Ricardo Hausmann (born 1956) is the Rafik Hariri Professor of the Practice of International Political Economy and the founder (2006) and Faculty Director of Harvard's Growth Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University. He is also a former Venezuelan Minister of Planning and former Head of the Presidential Office of Coordination and Planning (1992–1993). He co-introduced several regularly used concepts in economics including original sin, growth diagnostics, self-discovery, dark matter, the product space, and economic complexity.
Ricardo is the father of theatre director and producer Michel Hausmann, art historian Carolina Hausmann, and comedian Joanna Hausmann.
Early life and career Hausmann was born to a Jewish family in Venezuela. His father was a refugee of the Holocaust who was born in Leipzig, Germany and was orphaned as a teenager. His mother was from Belgium. He earned a bachelor's degree in Engineering and Applied Physics (1977) and a PhD in economics (1981) at Cornell University. From 1985 to 1991, he was professor of economics at the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administracion in Caracas, where he founded the Center for Public Policy. From 1992 to 1993, he served as Minister of Planning of Venezuela and as a member of the Board of the Central Bank of Venezuela. Around the same time, he was Chair of the IMF-World Bank Development Committee. Hausmann served as the first Chief Economist of the Inter-American Development Bank (1994–2000), where he created the Research Department.
In September 2000 Hausmann came to Harvard. He held the George A. Cowan chair at the Santa Fe Institute. Between 2005 and 2008 he chaired the International Panel on the Accelerated and Shared Growth Initiative for South Africa, an international panel of economists called upon by South African government to advise their economic growth program. He also teaches two development-related subjects: Development Policy Strategy and Why Are So Many Countries Poor, Volatile, and Unequal?. Concurrently with his position at CID, Hausmann has also held several positions at profit and non-profit organizations: he was a member of the board of Venezuela's full-service telephone company CANTV (2001–2007), of microfinance institution ACCION International (2009–2011), and of the advisory board of Abengoa, a renewable energy and engineering company based in Spain. From 2010 to 2011, he was also the elected president of the Latin-American and Caribbean Economic Association.
At the Growth Lab, Hausmann has concentrated his research efforts in two broad areas: the underlying determinants of macroeconomic volatility, financial fragility and crises; and the determinants of long run growth. Themes he has been exploring include the causes of growth accelerations and collapses; the causes and consequences of original sin; growth diagnostics, the process of structural transformation and the Product Space; and global imbalances and dark matter. Country-specific studies he has been involved with have included projects on Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Belize, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, China, El Salvador, Egypt, Ethiopia, Guatemala, India, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Tunisia, Venezuela, and the United States. He also works on gender issues and has been a co-author of the World Economic Forum's yearly Global Gender Gap Report during its creation in 2006 and until 2009. He writes a monthly syndicated column for Project Syndicate covering economics of development.
On March 4, 2019, Juan Guaidó named Hausmann as Venezuela's representative to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a Washington-based multilateral agency and the only international financial organization to recognize Guaidó as the legitimate president of Venezuela. The IDB cancelled its annual meeting in Chengdu, China after Hausmann was denied a visa by the Chinese government. On September 27, 2019, Hausmann resigned as ambassador to the IDB, writing on Twitter that "his academic duties at Harvard University are incompatible with the job at the IDB". Hausmann emphasized that he would be available to help Guaidó "any way he could"; he recommended Alejandro Plaz as Venezuela's IDB representative, who was named to the post by Guaidó. Also, Efecto Cocuyo
In August 2026, the Financial Times announced that an article it published in Hausmann's name had been written with the assistance of AI.https://www.ft.com/content/7ff4321e-3f96-4f7b-8f2d-4fefa4773a5d
Original sin (economics)
The expression original sin was first used in international finance in a 1999 article by Barry Eichengreen and Hausmann. The authors define original sin as a situation in which the residents (or government) of a country are unable to borrow in their own domestic currency. In other words, a poor country is forced to borrow funds denominated in foreign exchange (e.g. the U.S. dollar, the euro, or the yen). Based on their measure of original sin the authors show that original sin was present in most of the developing economies and independent from histories of high inflation and currency depreciation. This is seen as problematic because if the borrowing country's domestic currency depreciates, the loan will become more difficult to pay back, since their currency is now worth less relative to the loan.
