CID Student Ambassador Abeela Latif, interviews Dany Bahar, Research Fellow at Brookings Institution and Associate at Harvard’s Center for International Development and Miguel Angel Santos, Adjunct Professor in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and Senior Research Fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Development. Dany and Miguel talk about their research paper "One more resource curse: Dutch disease and export concentration". In the interview, they explain the concept of Dutch disease and talk about why natural resources can be seen as a curse from an economic perspective. They also discuss the motivation behind their research, their main findings and explain how policy makers can use these learnings to make smarter policy decisions.

READ THE PAPER HERE: https://bit.ly/2qpgubl

Interview recorded on February 2018.

www.cid.harvard.edu

About Miguel Angel Santos: Miguel Angel Santos is an Adjunct Professor in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard University. At CID, he has been involved in various research projects aimed at helping governments to rethink their development strategies, both at the national and sub-national levels. Since he joined CID in August 2014, he has been involved in projects at the national level in Mexico, Panama, and Venezuela, and at the sub-national level in Mexico in the states of Chiapas, Baja California, Tabasco and Campeche; and the city of Hermosillo at Sonora state. He has also performed as project manager in the projects leading to the build-up of the Mexican Atlas of Economic Complexity, and the Peruvian Atlas of Economic Complexity. Before joining the field of international development, Miguel worked for ten years in corporate finance and business development in Latin America, performing as Director of Finance for the Cisneros Group of Companies (1997-2003), Head of Corporate Finance for Mercantil Servicios Financieros (2005-2007), and Business Vice-President for Sony Pictures and Entertainment Latin America (2008-2009). At that point, he decided to switch tracks and get involved in development economics.

About Dany Bahar: Dany Bahar is a David M. Rubenstein Fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution. An Israeli and Venezuelan economist, he is also an associate at the Harvard Center for International Development.

His research sits at the intersection of international economics and economic development. In particular, his academic research focuses on structural transformation and productivity dynamics, and how they are affected by factors such as migration, innovation, trade, investment, entrepreneurship, and the diffusion of technology within and across borders. His expertise on policy issues includes international trade, migration, and globalization more generally, as well as the understanding of economic trends in the global economy and in particular regions. His academic work has been published in top economic journals and he often contributes to leading media outlets in the United States and around the globe.

He has worked and consulted for multilateral development organizations, such as the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Bahar holds a B.A. in systems engineering from Universidad Metropolitana (Caracas, Venezuela), a M.A. in economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a M.P.A. in international development from Harvard Kennedy School and a Ph.D. in public policy from Harvard University.