The Economics of Sustainable Development

Andrew Foster is the George and Nancy Parker Chair of Economics at Brown University. He received his PhD from Berkeley in 1988 and worked at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to Brown University in 1998. He is an applied microeconomist with interests in development, environmental, and population economics. He has worked on a variety of topics, including technology adoption, forest cover, air quality regulation, agricultural scale, household formation and labor markets. Much of his research considers India, but he also has done work focused on Bangladesh, the Philippines, Mexico, and the United States.  He currently serves as the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Development Economics.

Michael Kremer directs the Development Innovation Lab at the University of Chicago, where he is a University Professor. He is the joint winner of Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (Economics Nobel Prize) 2019, for the “experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”. Kremer’s work focuses on innovation, including in education, health, water, finance, agriculture. He has also worked extensively on how to design institutions to accelerate innovation, including through Advance Market Commitments (AMC) and social innovation funds.

Kremer actively translates his academic work into real-world programs. He helped to design an AMC for a pneumococcal vaccine. Subsequently three vaccines have been approved, and rolled out in 60 countries, saving an estimated 700,000 lives. As part of the Accelerating Health Technologies group, he conducted research and advised governments and international organizations on how to accelerate vaccination against COVID-19. His work on school-based deworming informed India’s national deworming day, which treats over 275 million children each year. His work on safe drinking water led to the Dispensers for Safe Water Program, which reaches 4 million people via the NGO Evidence Action. He is a co-founder of Precision Agriculture for Development, which leverages digital technology to improve productivity and incomes for small-holder farmers in developing countries.

Kremer is a co-founder and serves as Scientific Director of USAID's Development Innovation Ventures (DIV), an open, tiered, evidenced-based fund that supports innovation for development.

Andrew Dabalen is the World Bank’s Africa Region Chief Economist since July 1, 2022. The Chief Economist is responsible for providing guidance on strategic priorities and the technical quality of economic analysis in the region, as well as for developing major regional economic studies, among other roles.

He has held various positions including Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Europe and Central Asia Region, Lead Economist and Practice Manager for Poverty and Equity in Africa and most recently, Practice Manager for Poverty and Equity in the South Asia Region. His research and scholarly publications focused on poverty and social impact analysis, inequality of opportunity, program evaluation, risk and vulnerability, labor markets, and conflict and welfare outcomes. He has co-authored regional reports on equality of opportunity for children in Africa, vulnerability and resilience in the Sahel, and poverty in a rising Africa. 

A Kenyan national, Dabalen holds a master’s degree in International Development from University of California - Davis, and a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from University of California - Berkeley.

Richard Damania is the Chief Economist of the Sustainable Development Practice Group, effective March 1, 2020.  He has held several positions in the World Bank including as Senior Economic Advisor in the Water Practice, Lead Economist in the Africa Region’s Sustainable Development Department, in the South Asia and Latin America and Caribbean Regions of the World Bank.  His work has spanned multiple sectors and has helped the World Bank become an acknowledged thought leader on matters relating to environment, water, and the economy. Prior to joining the World Bank, he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Adelaide.  He has published extensively with over 100 papers in scientific journals, has held numerous advisory positions with governments and in international organizations, and serves on the Editorial Board of several prestigious scientific journals.

Rémi Jedwab is a professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Elliott School and the Department of Economics of George Washington University, the Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy, and the Director of the ESIA Initiative on Climate Change and Sustainable Cities at George Washington University, and an Affiliated Scholar of the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University. Professor Jedwab's main fields of research are urban and real estate economics, development and growth, and environmental economics. Some of the issues he has studied include urbanization and structural transformation, urban construction and climate change, the economic determinants and effects of transportation infrastructure, and the roles of institutions, human capital and technology in development and growth. He is the co-founder and co-organizer of the World Bank-GWU Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Conference and the Washington Area Development Economics Symposium.

