Workshop on Environment and Development in Latin America at CIDE (CIDE-WEDELA)

In recent years, CIDE (my home institution) has made an effort to increase the number of tenure-track hires in the environmental field. My colleague Alejandro Lopez-Feldman (who is the Director of the Economics Division and a solid scholar of environmental and development economics) was kind enough to invite me to the Workshop on Environment and Development in Latin America that was recently held at CIDE Santa Fe in Mexico City.

Several of my colleagues, Juan Manuel Torres Rojo (who is a forest economist and the former head of CONAFOR), Hector Nuñez who works alongside me in the Region Centro campus of CIDE, and David Heres who is at CIDE Santa Fe, as well as our recent hire Lopamudra Chakraborti who is also at the Region Centro campus are all environmental economists and it’s exciting to see the emerging environment cluster emerge at CIDE.

I’m not an environmental economist per se, but as a specialist in environmental policy, it is important for my own research that I am conversant in the scholarship that is being produced in the environmental economics field. Furthermore, my quantitative training allows me to have reasonable coherent conversations with my colleagues about the work they are undertaking. While the entire program was really good, I was there with most interest to hear one of the keynotes, Dr. Madhu Khanna, of Khanna and Damon fame.

Madhu and I met at a North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation workshop on information-disclosure policy instruments many, many years ago, while I was still a PhD student. Her paper with Damon (1999) was one of the many papers I had to read for my comprehensive examinations, and I fell in love with the way she conducted evaluations of voluntary environmental policy instruments, such as the US 33/50 and the Toxics Release Inventory. I have studied information-disclosure policy instruments in Mexico (the RETC, Registro de Emisiones y Transferencia de Contaminantes). Madhu wrote a really nice paper that provides an overview of non-regulatory approaches to pollution control that you can read here.

I was also very interested in hearing the panel on climate variability and impacts on Mexico. I was fascinated with Edward Taylor (University of California, Davis) on Climate Change and Labor Allocation in Mexico: Evidence from Annual Fluctuations in Weather, and with Marcelo Olivera (Universidad Autónoma de México, Cuajimalpa) who presented on Climate Change, Rain Fed Maize Productivity and Rural Malnutrition in Mexico. Unfortunately I couldn’t Storify this workshop in time and thus I can’t post the actual tweets that I sent throughout the first day of the workshop, but you can read them here.

I think the workshop was quite successful, and with the impending opening of our Masters programs in Regional and Environmental Economics (coordinated by my friend and colleague David Juarez), we will definitely be seeing more environmentally-focused events at both campuses of CIDE. Stay tuned.

You can share this blog post on the following social networks by clicking on their icon.