Growth Lab Podcast Series

The Growth Lab has been engaged in an applied research project with the country of Albania since 2013. In this time, we have conducted research on numerous, diverse workstreams related to stimulating economic growth in the country.

During this research engagement, our team conducted Growth Diagnostic analyses to understand and test potential binding constraints to economic growth in Albania. After the initial Growth Diagnostic study in 2013, the team has since updated its tests and findings to reflect changes in the Albanian economy over time.

In this podcast episode, Growth Lab researchers Jessie Lu and Tim O'Brien discuss the journey through iterations of the Albanian Growth Diagnostic from 2013 to 2020. They delve into the processes and data our team uses to thoroughly study and test various constraints; how these constraints have evolved over time; and their collaboration with our data development and design team to make the latest Growth Diagnostic update more digitally accessible to a wide audience.

The Growth Lab has been engaged in an applied research project with the country of Albania since 2013. In this time, we have conducted research on numerous, diverse workstreams related to stimulating economic growth in the country.

In this podcast episode, we kick off a larger outreach campaign, which showcases our engagement in Albania, by gathering members of our research team to discuss their work. Hosted by research assistant Jessie Lu, this podcast features Ermal Frasheri, Tim O’Brien, Shreyas Gadgin Matha, Spencer Bateman, Ricardo Villasmil, and Daniela Muhaj, researchers at the Growth Lab who have been involved with various aspects of this project.

The team paints a picture of our work in Albania, delving into the current situation in the country as it relates to COVID-19 and it’s macroeconomic consequences, our support in strengthening government capacities using tools like the Albanian Investment Corporation; the country’s current infrastructure landscape and plans for improvement and expansion; the importance of studying the Albanian diaspora; and Albania’s plans for accession to the EU.

What drives economic development? Or more precisely, what constrains economic development? An emerging consensus on this question surrounds the role of locally embedded productive capabilities and the idea that countries build on their existing capabilities to move into new economic activities. In new research published in Nature Communications, Neave O'Clery, Muhammed Yildirim and Ricardo Hausmann develop a mathematical model based on capability accumulation of countries and use this model to construct a directed network of products, the Eco Space. They uncover a modular structure in the network and show that low- and middle-income countries move from product clusters dominated by few capability products to advanced (many capability) products over time. They also show that the network model is predictive of product appearances in countries over time.

In this Growth Lab podcast, Research Analyst Ana Grisanti interviews the authors of this new research Neave O'Clery, Muhammed Yildirim, and Ricardo Hausmann, to learn more about their findings.

What does it take for a sub-national unit to become an autonomous engine of growth? This issue is particularly relevant to large cities, as they tend to display larger and more complex know-how agglomerations and may have access to a broader set of policy tools.

To approximate an answer to this question, specific to the case of Buenos Aires, Harvard’s Growth Lab engaged in a research project from December 2018 to June 2019, collaborating with the Center for Evidence-based Evaluation of Policies (CEPE) of Universidad Torcuato di Tella, and the Development Unit of the Secretary of Finance of the City of Buenos Aires. Together, we developed research agenda that seeks to provide inputs for a policy plan aimed at decoupling Buenos Aires’s growth trajectory from the rest of Argentina’s.

With COVD-19 forcing widespread adoption of virtual communication for much of the world, some wonder if these remote business practices will become the norm. Before the pandemic, international business travel was a 1-point-5 trillion-dollar annual expense – an expense that’s increasing about 7-percent a year. Why have corporations been willing to absorb this cost when technologies such as Skype, FaceTime, Zoom, WebEx, etc., have been widely available for the better part of a decade?

Growth Lab researchers have been studying this question for years. You see, the Growth Lab’s approach to development puts particular emphasis on knowhow. We're not talking about the information that exists in bo oks, computer files, graphs and algorithms. Knowhow only exists in brains, and it was very slowly from brain to brain through years of on the job, learning and interacting with experience counts. So to move knownow, you have to move brains.

Now for more on the importance of moving knowhow, its relevance to business travel and some findings in our research, let's bring in our guests. Ricardo Hausmann, Director of the Growth Lab and a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. Frank Neffke, Research Director at the Growth Lab. And Michele Coscia, Assistant Professor at the University of Copenhagen.

Across the world, the public sector pays higher average wages than the private sector for similar employees. Using data from Albania and Sri Lanka, the Growth Lab’s Ricardo Hausmann, Ljubica Nedelkoska, and Sehar Noor examined the factors behind public sector wage premiums. They found that in both countries, the government sector pays a premium for all, but its most skilled employees. For this group, the private sector pays better. Moreover, the government sector offers pensions, permanent contracts, and fringe benefits to the majority of its employees, as opposed to the private sector, where these are mainly reserved for the most valued employees. They show that the payment schemes of the public sector are primarily based on qualifications, where private sector wages are additionally influenced by person-specific characteristics, presumably negotiation skills and productivity. The research also shows that among the most valued employees (i.e., the highly skilled and highly paid ones), the best ones opt for the private sector. The best employees among the less skilled ones, opt for the government sector.

In this Growth Lab podcast, Research Assistant Jessie Lu interviews Ljubica Nedelkoska, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Growth Lab and co-author of this latest research on Public Sector wage premiums in Albania and Sri Lanka.

In this Growth Lab podcast, we are joined by Miguel Angel Santos, Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and Director of Applied Research at CID's Growth Lab, as well as Tim O’Brien, Senior Manager of Applied Research at CID's Growth Lab. Miguel and Tim sat down with CID Student Ambassador Valeria Mendiola to discuss their research from Jordan on Macroeconomic Stability and Long-Term Growth.

In 2019, Dr. Annette Idler wrote Borderland Battles: Violence, Crime, and Governance at the Edges of Colombia’s War (Oxford University Press, 2019). Based on her extensive research on this issue, her book reveals why the Colombian-Venezuelan borderlands are enabling crucial, but largely unacknowledged interactions between Venezuela’s devastating crisis and ongoing political violence in Colombia.

Failure to tackle the issues at the border could have serious long-term implications for stability in the region, which makes long-term plans for sustainable peace and security across and along the border an urgent necessity.

In this Growth Lab podcast, Research Assistant Ana Grisanti interviews Annette, who discusses how the so-called border effect has facilitated violence, undermined trust relationships, attracted numerous violent non-state groups, and obscured the nuanced realities of multiple insecurities.

In today’s world, most workers are highly specialized, but this specialization can come at a cost – especially for those on the wrong team. New research by Growth Lab Research Director Frank Neffke assesses the importance of the skills of coworkers. Finding coworkers who complement and not substitute one’s skills can significantly impact earning potential. The impact is equal to having a college degree. Coworker complementarity also drives careers and supports urban and large plant wage premiums.

Learn more about this research on The Value of Complementary Coworkers: https://growthlab.cid.harvard.edu/academic-research/complementarity

What is driving contemporary populism? Commonly-accepted answers are divided into two schools of thought, one economic and one cultural.

In his latest working paper, Growth Lab research fellow Eric Protzer utilizes geographic variation in the incidence of populism to apply cross-sectional regression analysis to these arguments, and concludes that they are highly unconvincing. Instead, the thus-largely overlooked factor of social mobility is found to have far greater explanatory power.

In this podcast, Rushabh Sanghvi, Research Assistant at the Growth Lab, interviews Eric about his research on Social Mobility and Populism.