Returning from the 6th World Congress on Environmental and Resource Economics (WCERE)

The 6 ^th World Congress on Environmental and Resource Economics (WCERE) was held in Gothenburg in Sweden during June 25-29, 2018. Over 1400 environmental and resource economists attended the Congress, and about 1000 articles were presented. Sissi Liu from Future Oceans Lab presented her work on “Price expectations and supply response of coastal mixed fisheries”, Professor Alberto Ansuategi was the discussant.

Some highlights

It is not possible to summarize a big conference such as WCERE, nevertheless, some highlights can be said: (1) gender balance: of the 4 keynote speakers, 3 of them are female, reminding us that gender equality plays a central role in the host country, Sweden; (2) vegetarian food: all lunches and dinners served in the congress, including the conference dinner, are vegetarian.  Bringing people from all over the world to Gothenburg is carbon costly, vegetarian good seems an obvious way to offset carbon footprints; (3) a truly global conference. The conference has a fair representation of speakers from low- and middle-income countries. This would not be possible without the generous support of Sida, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. Over 100 speakers from these countries received travel grants.

Sessions on fisheries economics

About 30 papers on fisheries were presented in 10 parallel sessions of the congress. Fisheries economics seems to have attracted increasing attentions in the last a few years. This is reflected in terms of the number of papers on fisheries economics and the number of audiences attended fisheries sessions. As figure below indicates, speakers affiliated with universities in USA, Norway (NO), Germany (DE) and Chile (CHL) are leading the field in terms of number of articles being accepted by the congress. There are also speakers from Spain (ES), Taiwan (TW), Japan (JP), Bangladesh (BA), Australia (AU), Cze republic (CZ), and Sweden (SW).

Research trends on environmental and resource economics

In a special session of the congress, Roland Kube (and his co-authors) shared their recent research findings on research trends on ERE in the last decades. According to the paper, during 1974-2014, Journal of Environmental Economics and Management (JEEM) published 1672 articles (or 40 papers per year). Of which 70% of the articles fell into the three categories: (1) costs and benefits of pollution control, non-market valuation (483 articles), (2) natural resource economics (450 articles), and (3) environmental policy instruments (412 articles). Fisheries papers have been of unremitting importance (102 articles in the category of natural resource economics) since the seminal paper by Clark and Munro (1975).

In terms of methodology, over 60% of JEEM paper published are theoretical models. Since 2000, there is a significant shift towards econometric and statistical methods. Mathematical and simulation modeling has become another important methodology.