Welcome!
Ricardo Hausmann is Director of the Center for International Development and Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at Harvard University.
Ricardo is one of the foremost thinkers on how regions and countries can accelerate growth. His research includes issues of growth, macroeconomic stability, international finance, and the social dimensions of development.
Ricardo has published widely in leading economic journals including Science, the Journal of Development Economics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of International Money and Finance, Journal of Economic Growth, and Science and 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. Professor Hausmann has advised governments in over 80 developing countries on creating effective growth strategies and development policies.
As Director of CID he guides the Center’s focus on solving global challenges with breakthrough research at the cutting edge of the hard sciences, social sciences, ethics and politics. Under Professor Hausmann’s leadership, CID’s Growth Lab has developed innovative theories and their practical applications. For example, Growth Diagnostics are being implemented by multilateral organizations throughout the world. Recently, his research team published The Network Structure of Economic Output and the Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity, a new theory to that predicts countries’ growth potential measuring their productive capabilities and know-how. His new Economic Complexity Indicators are 10 times more accurate in predicting growth than any other development index in use today.
Previously, Ricardo served as the first Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank (1994-2000), where he created its Research Department. He served as Minister of Planning of Venezuela (1992-1993) and as a member of the Board of the Central Bank of Venezuela. He also served as Chair of the IMF-World Bank Development Committee.
He holds a degree in physics and a PhD in economics from Cornell University.
Current Focus and Resulting Papers
Ricardo’s current focus is on the theories and applications of growth methodologies. Specifically he examines the specific constraints operative in a country; the process by which countries move to activities that are both new and more productive; the specific and predictable patterns in the transformation of a country’s economy; and the variety and complexity of the products a country is able to successfully make and export.
Recent research includes:
• The Building Blocks of Economic Complexity: The authors introduce their view of economic growth and development that gives a central role to the complexity of a country’s economy. They are able to interprete trade data as a bipartite network in which countries are connected to the products they export. The authors show it is possible to quantify the complexity of a country’s economy by characterizing the structure of this network. They also show that the measures of complexity derived are correlated with a country’s level of income. The deviations from this relationship are predictive of future growth and suggest that countries tend to converge to the level of income dictated by the complexity of their productive structures. Therefore, development efforts should focus on generating the conditions that allow complexity to emerge and generate sustained growth and prosperity.
Subsequent research on this topic includes:
o Predicting the Evolution of Industrial Ecosystems: The authors make the case that like in ecological systems, industries appear in a location following a predictable pattern. Deviations to this pattern, such as industries that should exist but do not currently, tend to self-correct and appear after a few years. This research has deep implications for the specific path each country should take and the specific capabilities they need to build prosperity and growth.
o International Knowledge Diffusion: A country produces a product (only if it has the product-specific knowledge to do so), and when exported, this product-specific knowledge is able to transcend country borders and travel internationally. The authors show that the productive knowledge to make a product diffuses to neighboring countries faster than to the rest of the world. It is slower for more complex products and becomes faster across time (in 2000 there is more diffusion of knowledge than in the 1970’s). These findings suggest that looking at the products a country produces and the complexity of those products helps explain the diffusion of knowledge.
• “Schooling Can’t Buy Me Love”: Marriage, Work and the Gender Education Gap in Latin America. Along with his co-authors, Prof. Hausmann examines the ways in which education affects who stays single, who marries whom, and who goes to work focused on Latin American countries. The paper enhances understanding of the factors affecting the marriage market and women’s labor force participation for the region. Ricardo Hausmann, also authored the “World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report,” in 2010 and continues to work on how to measure and reduce the gender gap.