Economy and Policy

From its founding, the Harvard-China Project has had a major component led by economists to study how policies affect the economy and environment.

The core economics team, long based in the Harvard Department of Economics and the Harvard-China Project itself, has studied how policies affect the macroeconomy, e.g., GDP growth and employment, and the microeconomy, e.g., enterprises and households. Example questions include how policies to control sulfur dioxide (SO₂) have affected energy use and economic growth in China, or how a prospective carbon tax might affect economic growth, air pollution, and carbon emissions. A smaller economics activity based at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has conducted research on the valuation of environmental health risk and mortality in China. Both economics research streams have also been key components of a series of interdisciplinary studies that integrate the economic frameworks with the emissions, atmospheric modeling, and environmental health research of the HCP to analyze the costs and benefits of national emission control policies in China.

The economics research was led by Dale W. Jorgenson until he passed away in 2022. Jorgenson, a pioneer in tax and energy policy research, was the Samuel W. Morris University Professor of Economics at Harvard. The core economics team today is led by Mun S. Ho (Harvard-China Project) and CAO Jing (School of Economics and Management, Tsinghua University), and includes active collaborations with a number of research alumni of the Harvard-China Project at universities across China.

Overview of the Economics Research of the Harvard-China Project