Dr Michael Harris

Summary

My interests are in resource, environmental and agricultural economics generally. My specific research interests are in the economics of sustainability, and in natural resource accounting and the development of sustainability indicators. The famous Brundtland Report definition of sustainable development (meeting the needs of the current generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs) is something economists are well-positioned to analyse and attempt to measure. However, this requires close collaboration with natural scientists (biologists, ecologists, hydrologists) and bridging the disciplinary divide is something I see as crucial to future work in this area.

Research interests

My main area of work is in several areas related to sustainability and the conceptual frameworks surrounding assessment of sustainable development. In joint work with Iain Fraser (University of Kent) I examined frameworks for resource and environmental accounting within the national accounts, which is to say, adjusting conventional measures of national income and economic growth to better measure resource depletion and environmental degradation. As well as that, I have worked in the area of assessment of sustainability indicators, with several critical papers on the Genuine Progress Indicator, one mooted alternative to GDP. Other work is ongoing on comparing economic indicators and biophysical ones.

I have also worked in collaboration with CSIRO and the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics on incorporating ecological resilience into economics. This is significant, because we have developed a way to define, quantify and price “non-marginal changes” (such as ecosystem regime shifts) which enables us to significantly improve our measures of Genuine Saving/Genuine Investment, as well as our benefit-cost analyses of projects that may involve threshold effects. This has potentially widespread application in situations where risks of threshold-crossing are serious, including (obviously) climate change.

I have worked in other areas while at USyd, including undertaking several developing country projects (one in Vietnam, one in Indonesia).

Background

Michael Harris has a Bachelor's degree in economics from the Australian National University, and a PhD from the University of Melbourne. Prior to coming to the University of Sydney in 2004, he taught in the Department of Economics and Finance at La Trobe University.

Michael currently supervises four PhD students, and is the Associate Supervisor for another. He is actively involved with the University’s Institute for Sustainable Solutions, and with the Management Committee for the University’s Institute of Social Sciences. He also maintains a blog to improve communication between economists and scientists on environmental and sustainability-related issues.

As Research Group Leader in Agricultural and Resource Economics, Michael helped develop REEML (the Resources, Energy and Environmental Markets Lab) as a joint venture between the Faculty, CSIRO and Aton Consulting, where staff and students may run economic experiments with applications to environmental markets.

Outside the University, Michael is involved in the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society, where he is on the Federal Council as a NSW representative. He is also on the Advisory Board of the Journal of Environment and Development Economics.

Recent publications

• Incorporating resilience in the assessment of Inclusive Wealth: An example from South East Australia, submitted to Environmental and Resource Economics (with Brian Walker, Leonie Pearson, Karl-Göran Mäler, Chuan-Zhong Li, Reinette Biggs and Tim Baynes).
• Towards genuine progress on the Genuine Progress Indicator, International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment, 4:1, 2008.
• On income, sustainability, and the ‘microfoundations’ of the Genuine Progress Indicator, International Journal of Environment, Workplace and Employment, 3:2, 2007.
• Sustainability and national accounting, Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, www.eolss.com 2006 (with Iain Fraser).
• Natural resource accounting in theory and practice: A critical assessment, Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 46:2, 2002 (with Iain Fraser).
• Agricultural R&D policy in Australia, in Paying For Agricultural Policy, Johns Hopkins University Press, Maryland, 1999 (with Julian Alston, John Mullen and Phil Pardey).
• Environmental economics, Australian Economic Review, 4th quarter, 1996.
• An approach to the econometric estimation of attitudes to risk in agriculture, Australian Journal of Agricultural Economics, 31:2, August 1987 (with Peter Bardsley).

Contact

Email:
Blog: http://blogs.usyd.edu.au/environresecon