Professor at Toulouse School of Economics Writes Open Letter Accusing Harvard Professor of Plagiarism
Today's Substack is not by me. Instead, I reprinted this open letter from X with permission from the author, César Hidalgo of the Toulouse School of Economics."
Eleven years ago, I quit an abusive academic relationship with my former co-author Ricardo Hausmann, presently a Professor of Practice at the Harvard Kennedy School. This abuse has now returned in a new act of plagiarism. Today, I am pushing back.
A few months ago, I learned about two new working papers that Hausmann and his team posted at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) [1,2]. The first one claims to introduce a “multidimensional approach” to economic complexity by combining data on trade, patents, and publications, and concludes that these metrics are complementary when explaining economic growth. Yet, this is exactly what my co-authors and I did in a 2023 peer-reviewed journal paper [3] that Hausmann and his co-authors were perfectly aware of (as I document below). Instead of giving proper acknowledgement to our work, however, Hausmann and his team hide it in a footnote on page 18 clouded in a factually incorrect statement. The footnote says that “other studies have developed similar complexity metrics under different names.” That is not true. Our 2023 paper uses the same name as Hausmann et al.’s 2024 “new” working paper, namely, the “Economic Complexity Index (ECI).”
Now, it is reasonable to wonder if this is a misunderstanding or oversight. People sometimes forget to cite others for innocent reasons. But there is clear evidence to the contrary in two other working papers published almost simultaneously with the first one. One of them, is another WIPO working paper by his coauthors but without Hausmann [4]. This paper does properly acknowledge the existence of our work in multidimensional economic complexity in the main text: “Following […] Stojkoski et al. (2023).” So, the team clearly knew about the work. The third working paper [2], also at WIPO, includes Hausmann as a first author making a call for the use of multidimensional economic complexity methods in innovation policy. Here, the only example of multidimensional work cited by Hausmann et al. is his own 2024 working paper [1], this time completely ignoring the 2023 peer-reviewed paper he knew about (“In Hausmann et al. (2024), we measure this for each country in different dimensions (e.g., trade and patents).”). Unsurprisingly, I had made a similar call for multidimensional expansion of the field in a paper that was also published after peer-review in 2023 (Hidalgo CA, Research Policy, 2023 [5]) and that had been available as a pre-print for two years. In that paper, I cite our original multidimensional economic complexity contribution and also two other papers that had introduced multidimensional approaches to relatedness, another key concept in the field, which Hausmann does not cite either.
In my view, these three documents provide clear evidence of an attempt by Hausmann to misappropriate an idea published by a former co-author while knowing of that work. This, violates Harvard’s honor code [6] which requires the “accurate attribution of sources” and considers “plagiarizing or misrepresenting the ideas or language of someone else as one’s own” as a violation of its community standards. In the first working paper [1], he copies the idea while hiding the attribution in a factually incorrect footnote. Simultaneously, he releases a second working paper citing this unpublished work as the only example of prior art [2]. The third paper [4], the one by his co-authors but not him, shows that the team knows about the work and behaves differently when the senior member of the team (Hausmann) is not an author. My co-authors and I were dismayed by Hausmann’s attempt to misappropriate our ideas. Why bother doing original work and getting it past peer-review (which for both of our papers was a lengthy process), if authors with a platform such as Harvard University take your ideas and pass them as their own? But this is not the first time. In 2019, Hausmann and his team announced a “first-of-its-kind” and “unique” feature in their trade data visualization website (“Atlas Online”): the “country profiles.” Yet, my group had supported country profiles in the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) since 2012, several months before Hausmann and I parted ways in 2013 (see full story document for details [7]). The reason that the profiles disappeared in Hausmann’s copy of the Observatory in 2013 was that they were deleted by his team, probably because they did not understand that we had conceived these pages for search engine optimization.
In short, the original OEC that I designed with my group and placed in the public domain had country profiles in 2012 and was redesigned in 2015 to make the country and product profiles the main part of the site. Today, http://OEC.world serves over 100,000 profiles, a design concept we use prominently when constructing other data distribution platforms (e.g. Data USA, Data Mexico, etc). In fact, in 2016 I published a “how to” guide in Scientific American for this kind of work in 2016 [9]. But when Hausmann and his team at Harvard finally built country profiles in 2019, seven years after we did, they claimed a “revolutionary first-of-its-kind” and “unique” feature, in their lab’s own website [10] and in the Harvard Gazette [11]
So why share this now?
I have three reasons.
First, I broke off my relationship with Hausmann in 2013 after several unpleasant experiences, which included having to fight for the authorship rights of junior authors (which Hausmann wanted to exclude from our joint book: The Atlas of Economic Complexity) and being exploited when we were equal partners in a company that I had registered for us to do joint consulting work (see full story document [7]). From there on, I just wanted to forget about him. The tacit deal was that, if he stopped the abuse, I could put this in the past. But Hausmann has repeatedly broken this tacit deal. His 2024 working paper research agenda seems to involve putting forward, without proper acknowledgement, ideas my team and I published after peer-review in 2023 and made available online in 2022. It has been more than a decade. This has to stop.
The second reason is that because Hausmann has done this before, I am concerned that if I don’t push back, he will do it again. Right now, my research group and I have a great thing going on. Should we worry that in 2026 Hausmann will try to pass off our 2024 and 2025 papers as his own?
The third reason is that this egregious behavior is supported by a power asymmetry that is highly profitable for Hausmann thanks to the Harvard platform. Soon after we split ways in 2013, Hausmann sold this [12] embarrassingly bad economic data visualization website to the Mexican Government as part of a project rumored to be about USD 5,000,000 (paid using an undisclosed and untraceable escrow account (“fideicomiso”)). The online platform was so sloppy that some government officials started to call it “El Mamarracho” (a derogatory term in Spanish for extremely shoddy work). I learned about this in 2019, after a new team entered Mexico’s economic ministry and invited us to build Data Mexico [13], a properly built open data portal integrating dozens of datasets in thousands of profiles for a fraction of the cost of the “Mamarracho.”
