Hausmann, a Venezuelan, is planning a very different public presence after leaving the IDB. He's deeply worried about events in his country, where he once was the minister of planning, and wants to speak about them publicly in ways that aren't possible at one of the multilateral development banks.
| Hausmann: "We need to make sure that we are not part of the problem" | ||||||
Hausmann's departure is clearly a major loss for the development community in Washington. "He was tremendously effective and basically put the research arm of the IDB on the map," says Sebastian Edwards who served as chief economist of the Latin American and Caribbean Department at the World Bank from 1993 to 1996. "The IDB had been producing research, some of it high quality, all along, but it was not being noticed."
Always provocative, Hausmann was known for looking into new areas and coming up with controversial solutions, but ones that obviously struck a chord in Latin American economics.