be really, really close to the research agenda from the beginning. So we try to take advantage of that position and learn as much as we can about the research agenda that will inform a tool who it will be for. And then, of course, whether we have the technology and what technology we will use to build it. So that’s that can be a multi-month process. Sometimes it’s just a week, but that always leads the way. And then typically happening in tandem is we begin a data exploration process. So this is where we’re wrangling with which data sets will we use? Do they need to be cleaned? How will we render them for a data visualization tool? At the same time, with that combination of data and research, we often go through a process of designing a wireframe. So for those of you who don’t know, a wireframe is like a sketch of what you intend to build before you even commit a line of code. And it’s really a way to start getting all the ideas onto paper in a really refined way. And so we begin that design process. We, we combine that with data exploration. We set up a data, usually databases and ingestion pipelines. And only once all of that is sort of locked and loaded do we begin the coding process. And through every such step of the way, research and development, wireframing and design, data development, software and front end development, we do a lot of engagement with stakeholders and users. So we show our work as often as possible to get feedback, to check our assumptions and to get even better ideas than what we’re proposing. And so we work with our researchers at the Growth Lab. We work with policymakers to test our work. And then, of course, we end with a wonderful launch event just like this. 

Chuck McKenney: Thanks, Annie. Ricardo, we have a question from Mossa wondering if there have been any assessments of how successfully some of our growth strategies have been implemented. 

Ricardo Hausmann: That is always a complicated assessment, because, you know, when things turn out well, it’s hard to take credit because you don’t know the counterfactual of what would have happened had we not been there. But…And we’re extremely proud of the turnaround in the economic situation of Albania post-2013, where I think we really entered into a crisis situation and really nicely turned, you know, participated in the turnaround. I think that in other countries, you can see our impact, by the way the change in government strategy and the change in-in the international perception of that government’s strategies. So I think we are very proud of our current engagement in Jordan. In other countries, you know, we got engaged for significant chunk of time. And, and the government politically went in a different direction. And years later, they are sort of like back. And our ideas have been, in some sense, influential in the way people are conceiving the future. 

Ricardo Hausmann: I saw in the chat one, one question about Cape Verde. And I wanted to to answer that question by, if you allow me to share my screen. Thank you. So I hope you’re seeing my, my screen here. This is Cape Verde. So Cape Verde is in the Atlas. I chose Cape Verde by just writing Cabo Verde or CPV. And it tells me that its exports are mostly services. And if if I do it at the six-digit level or maybe at the four-digit level so it’s not  taking me that long. It’s mostly travel and tourism and some transportation and so on. And there are some prepared fish and other stuff here. If I want to know what have been the dynamics, it tells me that this tourism sector had been growing a lot until 2018. So I’m going to guess that probably it’s going to be highly impacted by, by COVID-19 because of the essential stop it has generated in an international travel. I can look at the imports and it tells me that you know probably something must have happened because imports peaked around 2011. And so this decline in imports is probably worrisome. It’s not as dynamic as the economy was until 2008. I can ask about partners. Let me go back here, say, who do you trade with. So apparently, you know, the colonial links are still there. Thirty eight percent of your trade on the import side is is with Portugal. On the export side, it’s with Spain and Portugal, too. I can ask the question of who do you export fish to? And it says that most of your fish are going to Spain. Okay? So, so. Well, I can look at you in the in the product space, see–see where you are on the product space. And I see that there are very few things in the product space. I have, you know, prepared fish there, frozen fish, and spirits and you know, artificial filaments. And so you see, you see a little bit of, you know, what-what the productive structure is over there. So store actually Cape Verde and 250-so other countries are in the Atlas. And it’s, it’s available for for you to explore at any time. 

Ricardo Hausmann: I think Mossa also had a question about the post-conflict states. Well, Mossa, I believe, comes from Afghanistan. And we’re trying to, we are in the process of negotiating a project in Afghanistan, that–that’s going to be one post-conflict state. We also had a previous engagement in Liberia, and I don’t know what to call our project in Venezuela. But the Venezuela is worse than a conflict states. It’s a, it’s a failed state. It has, though the worst economic catastrophe, probably the third largest economic catastrophe in the world since 1960. Only, only in terms of declines in GDP per capita peak to trough, it’s a bigger than everything except for Liberia and Tajikistan. So, just to give you a little bit on on our previous experiences with complicated places. 

Chuck McKenney: We have a couple of questions on data. How do we acquire it, especially in developing countries? Maybe we can talk about that process and… and quality control? What we do for quality control?