Hausmann has engaged in commercial endeavors with many governments (e.g. Albania, Azerbaijan, Colombia, Mexico, etc.). So, in my opinion, the target audience for these misappropriated working papers are not other scholars, but the officials who purchase economic development contracts from him and take the word of the Harvard Professor of Practice at face value.
This is what makes misappropriating the multidimensional economic complexity idea important. A strong motivation for any consulting work in this space is the fact that trade-based measures of economic complexity explain future economic growth. This was established in a paper Hausmann and I published together in 2009 [14], based on work we did together while I was a PhD student at the University of Notre Dame. But the 2023 multidimensional economic complexity paper made that idea obsolete. On the one hand, it simultaneously considers multiple expressions of complexity (trade, patents, and research), and on the other hand, it looks at multiple outcomes (growth, inequality, and emissions). Giving advice based on the latest developments in the field requires using a multidimensional framework.
Finally, I want to say that I have nothing against Hausmann’s co-authors, some of whom I know personally and some of whom I don’t. I understand that they are in a situation in which they may depend financially and professionally on Hausmann. His first attempt to spin my publicizing these facts may be to argue that someone of his caliber does not have the time to look at petty things like footnotes and references (pinning the responsibility on them). I don’t think that’s fair.
I also want to say that I do not consider Ricardo’s behavior necessarily representative of Harvard University or of the World Intellectual Property Organization. I have met many people at those organizations and continue to collaborate with some of them. They are outstanding scholars.
I have decided to go public with this statement after consulting with several senior colleagues and lawyers specialized in disputes in higher education.
I am absolutely distraught by having to deal with this situation eleven-years after I quit that abusive relationship. But he needs to cut it out.
Full Story Document:
References:
[1] Hausmann, Ricardo, Muhammed Ali Yildirim, Christian Chacua, Matte Hartog, and Shreyas Gadgin Matha. "Global trends in innovation patterns: A complexity approach." World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Economic Research Working Paper Series 80 (2024). https://wipo.int/edocs/pubdocs/en/wipo-pub-econstat-wp-80-en-global-trends-in-innovation-patterns-a-complexity-approach.pdf…
[2] Hausmann, Ricardo, Muhammed Ali Yildirim, Christian Chacua, Matte Hartog, and Shreyas Gadgin Matha. "Innovation Policies Under Economic Complexity." World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Economic Research Working Paper Series 79 (2024). https://wipo.int/publications/en/details.jsp?id=4726…
[3] Stojkoski, Viktor, Philipp Koch, and César A. Hidalgo. "Multidimensional economic complexity and inclusive green growth." Communications Earth & Environment 4, no. 1 (2023): 130. https://nature.com/articles/s43247-023-00770-0…
[4] Moscatelli, Federico, Christian Chacua, Shreyas Gadgin Matha, Matte Hartog, Eduardo Hernandez Rodriguez, and Muhammed Ali Yildirim. "Can we map innovation capabilities?." World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Economic Research Working Paper Series 81 (2024). https://wipo.int/publications/en/details.jsp?id=4728…
[5] Hidalgo, César A. "The policy implications of economic complexity." Research Policy 52, no. 9 (2023): 104863. https://sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048733323001476…
[6] Harvard College Honor Code https://oaisc.fas.harvard.edu/honor-code/
[7] Full Story Document https://dropbox.com/scl/fi/eye27gan0uhe81xml5n1d/FullStory_HH.pdf?rlkey=gmefhrz5s4a5forlxonn009xe&dl=0…
[8] The Observatory of Economic Complexity https://oec.world
[9] Scientific American Article on the Design of Open Data Sites https://dati.cittametropolitana.genova.it/sites/default/files/news-allegati/What%27s%20Wrong%20with%20Open-Data%20Sites--and%20How%20We%20Can%20Fix%20Them%20-%20Scientific%20American%20Blog%20Network.pdf…
[10] Growth Lab claim of profiles being first-of-its-kind https://growthlab.hks.harvard.edu/podcasts/country-profiles
[11…] Harvard Gazette claim of profiles being first-of-its-kind https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/newsplus/growth-labs-new-data-viz-tool-identifies-diversification-opportunities-for-130-countries/…
[12] Atlas de Complejidad Economica Mexico https://datos.gob.mx/complejidad/
[13] Data Mexico https://economia.gob.mx/datamexico
[14] Hidalgo, César A., and Ricardo Hausmann. "The building blocks of economic complexity." Proceedings of the national academy of sciences 106, no. 26 (2009): 10570-10575. https://pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.0900943106
Wow.
This is very disheartening for me to read. I have been a big fan of the field of Economic Complexity, Hidalgo, and Hausmann. I have read many books and articles that were written by them. I even cited Hidalgo multiple times in my "From Poverty to Progress" book series.
I had no idea that something like this was going on behind the scenes. As a former professor, I know that well-known academics often take credit for the work of their younger colleagues. I know neither of the parties and therefore cannot judge who is correct, but this needs to be thoroughly investigated by Harvard. Normally, this would be swept under the rug but Harvard is under significant pressure on other issues. Maybe this time will be different.
I hope that justice is served.
I was going to make the same sort of comment, because it still is confusing as to who wrote itYou probably added "This open letter was reprinted from X with permission from the author."
Change that to "Today's Substack is not be me. Instead, I reprinted this open letter from Twitter with permission from the author, Cesar Hidalgo of the Toulouse School of Economics."
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