Ricardo Hausmann

Director of Center for International Development

Ricardo Hausmann speaker, keynote, harvard
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Ricardo Hausmann is Director of the Center for International Development, Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at Harvard University and George Cowan Professor of the Santa Fe Institute.

His research includes issues of growth and structural transformation, macroeconomic stability, international finance, and the social dimensions of development. Working with different co-authors, Ricardo Hausmann has introduced new approaches in several areas. His recent work on structural transformation introduced the concept of the Product Space (2007). His work on growth introduced the method of Growth Diagnostics (2005), a different approach to growth strategies. His work on global imbalances introduced the idea of Dark Matter, the role of intangible knowledge in the financial wealth of nations (2006). In his work on the causes of financial crisis he introduced the concept of Original Sin, the inability to borrow internationally in domestic currency (1999).

Ricardo Hausmann was an early contributor to the role of budget institutions and fiscal rules (1995). He is one of the co-authors of the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report. He is widely published in leading academic journals including Science, the Journal of Development Economics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of International Money and Finance, and the Journal of Economic Growth. Ricardo Hausmann is regularly featured in media outlets such as The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Forbes Magazine.

He has advised governments in over 40 developing countries on creating effective growth strategies and development policies. Previously, Ricardo served as the first Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank (1994-2000), where he created its Research Department. Ricardo Hausmann served as Minister of Planning of Venezuela (1992-1993) and as a member of the Board of the Central Bank of Venezuela. He was Professor of Economics at IESA, Venezuela’s leading graduate business school (1985-1992), where he founded the Center for Public Policy. He has also served as Chair of the IMF-World Bank Development Committee (1992-1993) and of the International Growth Advisory Panel of South Africa (2004-2007). Ricardo Hausmann has been on the boards of CANTV (2001-2007), Venezuela’s full service telecom company and ACCION International, and is on the Advisory Board of Abengoa, Spain’s leader in renewable energy.

He has been a consultant to all major multilateral development agencies including the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Asian Development Bank, among others. He holds a degree in Applied Physics and a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University.

Ricardo Hausmann’s been widely published in economic journals such as Science, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of International Money and Finance, Journal of Economic Growth, and is frequently featured in New York Times, Financial Times, The Economist, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Forbes Magazine, among others.

 

The Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity -2013

It has been two years since we published the first edition of The Atlas of Economic Complexity. "The Atlas," as we have come to refer to it, has helped extend the availability of tools and methods that can be used to study the productive structure of countries and its evolution.

Many things have happened since the first edition of The Atlas was released at CID's Global Empowerment Meeting, on October 27, 2011. The new edition has sharpened the theory and empirical evidence of how knowhow affects income and growth and how knowhow itself grows over time. In this edition, we also update our numbers to 2010, thus adding two more years of data and extending our projections. We also undertook a major overhaul of the data. Sebastián Bustos and Muhammed Yildirim went back to the original sources and created a new dataset that significantly improves on the one used for the 2011 edition. They developed a new technique to clean the data, reducing inconsistencies and the problems caused by misreporting. The new dataset provides a more accurate estimate of the complexity of each country and each product. With this improved dataset, our results are even stronger.

The Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity -2013

Venezuela Before Chávez-2013

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Venezuela had one of the poorest economies in Latin America, but by 1970 it had become the richest country in the region and one of the twenty richest countries in the world, ahead of countries such as Greece, Israel, and Spain. Between 1978 and 2001, however, Venezuela’s economy went sharply in reverse, with non-oil GDP declining by almost 19 percent and oil GDP by an astonishing 65 percent. What accounts for this drastic turnabout? The editors of Venezuela Before Chávez, who each played a policymaking role in the country’s economy during the past two decades, have brought together a group of economists and political scientists to examine systematically the impact of a wide range of factors affecting the economy’s collapse, from the cost of labor regulation and the development of financial markets to the weakening of democratic governance and the politics of decisions about industrial policy.

Aside from the editors, the contributors are Omar Bello, Adriana Bermúdez, Matías Braun, Javier Corrales, Jonathan Di John, Rafael Di Tella, Javier Donna, Samuel Freije, Dan Levy, Robert MacCulloch, Osmel Manzano, Francisco Monaldi, María Antonia Moreno, Daniel Ortega, Michael Penfold, José Pineda, Lant Pritchett, Cameron A. Shelton, and Dean Yang.

Venezuela Before Chávez-2013

Export Pioneers in Latin America

Export Pioneers in Latin America analyzes a series of case studies of successful new export activities throughout the region to learn how pioneers jump-start a virtuous process leading to economic transformation. The cases of blueberries in Argentina, avocados in Mexico, and aircraft in Brazil illustrate how an initially successful export activity did not stop with the discovery of a single viable product, but rather continued to evolve. The book explores the conjecture that costly burdens to entrepreneurial self-discovery (due to the deterrent effects of imitation by competitors) have held back potential exporters in post-reform Latin America. It also considers the conjecture that new export activities are a complex enterprise that can only come to fruition when innovative contributions of many actors are somehow provided jointly.

Export Pioneers in Latin America