Chakib Jenane is a Moroccan national with extensive experience in the field of sustainable development. Currently, he holds the position of Regional Director for Sustainable Development for the Western and Central Africa Region at the World Bank. In this role, he is responsible for driving sustainable development initiatives and transformative projects in the region. Before his current position, Chakib Jenane served as the Practice Manager for the Agriculture and Food Practice at the World Bank. During this time, he provided leadership and guidance to ensure the bank's engagement in agriculture in West and Central Africa was impactful and effective. Prior to joining the World Bank, Chakib Jenane held key positions at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. He served as Chief of the Agro-industry Technology Unit and deputy-Director of the Agribusiness Development Branch. In addition to his professional experience, Chakib Jenane also served as a university Professor at the Department of Agricultural Engineering at the Institute of Agronomy and Veterinary Medicine in Rabat, Morocco. Chakib Jenane holds a Doctorate-es-Sciences degree from the Institute of Agronomy and Veterinary Medicine in Rabat and an MS in agricultural engineering from the University of Minnesota. He also completed a post-Doctorate within the Bio-systems Engineering Department of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Sheetal Sekhri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at University of Virginia, an affiliate of the International Growth Centre (IGC), and a Giorgio Ruffalo Research Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School (2012-2013). Sekhri received her PhD from Brown University in 2008. Her research focuses on the delivery of public services and safety nets, higher education and skill development, and water related issues in India. Her past research has examined the role of informal networks in improving take-up in the public distribution system in India and understanding the returns to public college attendance in Indian labour markets. Current projects involve evaluating the implications of regulatory capture for groundwater depletion in India and implications of improvement in public distribution system for women’s health. Her work has been published in academic journals such as the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.

Dina Umali-Deininger is the South Asia Regional Director for Sustainable Development at the World Bank. She manages analytical work and a lending portfolio of about $21 billion, which focuses on helping countries in South Asia tackle their most complex challenges in the areas of Agriculture and Food, Climate Change, Environment, Natural Resources & Blue Economy, Environmental and Social Framework, Urban, Disaster Risk Management, Resilience & Land, Social Sustainability and Inclusion, and Water. Prior to joining South Asia, she served as the Agriculture Practice Manager for East Asia and Pacific and Central and Eastern Africa, as Water Practice Manager in Europe and Central Asia, and Country Sector Coordinator in the World Bank New Delhi office, overseeing the World Bank's agriculture and rural development program in India. She has an M.A. and Ph.D. in Applied Economics from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Agribusiness Management from the University of the Philippines.

Ryan Brown's research interests span multiple fields of applied microeconomics including development economics, labor economics, health economics, economic demography, and political economy.

Ryan's work has primarily focused on applying econometric techniques to population representative data in both developed and developing country settings, to examine how changes in the social, physical, and/or economic environment can have a persistent impact on health, preferences, and human capital accumulation. Ryan has a Ph.D. in Economics from Duke University, an M.A. in Economics from Duke University, and a B.A. in Economics and Psychology from Vassar College.

Gaurav Chiplunkar is an Assistant Professor at the Darden Business School, University of Virginia. His research studies the causes and consequences of labor market frictions in low-income countries, with a particular emphasis on the barriers faced by women and the youth. He is interested in examining the transformative potential of digital technologies and industrial policy reforms in mitigating these barriers, their aggregate implications on the allocation of resources and talent in the economy, and their consequences on economic growth and productivity. His research contributes to areas of development and labor economics, along with gender and personnel economics.

Gaurav completed his Bachelors in Economics from Delhi University, his Masters in Economics and Economic Research from the London School of Economics and the University of Cambridge, and his Ph.D. in Economics from Yale University. He is a Research Affiliate at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Institute of Labor Economics (IZA), and Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE).

Bruno Conte is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Bologna and a CESifo research fellow. He studies questions on environmental and development economics using tools from spatial economics. He teaches data sciences and how to implement them in economic research. From January 2024, he will join Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Barcelona School of Economics as an Assistant Professor of Economics.

Mathieu Couttenier is a current professor of Economics at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and Research Fellow to the CEPR (International Trade and Regional Economics Program and Political Economy Program). He is also head of the Center for Economic Research on Governance, Inequality and Conflict (CERGIC).

