Jerik Cruz

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

These themes guide my research as an incoming Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Reimagining the Economy Project and the Harvard Center for International Development on the comparative and international political economy of development. Working across political economy, comparative politics, and economic geography, my work combines computational social science with qualitative, historical, and causal inference methods. With these methods, I revisit theories of development and governance in the context of the new knowledge-based economy, with a focus on the governance of industrial policies at national, subnational, and international levels.

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 also received the American Political Science Association’s Best Paper in Science, Technology, and Environmental Politics Award, while my work on the OpenAudit inititative, which leverages agentic AI to advance governance research and advocacy in the Philippines, was a winner of the MIT Open Data Prize. You can access the OpenAudit website here.

I will receive my Ph.D. at MIT Political Science in September 2026. Before that, I consulted as a development economist for international organizations like the United Nations Development Programme and the Asian Development Bank. 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.