Research
The Growth Lab hosts an interdisciplinary team that iterates between theory and practice of economic development to improve our understanding of how economies grow.
Our trademark methodologies, Economic Complexity and Growth Diagnostics, have revolutionized development thinking and inspired many places to reconsider their economic strategies.
Research Questions We Seek To Answer
What kinds of processes do countries, regions, and cities use to diversify their productive capacity and accumulate productive knowledge in order to accelerate growth?
How can migration and mobility help foster economic development and how do complementary skills impact labor market dynamics?
What is the role of special economic zones in tackling product diversification opportunities and how does it impact knowledge transfer and migration?
How can countries prioritize key policy decisions and sequencing to achieve their long-term strategy?
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Academic Research
Our multidisciplinary team is working to uncover the mechanisms behind economic growth. Our three research pillars are: Economic Transformation; Diffusion of Knowledge and Technology; and Coordination of Knowhow.
Policy Research
We are developing rigorous place-specific research on the constraints to sustained shared prosperity, translating these insights into inputs for policy design and collaborating with practitioners to learn from the process of implementation.
Research Spotlight
Policy
The Economic Tale of Two Amazons
This new paper synthesizes the findings of two Growth Lab projects that studied the nature of economic growth in the Peruvian and Colombian Amazon. While deforestation is often treated as inevitable to serve human needs, local and global, our research fails to find evidence of a tradeoff between economic growth and forest protection. The economic drivers in the Amazon are its urban areas often located far from the forest.
Academic
The Impact of Return Migration on Employment and Wages in Mexican Cities
How does return migration affect local workers in Mexico? While migrants returning from the U.S. increase the local labor supply, they also return with new skills and knowhow, having been exposed to a more advanced U.S. economy. New research by Ricardo Hausmann and others, recently published in the Journal of Urban Economics, finds that returnees create jobs by inducing growth in the industries that hire them.
Data Viz
Top Visual Insights of 2023
Our multi-disciplinary team extended our pioneering research agenda to five continents in 2023. Our researchers engaged the world in leveraging decarbonization as a pathway for growth, identifying the barriers to migration and mobility of skills, examining inequality in cities and the effects of remoteness on growth, and understanding the role of innovation in economic complexity.