Ricardo Hausmann: Well, so there are different data sets in different tools. The Atlas is powered by the U.N. data on trade. It’s called the Comtrade Data Set. But we developed a mechanism to-to clean the data, which was done by Sebastian Bustos and Muhammed Yildirim. So we call it the Bustos-Yildirim method. And it’s based on the idea that every transaction gets reported twice, once by the importing country and once by the exporting country. And they developed an algorithm that decides who’s more trustworthy of the two, of the two reporters. And we use that to clean the data and so on. So. But every every data set has different, like cleaning challenges. When we work with these National Atlases, we usually use some dataset that the government provides. In the case of Colombia, they provided  like an employee of–an administrative employee dataset so that we know how many people are employed in each industry and where and how much they earn. And in the Albania project we we used our labor force survey. We also buy the Dun and Bradstreet data set of firms. And we buy the FDI markets data set from the Financial Times. And in one of our recent projects that was recently published in Nature Human Behavior, a paper by Michele Coscia and Franke Neffke, Frank Neffke is our director of academic research, and myself, we published a paper, Nature Human Behavior this past August, last month, and it was on business travel. And that was data that was provided to us by MasterCard and so. So, they gave us data on on the use of business cards in international travel. And it allowed us to do a research to show that business travel does drive future increases in productivity and in exports in the products that the country of origin is good at. So, you know, if you get a lot of Italians, you get better at pizza. So. So that’s that’s another example of another data set. But I’m sure that maybe the Annie or Tim know about other data sets that I didn’t mention. 

Tim O’Brien: No there is just a wide range, especially for individual country projects like Albania. And that dashboard. It pulls from lots of country specific data, set surveys, administrative data. We also like to use all the creative sources of information we can gather. So now things like mobility trends to study the impacts of coronavirus. And we’re kind of were data nerds. So if we can get our hands on it, we’ll try to learn from it. 

Chuck McKenney: We have a question from Will. How have private sector companies worked with governments to act on this information? And how do you think it will evolve moving forward? Ricardo? 

Ricardo Hausmann: I mean it. I don’t know if Annie knows the analytics of, of the Atlas. You know, now we’re in over a million individual users, so I can imagine that people can use this for many, many reasons. We see graphs that are powered by our Atlas in many, many documents by many entities. So I don’t know exactly how the private sector might be using it. But we know a little bit about how how the government has been using it, because, see, in the context of Albania, we trained the ambassadors in economic diplomacy and we trained the investment promotion agency to work with the ambassadors in the process of attracting investment. So they get the list of which companies to target from-from this tool and they track them with a separate tool to know, you, did you talk to them? Did they answer the phone? Did they come back? Did they visit the country, etc, etc.? So so,we know that it is being used as, as an active tool in the process of of investment promotion. Annie, can you shed some light on what do we know about our users? 

Annie White: Yeah, you’re exactly right. So Ricardo is right to say, we surppased the one million user mark on the Atlas, which is really exciting. We did that last year. In terms of who our users are, I actually think there’s a question here from Juan Pablo who asks, what’s the profile of people and institutions that consult the hub? Well, it’s probably a bit too early to know that we just put out the hub last week live. So we’re excited to see who starts coming to the site itself. But if we’re talking about the Atlas, our core group of users are policymakers, academics, more and more journalists. So I think what journalists really like are data visualizations that do a lot of the explaining for them. And so we see our data visualizations used in mainstream media outlets like the Financial Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, all the time. We see our work from the Atlas used by the World Bank, the IMF, the IDB as well, oftentimes generating larger analytical reports. On your question about the private sector. Actually, just this morning, the rankings tool that I showed you on the Atlas was used in a news piece on economic growth in Australia, urging entrepreneurs in Australia to use the Atlas to identify new opportunities for investment and-and new areas for growth. So I think when we talk about the private sector, it’s exactly what Ricardo said. It’s people trying to identify what’s next for my country. 

Chuck McKenney: We have one final question. So if anybody has any others, now would be the time to ask them, it’s just related to how can we use data for analyzing crises, say the post COVID-19 phase of performances? Is there any way to see the impact forecast, et cetera? 

Well. We are. I mean, the Growth Lab created a task force to help the countries think through their strategy, vis-a-vis COVID, especially their economic policy strategy. And so we’ve gained a lot of experience in how to analyze some of the issues. But I think it’s been too soon to develop a tool for it So we’re deeply engaged in COVID strategizing. But I don’t think we have a tool for public use yet. 

Chuck McKenney: I want to thank all of our speakers. I want to thank all of the attendees and just “growthlab.app” is the is the URL for the Viz Hub. You’ll find all of our latest research, news, profiles on faculty, fellows, on “growthlab.cid.harvard.edu.” And we’re very active on social media, especially Twitter. This is, this is our handle, “@HarvardGrwthLab,” without the “O.” Thank you. 

Ricardo Hausmann: Thank you all. 

Annie White: Thanks, everyone.