The Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) was a think-tank dedicated to helping nations join the global economy, operating between 1974 and 2000.

The announcement met with protests from students and staff since Harberger had previously advised the Augusto Pinochet military regime in Chile.

[2] The HIID coordinated development assistance, training, and research on Africa, Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, and Latin America.

For example, in the late 1970s David Korten headed a project funded by the Ford Foundation to assist in organization and management of national family-planning programs.

[4] In 1991 the HIID launched a program called WorldTeach that sent college student and graduates to schools in developing countries for a one-year assignment.

[12] The HIID and the Geneva-based World Economic Forum jointly produced the 1997 Global Competitiveness Report based on a late-1996 survey of 2,827 firms in 53 countries.

[14] In the late 1990s, USAID sponsored the Equity and Growth through Economic Research (EAGER) project, with the HIID commissioning work in eleven African countries.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded a project by the HIID to help rebuild the Russian economy on the basis of western concepts of ethics, democracy and free markets.

[24] In September 2000 Shleifer and Hay were accused by the Justice Department of making personal investments in Russia, and therefore failing to act as impartial advisers.

The episode became a factor in the dismissal of Larry Summers, who had set up the project as deputy secretary of the treasury under President Bill Clinton.

[16] The President of the institute from 1995, Jeffrey Sachs, resigned in 1999 to form the Center for International Development (CID), which would focus more on academic research than on consulting.

[26] A task force was appointed in July 1999 to review the future of the HIID, which in January 2000 concluded that it should be dissolved, with its functions distributed to faculties within the University.