Inclusion Hub spoke with Eduardo Lora, senior fellow at the Center for International Development at Harvard University, about the role of government in advancing innovation
After the U.N. Sustainable Development Summit, it is clear that government and the private sector both have key roles to play in creating inclusive growth, but according to Eduardo Lora, senior fellow in the Growth Lab at the Harvard University Center for International Development (CID), these roles are more closely connected than is often realized.
Inclusion Hub spoke with Lora at the CID’s Symposium on Inclusive Growth & Development (produced in collaboration with the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Meta-Council on Inclusive Growth and the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth) about macro forces and how smartphones, the key driver of financial inclusion, can trace their roots to government-led innovation.
Inclusion Hub: A big theme, as discussed, is that inclusive growth is changing the labor market– through the increase of self-employment in developed countries. What does the developed world have to learn from places like Latin America, where the percentage of workers outside formal employment structures has been steadily high?
Eduardo Lora: What a high percentage of workforce informality means, basically, is that there’s a lot of room to include people in the productive system. A lot of people who are working on their own aren’t really very productive, and they’re not really taking advantage of the potential of working with others in activities that are complex. Firms, because their work is coordinated and complex, can be much more productive than those working by themselves.