Agricultural and Resource Economics

Alain de Janvry is an economist working on international economic development, with expertise principally in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle-East, and the Indian subcontinent. Fields of work include poverty analysis, rural development, quantitative analysis of development policies, impact analysis of social programs, technological innovations in agriculture, and the management of common property resources. He has worked with many international development agencies, including FAO, IFAD, the World Bank, UNDP, ILO, the CGIAR, and the Inter-American Development Bank as well as foundations such as Ford, Rockefeller and Kellogg. His main objective in teaching, research, and work with development agencies is the promotion of human welfare, including understanding the determinants of poverty and analyzing successful approach to improve well-being and promote sustainability in resource use.

Dick Norgaard is recognized within the field of economics (Who’s Who in Economics, Millennium Edition, and The Changing Face of Economics: Conversations with Cutting Edge Economists) for both his critiques of and contributions to economics. He is one of the founders of the field of ecological economics. His recent research addresses how environmental problems challenge scientific understanding and the policy process, how ecologists and economists understand systems differently, and how globalization affects environmental governance. He has over 100 publications spanning the fields of environment and development, tropical forestry and agriculture, environmental epistemology, energy economics, and ecological economics. He is author of the book Development Betrayed: The End of Progress and a Coevolutionary Revisioning of the Future (Routeldege, 1994).

Michael's research in economics has focused largely on aspects of modeling individual choice behavior, with applications to demand forecasting, inducing conservation, environmental regulation and economic valuation. He is a leading authority on the methodology of non-market valuation using techniques of both revealed and stated preference. A team of two dozen prominent experts led by professors from the California Climate Change Center released a new report in early 2006 on the economic implications of meeting global warming emissions reduction targets established by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2005. The governor's goals include reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to 2000 levels by the year 2010, and to 1990 levels by 2020. "Managing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in California," the first report in a series of economic and technology assessments, finds that just eight policy strategies can take California halfway to the governor's 2020 targets, while increasing the Gross State Product by approximately $60 billion and creating more than 20,000 new jobs.