He earned his PhD in Economics from the University Paris 1 Sorbonne in 2011. Prior to joining the University of Lyon and Ecole Normale Superieure in September 2018, he served as an Assistant Professor at the University of Geneva and a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Lausanne. He has also been a visiting researcher at Stanford, Sciences Po Paris, and the University of Bologna.

His research is interdisciplinary, spanning economics, political science, culture, institutions, and geography. He focuses research on microeconomic questions, particularly in applied political economy and economic development. His main research interests are in the understanding of the determinants and consequences of conflict. He has published many academic papers on the role played by income shocks, natural resources, or climate on the diffusion of conflicts over space and time. Another aspect of his research focuses on the role of natural resources in shaping local economic development. In September 2023, he will begin studying the socio-economic impact of artisanal and small-scale mines in Africa thanks to the support of an ERC Consolidator grant. He has published in many leading peer-refereed journals, such as the American Economic Review, Journal of the European Economic Association, Economic Journal, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of Comparative Economics and PlosOne.

Teevrat Garg is an Associate Professor of Economics at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California in San Diego. His research is at the intersection of environmental and development economics with an emphasis on the role of public policy and institutions in fostering sustainable development, the renewable energy transition, and adaptation to climate change. In recent years, he has conducted research in India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Mexico, Uganda, and Vietnam. Teevrat’s work has been published in leading academic journals and covered by prominent media outlets such as the New York Times and Science Magazine. He currently serves as co-editor at the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (JAERE). Prior to joining UC San Diego, Teevrat was a postdoctoral fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He received a B.A. in Economics (with Honors), a B.S. in Mathematics from Lafayette College in 2010, and a Ph.D. in Applied Economics and Management from Cornell University in 2015.

Xavier Giné is a Lead Economist in the Finance and Private Sector Development Team of the Development Research Group. He is currently a BREAD affiliate and Associate Editor for the Journal of Development Economics. Since joining the World Bank as a Young Economist in 2002, his research has focused on access to financial services and rural financial markets. In recent papers he investigated the macroeconomic effects of a credit liberalization; the relationship between formal and informal sources of credit in rural credit markets; indigenous interlinked credit contracts in the fishing industry and the impact of microfinance services such as business training and financial literacy, microinsurance and microsavings. Prior to joining the Bank he was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain, an M.A. and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.

Nancy Lozano Gracia is the Lead Economist for Sustainable Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, with over 20 years of experience in economic policy and research. She is also the co-lead for the Global Solutions Group on Spatial and Territorial Development. Nancy joined the Bank in 2009 and has worked extensively on designing and delivering major operationally relevant analytical pieces across all regions. Some of her recent work includes analysis at the intersection of pollution and competitiveness in cities with a focus on Africa, analysis of urban inequality in Mexico and Colombia, and ongoing work to help countries reorient their productive capacity to become more environmentally friendly and inclusive. She has worked extensively on designing and using diagnostic tools to improve the understanding of sustainable development challenges and help identify priorities for action. She holds a doctorate in applied economics from University of Illinois and a Masters in environmental and agricultural and resource economics from University of Maryland and Universidad de los Andes, Colombia.

Saad Gulzar is an Assistant Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. His research interests lie in political economy, development, and environment, with a regional focus on South Asia including Pakistan, India, and Nepal. Before joining Princeton, he was an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in Politics at New York University in 2017.

Christa Hasenkopf is the Director of Air Quality Programs at EPIC. Her career focuses on efforts that open up information, resources, and networks so that more people in more places can help make the air they breathe healthier. Previously, she co-founded and was the CEO of OpenAQ, an environmental tech non-profit, which fosters a global community around the world’s largest open database of air quality information. She has also served as the Chief Air Pollution Advisor to the Office of Medical Services at the US Department of State and in multiple positions at the US Agency for International Development. Hasenkopf received a Ph.D. in Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences from the University of Colorado and a BS in Astronomy & Astrophysics from The Pennsylvania State University.

