Featured series 
The Growth Lab has more than 50 faculty, fellows, research assistants, and staff working on development challenges in more than a dozen countries worldwide. The Lab’s research in 2020 included modeling pandemic-related tradeoffs, mapping the network of global business travel, identifying foreign exchange constraints in Ethiopia, tracking the migration of the Albanian diaspora, and uncovering environmentally friendly diversification opportunities in Peru. Every project, paper, and presentation brought hundreds of charts, graphics, dashboards, and prototypes. The following are examples of some of the more notable visual insights from this year.
Global business travel network
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The figure shows the network of global business travel. Most business travel takes place between rich countries that are close to one another, with 65 percent of all business travel taking place within the top 1 percent pairs of countries. The best predictor of business travel from one country is the number of establishments that are owned by corporations that are headquartered in the other country.
The promise of plastic manufacturing in Albania
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In collaboration with the Government of Albania, the Growth Lab team developed an Industry Targeting Dashboard. The tool draws from numerous data sources to equip the user with the capacity to explore the strategic fit of 272 industries. It analyzes both the Albania-specific attractiveness and viability indicators for each industry. For example, manufacturing of plastics is a strategic industry for investment promotion in Albania due to its very high score across all viability indicators and high score on most attractiveness indicators.
Visit the Growth Lab’s Viz Hub for all the visual insights of 2020.
