The Growth Lab at CID

Summary | Faculty Participants | Events | Activities

Summary

Sustained economic growth is the single most important determinant of persistent increases in living standards and reductions in poverty. The large income differences between the richest countries and the poorest countries today, which stand at a ratio of 70 to 1, and the massive incidence of poverty worldwide is the consequence of the inability of poor countries to achieve sustained growth.

While progress has been made over the last 50 years in our understanding of the growth process, policymakers have been largely unable to adequately diagnose the constraints to growth in specific country settings and to design solutions that are well suited to the existing economic and institutional conditions of each country. In fact, the difficulties in triggering growth in spite of significant policy reforms in some countries and the surprising acceleration of growth in countries with more limited reform efforts has uncovered the limitations of what had become the conventional approach at policymaking since the 1980s. This experience has revealed the limitations of the set of ideas that were used to adopt a growth-oriented policy-reform agenda but has yet to create the grounds for a new set of tools to inform the policy process.

Building on recent advances made by the so-called new growth theories, and by the empirical studies spurred by these theories, the Growth Lab will draw from its academic research and from its country-specific activities to further understand:

1. What social and economic processes determine the speed of productivity improvements and technology adoption, and how these differ depending upon the institutional environment of a society and its level of technological or financial development;
2. How to identify in practical settings the most important constraints on growth when many aspects of an economy are distorted, and how to identify interventions that can relax these constraints given the political and social environment; and
3. What kinds of institutional processes can create a political capacity to identify and address opportunities and obstacles dynamically.

To make progress in these areas the Growth Lab:

• Encourages basic theoretical and empirical research on the determinants of growth and its social, political and environmental sustainability.
• Improves the diagnostic tools and techniques with which economic analysis and assessments are made.
• Improves access to new datasets that can extend the research frontier.
• Provides collective advice to selected countries, which should be research-motivated and research-driven, and therefore lead to new work on development policy formulation.
• Diffuses our research and work through the CID Working Paper Series.
• Selects and attract academics and policy makers from abroad (including those from our countries of operation) to come and spend time at CID as Research Fellows. This will allow us to learn from them and allow them to work with us, in addition to getting acquainted with frontier research and policymaking.
• Organizes conferences mixing theme focus and country focus, and confronting academics from inside and outside the Lab with policymakers. 

Faculty Participants

Philippe Aghion (co-chair), Harvard University
Ricardo Hausmann (co-chair), Harvard University
Dani Rodrik (co-chair), Harvard University

Daron Acemoglu, MIT
Laura Alfaro, Harvard University
Manuel Amador, Harvard University
Abhijit Banerjee, MIT
Olivier Blanchard, MIT
Ricardo Caballero, MIT
Mariana Colacelli, Columbia University
Diego Comin, NYU
Rafael Di Tella, Harvard University
Esther Duflo,  MIT
William Easterly, NYU
Jeffrey Frankel, Harvard University
Jeffry Frieden, Harvard University
Benjamin Friedman, Harvard University
Oded Galor, Brown University
Elhanan Helpman, Harvard University
Peter Howitt, Brown University
Tarun Khanna, Harvard University
Asim Ijaz Khwaja, Harvard University
Michael R. Kremer, Harvard University
Robert Lawrence, Harvard University
Ross Levine, Brown University
James Levinsohn, University of Michigan
Dan Levy, Harvard University
Roberto Rigobon, MIT
James Robinson, Harvard University
Francisco Rodríguez, Wesleyan University
Kenneth Rogoff, Harvard University
Christopher Stone, Harvard University
Federico Sturzenegger, Harvard University
Robert Solow (invited), MIT (Emeritus)
Debora L. Spar, Harvard University
Andrés Velasco, Harvard University
Michael Walton, Harvard University
David Weil, Brown University

Events

Thursday, 9 February 2006: Inaugural Dinner, Harvard Faculty Club

Friday-Saturday, 28-29 April 2006: Venezuelan Economic Growth 1970-2005, Second Conference

Monday, 15 May 2006: Growth Lab Seminar "South Africa: Economic Performance and Prospects"

Saturday, 9 September 2006: CID Blue Sky Conference

Thursday, 16 November 2006: CID Conference: The Peruvian Growth Puzzle

Friday, 17 November 2006: CID Conference: Understanding Economic Growth in Bolivia 1970-2005

Monday, 9 April 2007: Paraguay Legislators: A Discussion of Growth Diagnostics and Political Institutions

Wednesday-Thursday, 30-31 May 2007: Conference on Health Improvements for Economic Growth

Current Activities

The CID South Africa Growth Initiative

Health Improvements for Economic Growth

Understanding Economic Growth 1970-2005: Analytical Country Studies from the Andean Region
Three book-length case studies on Bolivia, Perú and Venezuela will probe the causes behind the economic trajectories of their economies since 1970. Each book will be composed of studies written by prominent researchers that will attempt to account for the transformations occurring in the economic, political and social spheres and their interaction with the growth experience of these economies.

Download an overview of the Growth Lab at CID (PDF)
 

Summary | Faculty Participants | Events | Activities

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Last revised 22 January 2008