Harvard Kennedy School
The Growth Lab teaches and trains economic development practitioners around the world. Housed at Harvard Kennedy School, we fulfill the HKS mission of improving public policy and public leadership so that people can live in societies that are safer, freer, more just, and more sustainably prosperous.
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In an increasingly connected world, strategies for economic growth must become more inclusive to account for a multitude of different contexts. Led by Ricardo Hausmann and Matt Andrews, this one-week, on-campus executive program places inclusion at the heart of the economic agenda. Learn to use powerful new tools that create a roadmap to shared prosperity—and to mobilize teams to achieve this goal.
Join leading Harvard experts and peers from around the world to explore the frameworks, tools, and networks needed to drive inclusion-driven economic policy and advance shared prosperity. You will also discover how to apply these policies to your own economic growth challenge. Strategies for Inclusive Growth is designed for senior-level leaders in both public and private sectors who want to advance economic growth and inclusion. Those who will benefit from this program include: policymakers (at the national, state, and city levels), business executives and investors, and development organization leaders. Session dates: Apr. 27 – May 2, 2025.
Leading Green Growth: Economic Strategies for a Low-Carbon World is a new, one-week on-campus Executive Education program. Under the direction of faculty chairs Ricardo Hausmann and Daniel Schrag, you will gain a foundational understanding of decarbonization and its economic impact. You will also acquire the essential tools and knowledge to anticipate new trends, remain competitive, and achieve prosperity in a low-carbon future.
In Leading Green Growth, you will gather with peers from around the world to analyze what the global energy transition to a low-carbon future means for you. This program will discuss the emerging green technologies that are reshaping the economic landscape. The program examines the key drivers of project success in green growth including how to lower capital costs and fund a green growth agenda. Session dates: May 18 – 23, 2025.
Ten-week online executive program brings together leading experts in economic development with practitioners from around the globe to focus on practical approaches to shared growth and development. Led by Ricardo Hausmann and Matt Andrews, the curriculum provides a framework for understanding economic growth, as well as sophisticated tools for diagnosis, decision making, and implementation.
We’ve transformed our cutting-edge research and frameworks into easily digestible formats for anyone struggling with the question of growth. You could be working in the private or nonprofit sectors, in government, or for a multilateral organization, focused on a country, region, or city. If you’re saying we need to grow more, we need to grow in different ways, in different locations, for the benefit of different peoples—this course is for you. Session dates: Sep. 29 – Dec. 5, 2025.
This course explores the causes and consequences of three salient and interrelated characteristics of developing countries, namely poverty, volatility, and inequality, and it links them to current themes in development policy.
The course will characterize the relationships between these three problems and a varied class of proximate and deeper determinants of economic development, including national saving, human capital accumulation, international trade, technology diffusion, demography, geography, economic complexity, and macroeconomic, structural, contractual, and political institutions.
This course will integrate the analyses of short- and long-run dimensions of development in the design of an overall development strategy. The course will review various determinants of economic growth, macroeconomic volatility, and income distribution, such as factor accumulation, demography, geography, economic complexity, and institutions.
It will develop the tools necessary for diagnosing growth constraints, macroeconomic imbalances, fiscal policy, trade, the performance of financial and labor markets, and the sources of inequality and volatility, with an eye toward relevant policy issues.
Offered in collaboration with the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, this intensive in-person and online classroom experience features custom-designed case studies, cohort learning, and team working sessions taught by Jorrit de Jong, Ricardo Hausmann and other Harvard faculty. Program participants come from around the world, bringing a diversity of perspectives, resources, and expertise as senior city officials.
EXECUTIVE EDUCATION
We have trained more than 1,500 senior policymakers from national, regional and city-level institutions, business executives, program officers, economists, and academics in:
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Growth Lab alumni are teaching our methodologies in graduate programs at top universities around the world.
LEG will reshape your economic development strategy, redefine competition through creativity, and provide you with the unique opportunity to collaborate and learn from people around the world. Let LEG’s incredible leadership team be your guide along a journey you will never forget through practical tools, case studies, and a hall pass to ask ‘why’ in an effort to tackle economic development’s most complex challenges.”
MAGGIE JONES
Assistant Director, Community Development for Tarrant County, TX USA