Later research has mainly focused on the international component of original sin: the inability of most countries to borrow abroad in their own currency. Barry Eichengreen, Hausmann and Ugo Panizza show that almost all of the countries (except US, Euro area, Japan, UK, and Switzerland) suffered from (international) original sin over time. The authors argued that this international component of original sin has serious consequences. It makes debt riskier, increases volatility, and affects a country's ability to conduct an independent monetary policy. This is because original sin is likely to cause a currency mismatch in the national balance sheet of a country: the currencies of its assets and those of its liabilities do not correspond. Thus, large swings in the real exchange rate will have an effect on aggregate wealth and it will be more difficult for the country to service its debt. In other words, original sin tends to make the fiscal balance dependent on the real exchange rate and the short term real interest rate.
Criticism on the concept of original sin has been twofold. On the one hand, Morris Goldstein and Philip Turner claim that original sin is not a sufficient condition for a currency mismatch, and thus cannot account for the large output losses due to the currency mismatches during financial crises. On the other hand, Carmen Reinhart, Kenneth Rogoff and Miguel Savastano claim that the main problem of emerging market economies is to learn how to borrow less rather than learn how to borrow more in their domestic currency. They assumed that the problems of emerging markets were not due to original sin, but to so-called debt intolerance: the inability of emerging markets to manage levels of external debt that, under the same circumstances, would be manageable for developed countries. Eichengreen, Hausmann and Panizza respond to both criticisms in a paper elaborating the difference between currency mismatches, debt intolerance and original sin.
Self-discovery Self-discovery is a concept developed by Hausmann and Dani Rodrik, referring to the process of discovering which economic activities can profitably be pursued in a given country. In a 2003 paper titled "Economic Development as Self-Discovery", Hausmann and Rodrik contest the notion that growth will follow automatically from the presence of state-of-the-art technologies and good economic institutions (like well-designed and enforced property rights). Another condition, they state, is that entrepreneurs in the country know what new economic activities can profitably be pursued there—in other words, that there is sufficient self-discovery.
Self-discovery is costly for the innovative entrepreneurs that invest their resources in it. However, the benefits of self-discovery accrue to all entrepreneurs in the country, who now know which activities are profitable without having to find out themselves. If this eventually leads to more innovation and growth in the country, the benefits of self-discovery accrue to even larger groups of people. Thus, according to Hausmann and Rodrik, self-discovery has benefits that stretch far beyond the firm that originally invested in the discovery (in other words, it has positive externalities). In consequence, governments should implement economic policies that promote self-discovery.
In a later paper, Hausmann, Rodrik and co-author Jason Hwang nuance the previous conclusions on self-discovery. They argue that some products are associated with higher productivity levels than others. Thus, self-discovery is mainly beneficial for countries if it is discovered that high-productivity goods can be profitably produced there. This is because the new products enhance the profitability of the country's export basket, which in turn is associated with higher growth. In other words, some products are more interesting to discover than others, and these products are what really causes the beneficial effect of self-discovery.
Growth diagnostics Growth diagnostics is a methodology developed by Hausmann, Dani Rodrik and Andrés Velasco to determine the underlying reasons why some developing economies are not growing as fast as might be expected. The underlying assumption is that different countries experience slow growth for different reasons (compare to the Anna Karenina principle). In the handbook "Doing Growth Diagnostics in Practice", the origin of the term is explained:
The growth diagnostic approach is based on the idea that there may be many reasons why an economy does not grow, but each reason generates a distinctive set of symptoms. These symptoms can become the basis of a differential diagnostic in which the analyst tries to distinguish among potential explanations for the observed growth rate of the economy.
Thus the growth diagnostics methodology departs from the "symptoms" of low growth that are visible in a country's economy—for example, low investment. Using a decision tree, all possible causes of these symptoms are inspected and if possible, eliminated. Next, the causes of these causes are scrutinized. This goes on until the most binding constraint to growth in a country is found. This is the constraint that economic policy in the country will need to address to accelerate growth. The authors argue that applying the wrong cure for the wrong disease, i.e. implementing the wrong economic reform in the wrong circumstances, can be both economically unproductive and politically dangerous.