By Ricardo Hausmann (originally published in GrowthPolicy)
Financial crises are a bit like airplane crashes. Airplanes, and banks, operate well most of the time. But every so often they crash with very bad consequences and our strategy is to do a forensic study of the last crash, see what we learn, and incorporate that learning into the system so that we might prevent the recurrence of the same kind of crash. In aviation, that has made air travel incredibly safe, to the point that, right now, the Civil Aviation Board does not only analyze crashes but they also analyze “near misses” because there are so few crashes that it’s very hard to keep on learning. So near misses are a way to reduce the likelihood of bad things happening that have not really happened.... Read more about How Should We Prevent the Next Financial Crisis?
By Ricardo Hausmann (originally published in GrowthPolicy)
Inequality is the result of many different phenomena. Some of them should be a source of policy concern while others should not. My main problem is the inequality that arises from differences in productivity—namely, differences in productivity across regions, across cities, within cities and across social groups. We know that there are huge differences in income across countries of the world: the richest countries are 200 to 300 times richer than the poorest countries in per capita terms. That’s inequality at the global scale.... Read more about What Should We Do About Inequality?
CAMBRIDGE – Should a country’s development strategy pay special attention to exports? After all, exports have nothing to do with satisfying their people’s basic needs, such as education, health care, housing, power, water, telecoms, security, the rule of law, and recreation. So why give precedence to satisfying the needs of distant foreign consumers?
Earlier this year I conducted two interviews with the Albanian TV station, Vizion Plus. In the first interview, I give an overview of the type of work that CID is doing in Albania and discuss some of the economic challenges and potentials in Albania:
La Alianza para el Gobierno Abierto, de la que México es miembro fundador, es una iniciativa multilateral que tiene como objetivo hacer a los gobiernos más transparentes, eficientes, que tengan una mejor rendición de cuentas e incentiven la participación ciudadana.
La semana pasada tuvo lugar en nuestro país la Cumbre Global de la Alianza para el Gobierno Abierto (AGA) México 2015, como espacio de diálogo entre sociedad civil y gobierno donde...
Cambridge, MA – Data visualization researchers at Harvard’s Center for International Development (CID) have unveiled The Globe of Economic Complexity – an interactive tool which colorfully captures $15 trillion in world trade data in cutting-edge 3D visualizations.
Powered by the UN’s international trade data, the Globe uses “confetti” or dot-based representation to generate dynamic maps, stacked graphs and network diagrams. The Globe is a spin-off of...
Inclusion Hub spoke with Dr. Ricardo Hausmann, director of Harvard's Center for International Development, about how those who are excluded must be included in the inclusive growth process through interventions to increase their productivity
Inclusion Hub spoke with Eduardo Lora, senior fellow at the Center for International Development at Harvard University, about the role of government in advancing innovation
After the U.N. Sustainable Development Summit, it is clear that government and the private sector both have key roles to play in creating inclusive growth, but according to Eduardo Lora, senior fellow in the Growth Lab at the Harvard University Center for International Development (CID), these roles are more closely connected than is often realized.
Cambridge, Massachusetts – Harvard's Center for International Development (CID), the MasterCard Center on Inclusive Growth, and the World Economic Forum's Meta-Council on Inclusive Growth are hosting the 1st Symposium on Inclusive Growth and Development on October 1-2, 2015 at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS). The Symposium is part of a collaboration to find sustainable and...
CAMBRIDGE – Capitalism gets blamed for many things nowadays: poverty, inequality, unemployment, even global warming. As Pope Francis said in a recent speech in Bolivia: “This system is by now intolerable: farm workers find it intolerable, laborers find it intolerable, communities find it intolerable, peoples find it intolerable. The earth itself – our sister, Mother Earth, as Saint Francis would say – also finds it intolerable.”
But are the problems that upset Francis the consequence of what he called “unbridled capitalism”? Or...
