The opening session of the World Law Congress began today with the welcoming of the Board of the World Law Congress and the solemn ceremony for the awarding of Doctor Honoris Causa titles to distinguish international figures in the fields of law, economics, academia, and the arts, held at the University of Arts in Tirana.
The ceremony, organized jointly by Albanian universities and the World Law Foundation, marks one of the most important moments of academic life, where universities come together to honor five prominent international personalities with the title of “Doctor Honoris Causa.” Among them were Ricardo Hausmann, the renowned academic and economist; Javier Cremades, President of the World Jurist Association and one of the leading voices in the promotion and protection of the rule of law; Jose Luiz Manzano, Andi Hoxhaj, and Joze Manuel Ciria, who through their work and contributions have left a profound mark on the development of thought, art, and institutions at the international level.
The ceremony precedes the main day of proceedings, which will take place on May 7 at the National Theatre of Opera and Ballet. The two-day events are jointly organized by the World Jurist Association in cooperation with the Albanian Ministry of Justice.
Prime Minister Edi Rama, who was present at the ceremony, delivered a speech in honor of the awarding of Doctor Honoris Causa title to the renowned academic and economist Ricardo Hausmann:
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Prime Minister Edi Rama: Good evening, everyone.
It’s a privilege for us to be the capital, the welcoming capital of the World Law Congress.
And I feel very well that just a year before that congress, for us to be here together, and we’ll be together tomorrow in a special session which will be the prelude for the world congress according to the tradition of this global platform convening distinguished people of uh the world of law from all continents.
Tonight, here I was called to proceed with my remarks on the conferral of the Doctor Honoris Causa title for Professor Ricardo Hausmann, and I was called with a request that he has made this request to the organizers, actually, and believe me, this is not an easy burden, and in special cases, I find it impossible to entrust my words to the translator. I will continue my speech in English because for me it is an exam in front of a professor.
Gentlemen, many economists explain the world after it changes. And then there are a very small number of economists who help countries change before the world notices.
Professor Ricardo Hausmann belongs unmistakably to the second category. Tonight we are not simply honoring a celebrated academic, a globally respected intellectual or the legendary director of the Centre for International Development and the Further Growth Lab at Harvard University. We are honoring a mind that has spent a lifetime teaching nations how to discover possibilities hidden inside themselves.
And I must confess something from the beginning. My relationship with Ricardo started as a total failure. I chased him unsuccessfully when I was still in opposition. I wrote to him. I searched for ways to reach him. I tried to tell him that Albania was worth his time, and in exchange, I got silence. Nothing, absolutely no sign that this famous Harvard professor had even noticed the existence of a loud Albanian painter trying to become prime minister.
And what made the silence even more mysterious was that Ricardo himself was in opposition to the Venezuelan leadership, so I kept wondering why a man intellectually self- condemned to dislike governments would refuse to talk to someone desperately trying to bring one down.
But in the end, I understood something very important to get Ricardo Hausmann’s attention: you first must win the election, which in retrospect may be the most sophisticated vetting process ever designed by an economist.
So, once I won, Ricardo came, and he did not come as one more prestigious expert flying business class into a developing country with a PowerPoint presentation full of imported wisdom and a return ticket already booked in his pocket, but with no intention of leaving a trace behind.
He came as what in military language makes all the difference with boots on the ground. And that matters because countries like ours have seen many experts. Experts who arrive already knowing everything. Experts who explain your country to you after spending six hours inside a hotel. Experts who produce reports are so thick that nobody reads them. And recommendations so more of the same that nobody believes in them.
And even worse, experts who never fail and always blame you for their failures. Ricardo is a totally different type. He listened, he questioned, he observed.
Our first real conversation happened on a rooftop in Tirana. And he spoke to me right away about the need to understand where Albania’s new sources of growth could come, after the financial crisis, at a time when remittances were declining, and the construction boom seemed exhausted. It is for another day to see how he concluded the new sources of growth.
But the striking thing in his list was that, without knowing, he put in front of me the same list that someone else, some decades ago, during communist Albania, named Franz Josef Strauss put on the table of the communist regime.
But what struck me even more was not the list itself. It was the way he looked at the country. Ricardo looked at Albania not as a case study, not as a problem to solve, not as another country somewhere at the edge of Europe. He looked at Albania as a country with untapped complexity, hidden energy, unfinished potential. And for people beginning to govern a country long accustomed to hearing haunting voices from within us, why it could not succeed, and endless lectures from outside about how it should succeed. This sounded like entirely new music because Ricardo does not approach nations like a mechanic approaches broken machinery.
He approaches them almost like a cartographer of human possibility. He searches for capabilities invisible even to the countries themselves. He asks not only what a country is, but what it could become. And that is profoundly rare as a gift, especially in our age of intellectual cynicism, where it is always easier to predict collapse than to imagine transformation.
Over the years, Ricardo taught me many things, some inspiring, some uncomfortable, some extremely expensive to learn properly.
He taught me, for example, that playing with macroeconomics is like playing with a wolf hiding in the forest.
First, you think the forest is quiet, and you can just play. Then suddenly, the wolf appears and reminds you that numbers can bite and bite you very hard. When you are in politics, this is not always pleasant news. Politicians naturally believe that reality is something they can negotiate. Economists like Ricardo exist to explain that, eventually, reality is there to send the invoice.
