Growth Diagnostics is a methodology I developed with Dani Rodrik and Andrés Velasco to determine the obstacles to a country’s capacity to grow. It is a unified framework for identifying the binding constraints to growth, which is key to formulating growth strategies. The main idea is that each country may be bumping against different potential constraints but each constellation of constraints must be giving off a different collection of symptoms or signals. These symptoms can then be used to perform a differential diagnosis.
https://www.ricardohausmann.com/growth-diagnostics
This approach seems pretty convincing to me, and has been mentioned in Growth and the case against randomista development as a potentially promising approach; it seems like the kind of approach that could result in similar successes to the growth that resulted from Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in China, arguably one of the biggest successes in economic development.
Relatedly, what’s up with the Millennium Challenge Corporation; did it succeed at its goals over the last decade? Why/why not?
I haven’t really seen any good high-level analyses of whether this kind of stuff works.
Unfortunately, all the links on RicardoHausmann.com explaining how Growth Diagnostics actually work appear to be dead links to me. Do you have another recommended source to understand exactly what growth diagnostics is and how it works? The EA forum post didn’t really seem to get into the details.
The how-to handbook is available here:
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/cid/publications/faculty-working-papers/doing-growth-diagnostics-practice
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/cid/files/publications/faculty-working-papers/177.pdf
Thank you! I’ll have to check these out
The MCC chapter on constraints analysis is here: https://www.mcc.gov/resources/story/story-cdg-chapter-3-guidelines-for-constraints-to-economic-growth-analysis