Skip to main content

March 13, 2012

March 13 2012 will go down as the best day of my life for it is on that day that I received news of my acceptance into the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. The subject line of the acceptance email read "Good news from MPA/ID Admissions". In the body of the email were the words:

My colleagues and I very much hope you’ll join an exceptional group of people by answering the echo of President John F. Kennedy’s call to “ask what you can do.”

One congratulatory note read:

Regardless of where you choose to go to grad school, you now know what the rest of us have known all along. You most certainly have what it takes to be an Ivy leaguer. Congratulations again. Harvard certainly is the best of the best, and you deserve it!

I look forward to meeting my peers in the fall, and I feel more enabled to answer the call, and pledge to do what I can to affect positive change not just in my native Zimbabwe, but where ever life will take me.

Thank you to all those who believed in me. Let's do this!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Modeling Core PCE inflation: A dual approach

Today's release of the August 2025 Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) inflation data drew widespread media attention, with coverage highlighting both the persistence of inflation and its implications for Federal Reserve policy. Across outlets, analysts pointed to resilient consumer spending and income growth as signs of underlying economic strength, even as inflation remains above the Fed's 2% target. The consensus among media reports is that while inflation is not worsening, its stubbornness continues to challenge policymakers navigating a softening labor market and evolving rate expectations. To provide deeper insights into inflation's trajectory, I've developed a forecasting framework that combines two econometric approaches — ARIMA time series modeling and Phillips Curve analysis—to predict Core PCE inflation. This analysis presents a unique opportunity to validate my forecasting methodology against eight months of 2025 data. ...

Mapping the Blast Radius: What Happens When the "World's Factory" Stops?

In global trade, "efficiency" often masks "fragility." We know that China is central to the global electronics supply chain, but how central? And if that node were to go dark, who would feel the shockwaves first? To answer this, I moved beyond standard trade statistics and built a network simulation using the OECD Inter-Country Input-Output (ICIO) Tables (2023 Edition) . This dataset maps the DNA of the global economy, tracking every dollar of input across 66 countries and 45 industries. 1. The Blast Radius: Tracing the Contagion I treated the global economy as a directed graph and simulated a total supply shock to Chinese Electronics (CHN_C26) . By tracing the flow of inputs across three tiers of buyers, I visualized the "Blast Radius" of this disruption. Fig 1: The Supply Chain Cascade. The shock originates in China (Red) and immediately hits "Tier 1" assembly hubs (Dark Blue) before cascading to global consumers...

Turkey's Informality Tax

A general-equilibrium model of Turkey's dual labour market says the cost of taxing formal work doesn't show up where we usually look for it. The bottomline: Making Turkey's transfer to the unemployed a third more generous raises unemployment from 8.6% to 9.2% . That is the honest cost, and it is not large. How you pay for it matters more than whether you pay for it. Funded by payroll taxes, the poor end up 0.6% worse off than before the transfer was raised — the policy defeats itself. Funded by VAT, they are 0.5% better off . The reason is not unemployment, which is nearly identical under both. It is informality . A higher payroll tax pushes formal jobs into the unregistered sector, where the wage is 43% lower and nothing is taxed. Turkey is not on the wrong side of the payroll-tax Laffer curve — revenue peaks around 53%, well above today's ~37.5% wedge. But the marginal cost...