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 and graduate fellow at MIT GOV/LAB on the political economy of development and innovation, in comparative and international perspective. Working across comparative politics, political economy, and economic geography, my work combines computational social science with qualitative, historical, and causal inference methods. With these methods, I revisit theories of economic and political development, focusing on the dynamics of industrial policy at national, subnational, and global levels. In Fall 2026, I will join the Harvard Kennedy School’s Reimagining the Economy Project and the Harvard Center for International Development as a Postdoctoral Fellow from 2026-2028.

Among others, my projects have been supported by the APSA/NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant, Microsoft’s AI Economy Institute, the Institute for Humane Studies Junior Fellowship, the Southeast Asia Research Group, and Canada’s International Development Research Centre. My research has received paper awards from APSA’s Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics section, while my ongoing work on the OpenAudit inititative, which leverages agentic AI to advance governance research and accountability advocacy in the Philippines, has also been honored with the MIT Open Data Prize.

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.