Shreekant Gupta
Measuring the impact of climate change on agriculture is a difficult but vital undertaking. In a paper forthcoming in Climate Change Economics, Shreekant Gupta estimates the impact of climate change on food grain yields in India, specifically rice and millets. He estimates a crop-specific agricultural production function with exogenous climate variables, namely, precipitation and temperature and controls for key inputs such as irrigation, and fertilizer. The analysis is at the district level using a panel dataset. It is part of a broader research programme on the economic impacts of climate change at the regional and district level in India (and eventually all of South Asia).
Recently (2006–07), Mr Gupta was Director of the National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi where he was involved in a wide range of activities in the urban sector including urban governance, planning, water and sanitation and transport. Previously, he was a fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), New Delhi (1995–97), and headed the Environmental Policy Cell. He also worked as an environmental economist at the World Bank at Washington DC (1993–95) focusing on macroeconomic policies and the environment in Sri Lanka, Ghana and Poland.
In June at CESifo, Mr Gupta plans to study the working of the EU-ETS with possible implications for a wider system of GHG trading that may emerge. He is also interested in the ongoing research at CESifo on the Green Paradox, especially empirical aspects on its nature and extent with possible application to India.
Shreekant Gupta has published papers in journals such as Rand Journal of Economics, Land Economics, Ecological Economics, Economic and Political Weekly and Water Policy. He has served on several national and international committees on the environment including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 to which his contribution was recognised. He has also been consultant to the World Bank, ADB, GEF, UNEP and OECD on various environmental issues.
He received his PhD in economics from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1993 where his dissertation committee included the Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling. He also has a Masters degree from the Delhi School of Economics and an undergraduate honours degree in economics from the University of Delhi. He was Fulbright Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2001-2002) and Shastri Fellow at Queens University, Canada (summer 2001).
Mr Gupta is Associate Professor at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi and Adjunct Associate Professor at the LKY School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore (NUS). He is on the editorial board of Singapore Economic Review and Journal of Developing Areas.