Jerik Cruz

How has the global spread of the knowledge economy affected processes of development and innovation? What are the consequences of these shifts on democracy and governance? And what strategies can government, civil society, and responsible business use to steer these transformations in more inclusive directions?

These themes guide my research as a Ph.D. candidate at MIT Political Science and Graduate Research Fellow at MIT GOV/LAB on the political economy of development and innovation. Working across comparative politics, political economy, and economic geography, my work combines computational social science with qualitative, historical, and causal inference methods. I use these methods to revisit political economy theories of the underlying drivers of economic and political development, focusing on the governance of industrial policy at national, subnational, and international levels.

My current projects have been supported by the APSA/NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, the Institute for Humane Studies Junior Fellowship, the Southeast Asia Research Group, the MIT Center for International Studies, the MIT Political Methodology Lab, and MIT GOV/LAB. I have also been awarded the MIT Open Data Prize for my ongoing work on OpenAudit, an academe-civil society inititative leveraging publicly-available audit reports and AI algorithms to advance governance research and accountability advocacy in the Philippines and other developing democracies.

Before my PhD, I consulted as a development economist for international organizations such as the United Nations Development Programme, the Asian Development Bank, and the International Labour Organization. I’ve also worked as an advocacy strategist on multi-awarded public health, environmental justice, and good governance campaigns, including the campaign to legislate the Philippines’ Sin Tax Law of 2012, which is today funding the country’s universal healthcare program.