And together with that lesson came another one, maybe even more important. He taught me that what you prevent from happening will never make headlines. No newspaper will celebrate the crisis that never came. No television debate will discuss the disaster that was avoided. No voters will applaud the catastrophe that remained invisible. And yet preventing the wrong thing from happening is often one of the greatest contributions a leader can make to their country.
This is a difficult, very difficult philosophy for democratic politics, which rewards spectacle far more generously than prevention. But Ricardo taught me that serious leadership is often the art of avoiding invisible collapses. And whenever I became too dramatic about our problems, which I admit for an artist accidentally trapped inside the prime minister’s office may happen too often. Ricardo would look at me with that calm smile and deliver one of his favorite pills. Prime Minister, you can’t imagine how many people in this world doing your job nowadays would love to have your problems, which was Ricardo’s elegant way of saying stop complaining and blaming yourself. Your country is doing fine. He taught me that countries do not defer based on what they have but based on what they know.
A revolutionary approach for countries that spent decades obsessing over natural resources while neglecting the most important resource of all, collective know-how.
He taught me that institutions are essential for success. But he also taught me something even more encouraging for a country like ours, where institutions were historically the missing link. Success itself can build institutions that functioning systems are not created
only through laws, charts and formal diagrams. They are also created through momentum, through confidence, through people beginning to believe that improvement is possible and therefore worth organizing around.
And then he introduced us to one of the most practical ideas for surviving this functional bureaucracy and still making big projects happen. The black belt teams are small groups of highly capable people empowered to cut through layers of institutional paralysis and simply get things done.
For the bureaucracy, this sounded almost illegal. For Albania, it sounded miraculous. And in many ways, it was starting with the implementation of the Trans Adriatic Pipeline project.
I remember that before even entering office, I had a delegation from the shareholders of TAP, and they were very worried because they didn’t know what to expect from Albania, and while they seemed very confident about Turkey, Greece, and even Italy, they sounded completely alarmistic about Albania.
How will their pipe cross our country without facing terrible problems? We created the black belt team across all agencies, and when the project was over, they came back to me, and they said, “We’re sorry. We owe you an apology. Albania was the best partner we had in this endeavor.” The others are so-so.
So, of course, Ricardo also tried for years to convince me about the idea of the Albanian Development Corporation. I resisted stubbornly, not because the idea was bad. It wasn’t, and not because, like usually politicians do, I process that extraordinary ability to reject good ideas until sometime transform them into obvious truths.
No, I don’t. But for some reason, the idea felt complicated to me at the time. While it was a remarkably beneficial instrument for the country and for the public interests.
Nevertheless, Ricardo persisted patiently every time we would meet. I remained skeptical, Albanian, and as a result, we lost some years before finally understanding that he was right, making it happen and beginning to see the benefits. A similar delay shaped our thinking about the development bank, but for an entirely different reason. Every time the idea resurfaced, Ricardo would remind me of one brutally simple truth. a development bank can be a great instrument if managed independently and professionally, but it can become a terrible instrument if run by politics.
In other words, the problem is never the instrument itself. The real question is whether the country has the maturity to resist turning every delicate institution into a political toy. So, we choose some caution before speed, and now the development bank has been created and is preparing to open its doors.
The ability to combine realism with optimism is perhaps what makes Ricardo so rare. He never romanticizes countries, but he never condemns them either.
He sees weakness very clearly, but he sees possibilities even more clearly. And beneath all ideas, theories, frameworks, and strategies, regardless of work, there has always been something deeply and rarely humane.
What I learned from his theory of economic complexity is in the end not really about economics alone. It is about people, about know-how, about trust, about the invisible networks of cooperation that allow societies to create things no individual alone could create. It is even in a way about storytelling because nations also become what they learn to imagine about themselves.
As Ricardo once put it beautifully, development is a process of accumulating collective know-how. He taught us that prosperity is not buried underground, like oil or minerals. Prosperity lives inside people, inside their ability to learn together, work together, build together. And for countries like Albania, this idea is liberating because we spent too much time and too much of our history being told what we lacked to feel inadequate and too much of our transition being told what we should imitate to look acceptable.
Ricardo helped me and us think instead about what we already possess, what we can develop, and what we may yet become. Of course, all this does not mean he became Albanian. But somewhere along the way, something very beautiful happened. The relationship stopped being one between a very wise advisor and the government seeking advice.
It became a relationship of mutual hope for our country, Albania, of friendship and respect, of shared curiosity about the future of both our countries and of the world we live in.
And that perhaps is Ricardo’s greatest talent. He does not make countries feel examined. He makes them feel imaginable again. So today, as we honor him, we honor more than a distinguished economist and more than a brilliant academic. We honor restless intelligence, a generous mentor, patient listener, and a builder of ideas that travel far beyond classrooms and conferences.
We honor a man who reminds countries like ours that history is not destiny and that small countries are not condemned to small futures. That transformation is not magic. It is knowledge organized through courage. And what a privilege it is to say tonight that this man is above all a loyal friend of Albania, our friend.
Professor Hauseman, dear Ricardo,
I know it took long, but you made it so long. I am forever grateful to you, not simply for your precious advice, but for your faith in Albania.
Faith that this country could aspire higher. Faith that we could think about ourselves bigger. Faith that our future is not inherited but built day by day. And for that I thank you deeply.
We all thank you very deeply.
