Guest blog by Jaime A. Garron B., LEG ’23
As a trained economist and international development practitioner with experience in diverse country settings, I can confidently say that common sense is perhaps the least common of the senses when it comes to public policy design and implementation, for a variety of reasons and circumstances. This scarcity, influenced by various factors and circumstances, poses challenges for nations aspiring to secure a sustainable and inclusive growth trajectory. Why is this the case? Moreover, how can we articulate our ideas to bring lucidity to our analyses, setting the stage for more productive engagements with stakeholders to tackle our growth challenges? These overarching queries drove my application to the Harvard Kennedy School Leading Economic Growth (LEG) executive education program in 2023.
Over an enriching ten weeks, my intellectual curiosity was ignited, focusing on unraveling the complexities of my current post – Guatemala. Harvard equipped me with invaluable tools, including the Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) toolkit and Growth Diagnostics, as well as analytical approaches such as economic complexity analysis, product space analysis, the scrabble theory of economic development, high-bandwidth policymaking, and policy space design. I delved into a plethora of stylized facts from pertinent country cases, identifying both successes and failures.
As a United Nations country economist my job entails advising the UN Resident Coordinator and UN Country Team on several topics with emphasis on economic transformation and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, two very complex items in the current national policy making agenda. The insights gained from the LEG program have provided me with new perspectives and intellectual incentives to better address the country’s needs, especially with the upcoming government administration change in January 2024.
At the beginning of the course (and actually during the application process), we were all tasked with defining a growth problem to apply the tools and analytical approaches presented. After refining my focus, my challenge centered on the creation of decent jobs (as defined by the ILO) and productivity growth. I have been living in Guatemala four years now and it is a beautiful country endowed with great natural resources, lots of trees (the name Guatemala literally means “place of forests or many trees” in native Nahuatl) and hard-working people with a greater heart (superb hosts!). Yet, there exists a stark reality affecting a significant portion of the population, demanding urgent attention.
Despite being an upper-middle income country, with a small but stable economy (averaging 3.5% real GDP growth per year in the last 20 years), solid macroeconomic management (fiscal deficit averaging 2% in the last decade and public debt level well below international thresholds), but high dependency on remittances (19% of GDP in 2023), the socioeconomic landscape portraits a challenging scenario whereby 6 out 10 households are poor (monetary and multidimensionally), and although unemployment is low (2-3% in the last decade) underemployment is high (between 11-18% in the last decade), informal economy is very significant (currently 71%), with labor productivity stagnated the last 40 years (productivity per person employed only grew 0.6%, on average). On top of that, exports are of little complexity, highly concentrated, with a product basket that has barely changed in the last decade (8 products accounted for 42% of total exports in 2011 and 2021, and new exports accounted only 4% of the total basket) according to Harvard´s Atlas of Economic Complexity. Consequently, my growth challenge was related to achieving inclusive economic growth by promoting employment (formal job creation) and productivity growth, as I am convinced that one of the most effective poverty reduction policies is job creation:
The program’s journey, guided by eminent Harvard faculty such as Professors Ricardo Hausmann and Matt Andrews, was truly stimulating. I only have words of gratitude and appreciation for their knowledge sharing and the conducive learning environment they provided. I have collected several quotes from Prof. Hausmann that I find inspiring. Here´s my favorite: “Societies know more when they know different.”
Reflecting on the program, my top three takeaways include: 1) context is fundamental: understanding your initial conditions (problem constructing/deconstructing), getting to know your productive flora and fauna (meet your monkeys -companies- and find your trees -sectors-) and identifying the true binding constraints (growth diagnostics) are halfway through addressing the problem; 2) how technology and knowledge are being related will shape our rethinking of any growth strategy: technology comprises three forms of knowledge (embodied knowledge in tools and materials; codified knowledge in recipes, protocols, and how-to manuals; and tacit knowledge or knowhow in brains); and iii) I will never look at the scrabble word game the same way again 😉.
Finally, I shared my learning journey with 4 other participants that now I can call my friends: Aygun (Azerbaijan); Alexander (USA); Dmytro (Ukraine) and Abdulla (United Arab Emirates). Indeed, a great experience. Vamos LEG up!
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Leading Economic Growth Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 58 Participants successfully completed this 10-week online course in December 2023. These are their learning journey stories.