Today’s environmental crises are affecting lower-income countries – and within those countries, poor and marginalized communities – most of all. Policymakers in these countries are seeking new ways to balance trade-offs between the economic growth that can provide citizens with income-generating opportunities, and the harmful emissions that industrial production usually entails.

For over a decade, EGC affiliate Nick Ryan and colleagues have worked with policymakers in the highly industrialized Indian state of Gujarat to reduce emissions at low cost to industries. Now the team is expanding their work to implement a cap-and-trade market for carbon emissions from large sources. This series of studies – the first of its kind among today’s emerging economies, outside of China – is a collaboration of the Gujarat Pollution Control Board, EGC, the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC), and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL).

In this episode of EGC Voices in Development, Ryan talks about the trade-offs low-and-middle income countries face between expanding access to energy, while also reducing the health and environmental costs of energy production. He says a critical role that development economists can play in supporting environmentally sustainable economic growth is to generate evidence on the impact different policy changes can have in order to inform decision-making.

Nicholas Ryan is an Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University. He was a Prize Fellow in Economics at Harvard University from 2012-2014. He received a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012 and a BA in Economics summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania. Ryan studies energy markets and environmental regulation in developing countries. Energy use enables high standards of living but rapid, energy-intensive growth has caused many environmental problems in turn. Ryan’s research measures how energy use and pollution emissions respond to regulation and market incentives. His work includes empirical studies of the effect of power grid capacity on electricity prices, how firms make decisions about energy-efficiency and how environmental regulation can be designed to best abate pollution at low social cost. Recent research studies the adoption and pricing of renewable energy in low- and middle-income countries.