On today's Growth Lab podcast, Harvard Kennedy School student Alexandra Gonzalez interviews Miguel Angel Santos, Adjunct Professor in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Director of Applied Research at Harvard's Growth Lab. Miguel discusses the Growth Lab's research initiative in Panama aimed at exploring export...
Starting in November 2015, The Growth Lab was engaged in economic policy research with the Government of Sri Lanka. Led by Professor Ricardo Hausmann, the team focused on a single question: what is holding back investment in Sri Lanka – especially in new and non-traditional export-oriented sectors – and what can the government do about it? In this Growth Lab podcast, members of the Sri Lanka team share their learnings from the project and how they partnered with key counterparts in the government and civil society to support potential solutions, and better understand the deeper...
Between 1999 and 2009, Jordan experienced a huge growth acceleration, tripling its exports and increasing income per capita by 38%. Since then, its economy has been thrown off balance, impacted by a number of external shocks that include the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, and the Syrian Civil War. For the past year, The Growth Lab has been working in the country with the goal of understanding what is hindering income growth per capita and drafting a roadmap to help Jordan get back on a sustainable growth track. On today's Growth Lab podcast, Director of Applied Research,...
Since 2013, the Center for International Development has been collaborating with the Government of Albania to identify binding constraints to economic growth and create policy solutions to solve them. CID’s Growth Lab and Building State Capability programs have used the tools of growth diagnostics and problem driven iterative adaptation (PDIA) to help drive economic growth in the country. CID Researchers Ermal Frasheri and Tim McNaught have seen firsthand how theory informs public policy and how insights from public policymaking, in turn, enrich our theoretical frameworks. In this Growth Lab... Read more about Public Policy in Action: What Did Working in Albania Teach Us about Economic Growth?
In this Growth Lab podcast, we are joined by Miguel Angel Santos, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Director of Applied Research at the Growth Lab, as well as Tim O’Brien, Senior Manager of Applied Research at the Growth Lab. Miguel...
With COVID-19 forcing widespread adoption of virtual communication for much of the world, some wonder if these remote business practices will become the norm. Before the pandemic, international business travel was a $1.5 trillion annual expense – an expense that’s increasing about 7% a year. Why are corporations willing to absorb this cost when technologies such as Skype, FaceTime, Zoom, WebEx, etc., have been widely available for the better part of a decade?
In 2019, Dr. Annette Idler wrote Borderland Battles: Violence, Crime, and Governance at the Edges of Colombia’s War (Oxford University Press, 2019). Based on her extensive research on this issue, her book reveals why the Colombian-Venezuelan borderlands are enabling crucial, but largely unacknowledged interactions between Venezuela’s devastating crisis and ongoing political...
In today’s world, most workers are highly specialized, but this specialization can come at a cost – especially for those on the wrong team. New research by Growth Lab Research Director Frank Neffke assesses the importance of the skills of coworkers. Finding coworkers who complement and not substitute one’s skills can significantly impact earning potential. The impact is equal to having a college degree. Coworker complementarity also drives careers...
Women in Jordan are excluded from labor market opportunities at among the highest rates in the world. Previous efforts to explain this outcome have focused on specific, isolated aspects of the problem and have not exploited available datasets to test across causal explanations. In this podcast, Emma Cameron, student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, interviews Growth Lab Research Fellow Semiray Kasoolu. Semiray discusses Growth Lab...
The creators of the Atlas of Economic Complexity - Harvard Growth Lab’s free online tool that translates economic growth research into policy actions to expand global prosperity - are proud to introduce: Country Profiles, a first-of-its-kind platform that revolutionizes how to think about economic strategy, policy, and investment opportunities for over 130 countries. Country Profiles invite users to take an interactive, step-by-step journey to analyze a country’s economic dynamics and future...
Across the world, the public sector pays higher average wages than the private sector for similar employees. Using data from Albania and Sri Lanka, the Growth Lab’s Ricardo Hausmann, Ljubica Nedelkoska, and...
