A leading architect of economic policy in Latin America, Professor Ricardo Hausmann, was named director of the Center for International Development yesterday as the University pledged to ensure the cash-strapped center’s future.

With its coffers dwindling, the center has suffered from a parade of leadership over the past four years, and University President Lawrence H. Summers once considered scrapping the program altogether. But the Kennedy School of Government, which administers the center, said in a press release that Summers’ office would provide seed money to keep the center afloat while it seeks a permanent endowment.

Hausmann, a former Venezuelan government official and chief economist of the Inter-American Development Bank, will assume the director’s post vacated last month by Professor Mark R. Rosenzweig, who criticized Summers and the University for neglecting the center.

The appointment of Hausmann, professor of the practice of economic development at the Kennedy School, and the commitment to additional funding appeared to at least temporarily rescue the center from a period of uncertainty that had alarmed many professors and students. The center coordinates and funds research on international development among its nearly 90 faculty associates and doled out roughly $200,000 to students and student groups last year.

But with no permanent endowment from which to draw, the center was on pace to go belly-up within the next two years, according to Aimee Pease Fox ’96, the center’s executive director. A Harvard official close to the center said Summers’ office would provide roughly $500,000 in seed money, enough to hold over the center for an additional half-year while gifts are raised for an endowment.

“CID is an extraordinary resource for the University as we deepen our commitment to promoting development around the world,” Summers said in a statement yesterday. The president was far less supportive a year and a half ago, when he considered dissolving the center, which was established in 1998 by economist Jeffrey D. Sachs ’76, who later left for a plum post at Columbia University.

Several people involved with the center—including Rosenzweig, the center’s former director—said political differences with Summers had stymied their progress.

“Some think that President Summers wants to (perhaps sub-consciously) organize the study of development around himself, and that is why little or no resources are provided” to the center, Rosenzweig wrote in an e-mail last month. He left to join a better-funded program on economic growth at Yale.

Hausmann, Rosenzweig’s replacement, has differed with the president’s views on international development in the past, while Summers steered global fiscal policy at the Treasury Department. But Hausmann downplayed those differences in a telephone interview yesterday.

“It’s impossible to have two economists who have shared views on too many topics, and honestly, I think that’s great,” he said. “I don’t feel that President Summers’ opinions are anything other than valuable, collegial inputs.”

Hausmann, who has been closely involved with the center since arriving at the Kennedy School in 2000, said he hoped to establish closer links between researchers at the center and officials in the developing world. A native of Venezuela, Hausmann is the center’s first director from a developing nation.

“There is a lot of thought in the industrial world as to how it is that the rich countries should help the poor countries. That question is not very intuitive to me because I come from a developing country. My focus is on what the developing countries should be doing, not what we in the United States should be doing,” he said.

The dean of the Kennedy School, David T. Ellwood ’75, said in an interview that Hausmann “was the obvious choice right from the start.” Ellwood said he led the search for a new director but consulted with Summers before appointing Hausmann.

A former minister of planning and board member of the Central Bank in Venezuela, Hausmann’s research has largely focused on developing nations in Latin America, though his current projects include South Africa and China, among other countries.

In his most recent project, Hausmann led faculty from across the University in developing recommendations for growth strategies in El Salvador, Uruguay, and Kazakhstan, according to a Kennedy School press release.

“Since I’ve been at Harvard, I’ve tried to think more broadly” about development issues outside of Latin America, Hausmann said.

Though he served in various posts in the Venezuelan government through the 1990s, Hausmann has since appeared to cut his ties to Caracas.

When Hugo Chávez assumed the presidency in 1998, he asked the economist to serve in his administration, but Hausmann declined, according to El Nacional, a Venezuelan daily newspaper. Since then, Hausmann has emerged as a vehement critic of Chávez.

In September 2004, Hausmann and MIT economist Roberto Rigobon published a study concluding that the previous month’s Venezuelan referendum, in which Chávez survived a presidential recall, was almost certainly fraudulent. The study cast doubt on a previous election audit conducted by the Carter Center, a human-rights group founded by former President Carter.

The Venezuelan ambassador to the United Kingdom, Alfredo Todo Hardy, described Hausmann as “a leading figure in the anti-Chávez opposition movement” in a September 2004 letter to the Financial Times.

As he assumes the directorship of the Center for International Development, Hausmann said he was not concerned about the center’s past financial troubles.

“If you think of the irony of dealing with countries that are poor and lack everything—those are really serious problems,” Hausmann said. “Funding a program like CID at Harvard should be easy compared to that.”

—Daniel J. Hemel contributed to the reporting of this story.
—Staff writer Zachary M. Seward can be reached at seward@fas.harvard.edu.