Koichiro Ito is an Associate Professor at Harris School of Public Policy at University of Chicago. He received a BA from Kyoto University, an MA from University of British Columbia, and a PhD from UC Berkeley. Prior to joining University of Chicago, he was a SIEPR Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University and an Assistant Professor at Boston University.

His research interests lie at the intersection of environmental and energy economics, industrial organization, and public economics. These include analyses of how consumers respond to nonlinear pricing, dynamic pricing, and rebate programs in electricity markets, how intrinsic and extrinsic motivation affects their economics decisions, how firms strategically react to attribute-based regulation such as fuel economy standards, how firms respond to dynamic incentives in sequential forward markets in wholesale electricity markets, and how much people in China value air quality. His research uses a variety of methods including randomized controlled trials, quasi-experimental designs, and structural estimation to address questions in energy and environmental economics.

He is a recipient of the Suntory Prize for Social Sciences and Humanities and the Nikkei Prize for his book, The Power of Data Analysis: How to Approach Causality, published by Kobunsha in April 2017. The original book was published in Japanese and then has been translated to Korean and Taiwanese. He is also a recipient of Ishikawa Prize from the Japanese Economic Association in 2020.

Professor Ito is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Faculty Affiliate at the E2e Project, a Faculty Fellow at Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, a Fellow at the International Growth Centre, and a Research Fellow at the Graduate School of Economics at Kyoto University. He serves as a member of the Board of Editors for American Economic Review and an associate editor of Japanese Economic Review.

Hanan Jacoby is Lead Economist in the Sustainability and Infrastructure Team of the Development Research Group.  His current work focuses on the economics of irrigation -- groundwater markets, efficient irrigation technology, corruption in canal systems, and the energy-groundwater nexus – as well as the optimal pricing of public utility services such as piped water.  In addition to these topics, he has published articles on land tenancy, rural roads, risk-coping, child nutrition and schooling, and the economics of marriage in journals such as American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Journal of Political Economy, and Review of Economic Studies.  He has served as an associate editor for Journal of Development Economics since 2004. Before joining the Bank in 1998, he taught economics at the University of Rochester. He received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1989.

Lucile Laugerette is a Ph.D. student in economics at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and affiliated with the Center for Economic Research on Governance, Inequality, and Conflict. Prior to her doctoral study, she obtained her MPhil in Development economics from Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Her main research interests include economic development, conflict, environment, religion, and gender issues.

Raahil Madhok is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Applied Economics at the University of Minnesota. He is an environmental economist with research themes overlapping development, agriculture, and political economy. Raahil's current research agenda explores how economic development shapes land and natural resource use, including biodiversity, food supply, and air quality. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of British Columbia and a B.A. from McGill University.

Helena Naber is a Sr. Environmental Specialist with the Environment and Natural Resources Global Practice of the World Bank, where she works on issues pertaining to pollution management and environmental governance. Her current responsibilities include leading reimbursable advisory services activities in Saudi Arabia, as well as acting as climate change coordinator in the unit. Prior to joining the World Bank in September 2007, Helena worked on environmental sustainability issues in Jordan. She holds a master’s degree in environmental economics from Wageningen University, the Netherlands.

Anna is a PhD candidate in Sustainable Development at Columbia University. She conducts applied micro and interdisciplinary research with a focus on the environment. She is especially interested in climate adaptation and plastic pollution and uses remote sensing and non-traditional data in a lot of her projects. Anna graduated from Harvard University with a BA in Environmental Engineering and grew up in Budapest, Hungary.

Wolfram Schlenker is an environmental economist. He studies the effect of weather and climate on agricultural production, how climate trends and the US biofuel mandate influences agricultural commodity prices, and how pollution impacts both agricultural yields and human morbidity. He recently examined how financial markets incorporate climate forecasts and the incidence of a carbon tax.

He co-directs the Center on Environmental Economics and Policy (CEEP) with Professor Douglas Almond and co-directs the Energy & Environment Concentration at SIPA with David Sandalow. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He currently serves on the Board of Reviewing Editors at Science.

He holds a PhD in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley (2003) and a Master of Engineering and Management Sciences from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany (2000), as well as a Master of Environmental Management from Duke University (1998).