Jerik Cruz

How has the global spread of the knowledge economy affected the dynamics of industrial policy and state-business relations? What are the consequences of these shifts on democracy and governance? How can government, responsible business, and civil society steer these transformations in more inclusive directions?

These themes guide my research as a Ph.D. candidate at MIT Political Science, a graduate fellow at MIT GOV/LAB, and an MIT SERC scholar on the political economy of development, in comparative and historical perspective. 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 theories of the drivers of economic and political development, focusing on the dynamics of industrial policy at national, subnational, and global levels.

My 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, MIT GOV/LAB, and Canada’s International Development Research Centre. 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.