Un Giro Económico para Bolivia: Oportunidades y Desafíos en Agricultura

El sector agropecuario de Bolivia ha crecido más rápidamente en las últimas dos décadas que en cualquier otro período desde 1960, pero ese crecimiento ha estado impulsado por la expansión de la superficie cultivada más que por mejoras en la productividad. El régimen de políticas públicas ha restringido las exportaciones y ha desaprovechado un gran potencial. Los rendimientos de cultivos clave continúan por debajo de los de otros países pares en la región, y la expansión sostenida de la superficie cultivada implica riesgos tanto de costos ambientales como de una menor inserción en mercados internacionales, ya que éstos penalizan más los productos vinculados a la deforestación. A través de análisis comparativo, casos de estudios sobre los principales cultivos de Bolivia, y lecciones sobre la diversificación agrícola del Perú, este análisis identifica un conjunto recurrente de restricciones. Entre ellas, las limitaciones al uso de semillas transgénicas, la debilidad de la investigación y desarrollo y de los servicios de extensión, las brechas fitosanitarias y logísticas, y la falta de riego con orientación comercial. Dado que estas restricciones interactúan de manera distinta según la diversa geografía agrícola de Bolivia, proponemos poner en marcha una Estrategia Nacional para el Potencial Agropecuario que permita a cada una de las distintas regiones agrícolas del país alcanzar su frontera productiva. La diversificación de las exportaciones surgiría como un resultado natural en la medida en que más regiones de Bolivia logren desarrollar su potencial, generando divisas adicionales que son necesarias para aliviar la crisis macroeconómica que actualmente atraviesa el país.

Bolivia’s Economic Pivot: Agricultural Potential and Challenges

Bolivia’s agricultural sector has grown faster over the past two decades than in any period since 1960, but this growth has been driven by the expansion of cultivated area rather than by improvements in productivity, while the prevailing policy regime has restricted exports and left significant potential unrealized. Yields for key crops continue to underperform regional peers, and continued expansion of the agricultural frontier risks both environmental costs and reduced access to international markets that increasingly penalize deforestation-linked products. Drawing on cross-country comparisons, case studies of Bolivia’s major crops, and lessons from Peruvian agricultural diversification, this analysis identifies a recurring set of production- and market-side constraints, including restrictions on transgenic seeds, weak R&D and extension services, phytosanitary and logistics gaps, and the lack of commercially-oriented irrigation. Because these constraints interact differently across Bolivia’s diverse agricultural geography, we propose launching a National Strategy for Agricultural Potential to enable each of Bolivia’s distinct agricultural regions to reach its productive frontier. Export diversification would emerge as a natural outcome as more of Bolivia’s regions realize their potential, generating the additional foreign exchange needed to ease the country’s ongoing macroeconomic crisis.

Un Giro Económico para Bolivia: Un Diagnóstico de Crecimiento del Sector Turístico

El turismo representa una oportunidad estratégica para que Bolivia genere divisas y promueva un crecimiento más inclusivo. Este informe busca dimensionar esa oportunidad, identificar sus restricciones más vinculantes y proponer soluciones a ellas. Utilizando un modelo de gravedad del turismo internacional, encontramos que Bolivia tiene una brecha de más de 370 millones de dólares frente a su potencial. Nuestro diagnóstico identifica dos restricciones principales. A nivel nacional, la escasa conectividad aérea internacional limita el acceso de Bolivia a mercados clave. Recomendamos un paquete de reformas para mejorar la competitividad del sector aeronáutico y ampliar el acceso aéreo. A nivel local, las fallas de coordinación y los problemas de gobernanza dificultan la consolidación de ecosistemas turísticos, particularmente evidenciado en el circuito del Salar de Uyuni. Proponemos una nueva arquitectura de gobernanza a nivel de destino para facilitar la coordinación, alinear incentivos y generar mayores beneficios para las comunidades locales.

Bolivia’s Economic Pivot: A Growth Diagnostics of the Tourism Sector

Tourism represents a strategic opportunity for Bolivia to generate foreign exchange and support more inclusive growth. This report aims to quantify the opportunity, identify binding constraints and propose solutions. Using a gravity model of international tourism, we find that Bolivia performs significantly below its potential with an unrealized gap of more than USD 370 million. Applying Growth Diagnostics heuristics, we identify two constraints and suggest policy responses. At the national level, weak international air connectivity limits Bolivia’s access from key source markets. Accordingly, the report recommends a package of reforms to improve aviation competitiveness and air access. At the local level, coordination failures and governance issues hinder the emergence of strong tourism ecosystems, particularly in the Salar de Uyuni circuit. We propose a new destination-level governance architecture to facilitate coordination, align incentives, and deliver stronger benefits for local communities.

The Cube: A Lawful, Incremental Framework for Using Public Procurement to Pull Innovation 

Governments already spend large sums to promote innovation through grants, tax credits, loans, equity instruments, incubators, prizes, and advisory programs. Yet public procurement is vastly larger than conventional innovation-policy budgets. In OECD economies, procurement is roughly 13 percent of GDP, while direct support and tax relief for business R&D together are only a fraction of one percent of GDP. This asymmetry matters. Even a very small innovation-oriented tilt in procurement can represent a material increase in the effective scale of innovation policy. 

