Professor Ricardo Hausmann

Environmental, Social and Economic Impacts of Green Energy Technologies, and the Need for Public Policy

Ricardo Hausmann is the founder and Director of Harvard University’s Growth Lab and the Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. His leadership and scholarly contributions have had a significant impact on the study and practice of economic development and have made the Growth Lab one of the most important centers for economic research and development in the world.

His research efforts focus primarily on two broad areas: macroeconomic volatility and the determinants of long run growth.  He has been especially influential in developing new theories and methodologies that are now widely used among economists, some with esoteric names such as Dark Matter, Original Sin, and Self-discovery. His work has been published in some of the top journals in the world, including Science, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of International Economics, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of International Money and Finance, Economic Policy, and the Journal of Economic Growth, among many others, and his writings have been cited more than 54,000 times.

Since launching the Growth Lab at Harvard in 2006, Hausmann has served as principal investigator for more than 50 research initiatives in nearly 30 countries, including the United States, informing development policy, growth strategies, and diversification agendas at the national, regional, and city levels.  He has been asked by the South African government to advise their economic growth program, held positions at several profit and non-profit organizations, been president of the Latin-American and Caribbean Economic Association, written a monthly syndicated column for Project Syndicate covering the economics of development, and operated his own private consulting firm.

Before joining Harvard University in 2000, Hausmann had served as the first Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank, where he created the Research Department; Minister of Planning of Venezuela; member of the Board of the Central Bank of Venezuela; Chair of the IMF-World Bank Development Committee; and first Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank. He was previously a professor of economics at the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administracion (IESA) in Caracas, where he founded the Center for Public Policy. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University.