Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon: An Economic Perspective

Date: 

Wednesday, November 13, 2019, 12:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S050

Deforestation in the Amazon

Speaker: Eduardo Souza-Rodrigues, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto
Moderator: Fernando Bizzarro, PhD student, Government Department, Harvard University; Graduate Student Associate, DRCLAS

Eduardo Souza-Rodrigues will discuss the current state of the Brazilian Amazon as well as explore relevant policy changes over the last two decades. He will also focus on the efficacy of alternative policies from an economic perspective.

Eduardo Souza-Rodrigues is an assistant professor of Economics at the University of Toronto since 2013. He obtained his PhD degree in Economics at Yale University in 2012. After that, he became a post-doc fellow at Harvard University for one year. Eduardo Souza-Rodrigues’ research agenda lies at the intersection of Environmental Economics and Industrial Organization, with an emphasis on Structural Dynamic Models (i.e., on models in which economic agents are forward looking). His research focuses on problems related to tropical deforestation, especially on the Amazon rainforest, and on the performance of existing and yet-to-be-implemented conservation policies. Evaluating yet-to-be-implemented policies necessarily involves counterfactual analysis based on economic behavioral models. Eduardo’s second research area is dedicated to the questions of when, and under what conditions, counterfactual predictions are identified in structural dynamic models (which have been extensively used in applied work).

Fernando Bizzarro is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Government at Harvard and a Graduate Student Associate to DRCLAS. A political scientist from Brazil, he researches the nature, causes, and consequences of democracy and political parties in Latin America.

Presented in collaboration with the Harvard University Center for the Environment