Yet procurement systems are rarely used this way. Most public procurement organizations are designed to secure timely delivery, preserve integrity, ensure equal treatment of suppliers, and obtain value for money. They are not designed to explore technological uncertainty, nurture early markets, or orchestrate experimentation with new solutions. Procurement officers are typically judged on compliance, continuity of service, and avoidance of visible failure. Under those incentives, the safe equilibrium is predictable: detailed specifications, strong threshold requirements, large established suppliers, price-dominant competitions, and risk transfer to vendors wherever possible. 

This report argues that governments do not need to choose between lawful procurement and innovation policy. They can make procurement more innovation-friendly without abandoning core procurement principles. The relevant question is not whether procurement law should be suspended in the name of innovation. The relevant question is how familiar and lawful procurement tools can be reframed so that public buyers learn about technological possibilities, reduce uncertainty, validate solutions, and scale what works. 

This is the purpose of The Cube. 

Mapping Economic Opportunities in Global Clean Energy Supply Chains 

The energy transition offers countries that can manufacture clean energy technologies substantial opportunities for sustainable economic growth. This paper provides a framework for context-aware industrial policy by applying economic complexity theory to a newly constructed dataset of twelve key clean energy supply chains (CESCs). We find that CESCs are diverse but highly interdependent; they are also growing faster and are more concentrated than other industries. CESCs exhibit substantial entry, exit and competitive churn, and countries are more likely to enter CESC industries that are related to their existing productive capabilities. We also explore changing global competitiveness and country positioning in these industries, and draw out implications of these patterns for industrial policymakers.

Inventing modern invention: The professionalization of technological progress in the US

Over the course of the mid-19th and early 20th century, the US transformed from an agricultural economy to the frontier in technology. To study this transition, we digitize half a million pages of patent yearbooks that describe inventors, organizations and technologies on over 1.6M patents. We combine this with demographic information from US census records and information on corporate research from large-scale repeated surveys of industrial research labs. Our data reveal that in the early 1920s a new system of innovation — based on teamwork and engineers — started to rapidly replace the existing craftsmanship-based invention that had dominated innovation in the 19th century. We argue that this new system relied on an organizational innovation: industrial research labs. These labs supported high-skill teamwork, replacing the collaborations within families with professional ties in firms and industrial research labs. The systemic shift in innovation had far-reaching consequences: it changed the division of labor in invention, led to an explosion of novelty and teamwork, and reshaped the geography of innovation in the US.

For a deeper dive into the research and visuals, explore this analysis by the Complexity Science Hub.

Tackling Discrepancies in Trade Data: The Harvard Growth Lab International Trade Datasets

Bilateral trade data informs foreign and domestic policy decisions, serves as a growth indicator, determines tariffs, and is the basis for financial and investment decisions for corporations. Accurate trade data translates into better decision-making. However, the raw bilateral trade data reported by UN Comtrade suffer from two structural problems: reporting differences between country partners and countries reporting in different product classification systems, which require product-level harmonization to compare data across countries. In this paper, we address these challenges by combining a mirroring technique and a data-driven concordance method. Mirroring reconciles importer and exporter differences by imputing country reliability scores and applying a weighted country-pair average to calculate the estimated trade value. We harmonize product classifications across vintages by calculating conversion weights that reflect a product’s market share. The resulting publicly available datasets mitigate issues in raw trade statistics, reducing reporting inconsistencies while maintaining product-level granularity across six decades.

Catalysing Economic Growth Through Powershoring

In a trend called powershoring, energy-intensive industry will locate closer to renewable energy sources, driven by cheap renewable energy (which is difficult to transport), and the need to decarbonise. Regions’ renewable energy resources and industrial capabilities shape the types of energy-intensive industries they can attract: some regions are best placed to produce very energy-intensive commodities (like green steel and green ammonia), while other regions are best positioned to host more complex industries that still require good clean energy supplies (like battery manufacturing or datacentres). Similarly, some powershoring industries have many spillovers and open up new pathways for regional economic growth, while other energy-intensive industries have fewer spillovers or open up fewer development pathways. This contribution explores these trends to help policymakers develop contextually aware powershoring strategies that can catalyse their best opportunities for economic development.

Tackling Discrepancies in Trade Data: The Harvard Growth Lab International Trade Datasets

Bilateral trade data informs foreign and domestic policy decisions, serves as a growth indicator, determines tariffs, and is the basis for financial and investment decisions for corporations. Accurate trade data translates into better decision-making. However, the raw bilateral trade data reported by UN Comtrade suffer from two structural problems: reporting differences between country partners and countries reporting in different product classification systems, which require product-level harmonization to compare data across countries. In this paper, we address these challenges by combining a mirroring technique and a data-driven concordance method. Mirroring reconciles importer and exporter differences by imputing country reliability scores and applying a weighted country-pair average to calculate the estimated trade value. We harmonize product classifications across vintages by calculating conversion weights that reflect a product’s market share. The resulting publicly available datasets mitigate issues in raw trade statistics, reducing reporting inconsistencies while maintaining product-level granularity across six decades.