Jeremy Gutsche
Innovation Keynote Speaker; CEO, Trend Hunter. Renowned Futurist & Award-Winning Author
Some economists research the impact of theories and models on the decisions made by government. Speaker Ricardo Hausmann actually applied them as Venezuela’s Minister of Planning. In a widely varied career, Hausmann has also held leading roles at international financial institutions. Organizations seeking a deeply informed and highly entertaining keynote address find their ideal speaker in Hausmann.
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Politician, banker, professor, and development financier, economics speaker Ricardo Hausmann brings a world of experience to his enlivening presentations. As a keynote speaker, Ricardo Hausmann illuminates questions of economic growth, macroeconomic stability, and the social dimensions of economic development.
Ricardo Hausmann began his career as a professor of economics, and currently teaches at Harvard. Between these phases of his career, Hausmann put his ideas to the test like few other contemporary economists have.
As professor of economics at the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administracion in Caracas, Hausmann founded the Center for Public Policy. His interest in policy led to a tenure as Venezuela’s Minister of Planning. He also sat on the board of the country’s central bank and was chair of the IMF-World Bank Development Committee. Expanding his purview even further, Hausmann moved on to serve as the Inter-American Development Bank’s first Chief Economist.
He continued his enterprising ways upon returning to professorship. Hausmann is currently the Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School. Additionally, at Harvard’s Center for International Development, Hausmann serves as director of the innovative Growth Lab. Earlier, he was the director of the Center for International Development at HKS.
Ricardo Hausmann, Harvard professor and expert on growth, delivers a powerful keynote highlighting that inequality comes from the humongous differences in productivity between different regions of a country and between countries as well. Prof. Hausmann argues that they are unproductive because they are excluded from the networks that would make them productive. In the Digital Age, advances in technology and innovations can reduce the fixed costs of the network to connect unproductive regions to the productive ones.
In this fascinating talk, Prof. Hausmann from Harvard explains in very easy to understand terms that Economic Complexity is like a game of Scrabble: having more letters means you can build more words, in the same way that countries that have more capabilities and resources can generate more and diverse products and services. Using simple analogies, Prof. Hausmann delivers a powerful talk that will unravel the secrets to economic growth, explain the wide gap that exists nowadays between rich and poor countries, and what we can do to close it to have inclusive growth.
Why do some countries, regions and economies collapse? How can very powerful countries that have a lot of resources and capabilities end up failing? Prof. Hausmann, Director of the Growth Lab at Harvard's Center for International Development and the Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, has studied the reasons of what can bring an economy to collapse and how to prevent it. Using the example of his native Venezuela, this talk focuses on the deep issues that can collapse an entire economy and country and what can be done to rescue and recover.