📅 🕐 12 Jul 2025🔗 Fuente: eltiempo.com🕑 4 min de lectura
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With a vibrant, provocative and anecdote-filled speech, Catalan economist Xavier Sala-i-Martin, professor at Columbia University and creator of the prestigious Global Competitiveness Index of the World Economic Forum, closed the OECD Global Forum on Local Development with a clear message: progress cannot be exported, it must be built locally.
“The problem with the economy is not understanding the general principles; we know that. The real problem is how to do it, how to implement it,” Sala-i-Martin told a packed audience at the Gran Malecón del Río in Barranquilla. “And the honest answer is: we don’t know. There is no universal formula.”
He does not recommend copying models
Puerta de Oro is where the OECD Local Development Forum 2025 was held. Foto:Sergio Cárdenas. EL TIEMPO
Throughout his lecture, he dismantled the common idea of replicating successful models in other countries without taking into account the profound differences between contexts.
He recalled, for example, how Spain tried in the 1980s to copy the Swedish labor system—where unemployment benefits were generous—without considering cultural and social differences.
«In Sweden, people follow the rules. In Spain, we grew up reading Lazarillo de Tormes, where rogues do well. What happened? Unemployment skyrocketed and did not fall for decades.»
He used this example to insist that public policies must be born out of trial and error, adapted to the specific realities of each community.
“The economists who have transformed the world have not done so from an office. They have done so by experimenting,” he said, citing Nobel Prize winners Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer, promoters of the controlled experiment-based economy.
But he warned that such trials cannot be carried out on a large scale, as in the case of an entire country: “We don’t have 50,000 countries to test 50,000 policies.”
He therefore proposed that the natural place for experimentation should be cities and local territories, where authorities can design policies that are closer to citizens, implement prototypes, observe results, and scale up what works.
Specific examples
View of the OECD forum in Barranquilla. Foto:Alcaldía
The case of China, he said, is an example of this. After Mao’s death, the communist government did not impose a capitalist transformation from the center.
It allowed Shenzhen, on the edge of Hong Kong, to experiment with its own economic model. Local success led to a gradual national transformation based on results rather than imported ideologies.
Following this logic, the economist called on local governments to “think like entrepreneurs.” What does that mean? Listening to communities, understanding real problems, defining specific challenges, generating diverse ideas, building prototypes, testing solutions, and adjusting what doesn’t work.
“That’s how startups work. And that’s how governments that want to innovate should work,” he concluded. And that’s where his speech took an emotional turn: he spoke of Barranquilla as a real example of that vision.
On his tour of the city, Sala-i-Martin visited the new Barrio Abajo Open-Air Museum, a project promoted by local merchants, artists, and the district government.
“Everything I explained about prototyping public policies, I saw this morning. People were listened to, proposals were voted on, artists were chosen, and murals were created that transformed a neighborhood,” he said enthusiastically.
Citizen ownership
Traditional dances at the OECD Local Development Forum. Foto:Sergio Cárdenas / CEET
But what impressed him most was a spontaneous gesture. In the middle of the opening ceremony, a neighbor—nicknamed “Cuadrado” because of his resemblance to the Colombian soccer player—took out his own chair, offered it to the mayor, and promised to protect the murals from possible damage.
«That’s taking ownership of public property. That’s what ensures the success of a policy: that people feel it’s theirs.“
That’s why the economist welcomed the OECD’s decision to hold this forum in Barranquilla. ”Of all the cities in the world they could have chosen, they chose this one. And they chose well. Because here, they don’t just talk about local development. Here, they practice it.»
With a final ovation, his message resonated: the future of development is not found in expert manuals, but in the ability of communities to listen, experiment, and learn. And in that, Barranquilla—according to Sala-i-Martin—is already one step ahead.
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Closing of the OECD Local Development Forum Foto:
LEIDYS RIVERO MARTÍNEZ
EL TIEMPO
Editor’s note: This text is an artificially intelligent English translation of the original Spanish version, which can be found here . Any comment, please write to [email protected]
