Ricardo Hausmann

Ricardo Hausmann is Director of Harvard's Center for International Development and Professor of the Practice of Economic Development at the Kennedy School of Government. Previously, he served as the first Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank (1994-2000), where he created the Research Department. He has 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 was Professor of Economics at the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administracion (IESA) (1985-1991) in Caracas, where he founded the Center for Public Policy. He holds a PhD in economics from Cornell University. Professor Hausmann’s research interests include issues of growth, macroeconomic stability, international finance, and the social dimensions of development. He did pioneering work on the causes of macroeconomic volatility in developing countries and studied its effects on growth, poverty and inequality. He also studied the role of budgetary and political institutions in achieving fiscal balance and the role of foreign currency debts in causing economic crises. Prof. Hausmann has also made important contributions to the study of the “resource curse”. More recently, his growth diagnostics methodology designed to identify the binding constraints to growth in countries has been adopted widely by multilateral organisations and his breakthrough research on the patterns of change in productive structures, is informing countries’ industrial policies around the world. Professor Hausmann developed the methodology of the World Economic Forum Gender Gap index, which looks into areas of health, education, economic participation and political power and he is also the Co-author of the Gender Gap annual report.