Plenary sessions

Thursday 25 June 11.00-12.30 Opening Ceremony and David Pearce Lecture


Chair – Harmen Verbruggen

Welcome address Harmen Verbruggen - Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration and Chair of the Local Organizing Committee

Welcome address Thomas Sterner – President of EAERE

Opening speech Minister Van der Hoeven (Minister of Economic Affairs, The Netherlands)

David Pearce Lecture Rick van der Ploeg (University of Oxford and University of Amsterdam): Global Crisis and Natural Resources: A Developing Country Perspective

The global financial crisis has potentially many adverse effects on the developing world: falls in exports of goods and services to the OECD, dramatic falls in commodity prices and resource exports, and falls in remittances. Since many of the poorer countries are heavily specialized and dependent on natural resources, often landlocked, ethnically polarized, and financially underdeveloped, they suffer especially from the notorious volatility of natural resource prices. Volatile oil prices harm not only producers and consumers in the developing world, but also harm environmental quality if they hold back irreversible investments in costly energy-saving technology and hydrocarbon substitutes. In the aftermath of the crisis, political  leaders should seek for a global deal whereby resource-rich developing countries are helped to cope with managing very volatile stream of resource revenues while cutting back pollution of the energy industries.
The global crisis facing the world today is thus not only a financial crisis, but also a fuel and commodity crisis. In addition, the world also faces a food, water and climate change crisis, all of which undermine the ability to sustain prosperity and eradicate poverty in the developing world.
Hence, the contours of a Global Green New Deal will be sketched.

Friday 26 June 11.00-12.30 Plenary Session with two Keynote Speeches


Chair - Cees Withagen

Keynote speech Kirk Hamilton (World Bank): Wealth, Social Welfare and Sustainable Development

Theoretical work has elucidated the link between net or 'genuine' saving and the change in social welfare. These results will be presented and related to the literature on sustainabile development. Policy rules for achieving sustainable development are important for policy-makers, and recent results on generalizing the Hartwick Rule will be highlighted. The empirical work of the World Bank on measuring genuine saving, change in total wealth per capita and the composiition of the wealth of nations will be presented. Finally, there will be discussion of the broad policy messages derived from the empirical work.

Keynote speech Scott Taylor (University of Calgary and NBER): Environmental Crises: Past, Present and Future

Environmental crises are distinguished by rapid and largely unexpected changes in environmental quality that are difficult if not impossible to reverse.  Examples would be major extinctions, civilization collapse and large scale degradation of an ecosystem.  They are rare, but not zero probability events.  I argue that three forces combine to create the preconditions for crisis: failures in governance, an ecological system that exhibits tipping points, and an economy/environment interaction producing positive feedback effects.
To make these ideas precise, I develop a simple dynamic model to illustrate how a crisis may arise, and draw from our knowledge of past and present crises to identify the mechanisms involved.  I then turn to speculate as to whether global warming is indeed a future crisis in the making.

Saturday 27 June 14.00-15.30 Keynote Speech and Closing Ceremony


Chair – Marjan Hofkes

Keynote speech Billy Pizer (US Treasury Department): Facing the Climate Change Challenge

Awards presentation:
  • Erik Kempe Award
  • European Lifetime Achievement Award in Environmental Economics
  • European Practioner Achievement Award in Environmental Economics
  • Poster Award

Closing speech – Harmen Verbruggen