It might actually do some good for the world, says a new study out of the Harvard Kennedy School's Growth Lab, which finds a direct link—of causation, not correlation—between a country's incoming business travel and its economic growth. The more business travelers a country received, the better its industrial ventures fared, and the higher its GDP climbed.

The study's authors attribute this link to the movement of "knowhow"—a quantity that exists only in brains and is transferred from brain to brain through lived experiences, over years of imitating, repeating, and responding to situations. It's the type of knowledge that cannot be written in a book or defined by an algorithm, but must be picked up from others by working alongside them.

"Moving knowhow quickly involves moving brains," the authors wrote—i.e., flying those brains, and the people who carry them, overseas and across continents. This could explain why business travel is still so prevalent, despite being far slower and more expensive than digital communication such as Skype or Zoom.

For the study, Harvard researchers partnered with the Mastercard Center for Inclusive Growth, using data from Mastercard's corporate credit and debit cards to track business travel from 2011 to 2016. With this data they ranked countries on incoming and outgoing knowhow, with Germany, Canada, and the U.S. among the top countries exporting knowhow.

Read the full article at fastcompany.com