Institute of Economics and the Environment

The Institute for Economics and the Environment
& The Center for Public Service

Overview

The professional development course seeks to provide working professionals with the tools they need to interpret, set up and implement cost-benefit analysis of public sector issues, estimate monetary values of services that are not bought-and-sold and conduct impact evaluation of programs.  Examples of topics to which participants may apply the tools learned include land use, infrastructure investments, equity policies, environmental protection and public recreation.

Professional Development Course Methods

The professional development course is offered once per week over four full days, and includes lectures and discussion with course faculty members, as well as small group sessions. Application of the methods learned during the course is discussed in small-group sessions supported by Portland State University graduate students. Participants are required to bring an application or case study from their own work that could potentially be addressed during the professional development course. These applications and cases studies are analyzed using the methods presented in the course, with advising from course faculty and input from fellow participants and Portland State University graduate students.

Course Overview

• Participation in the Professional development Course in Cost-Benefit Analysis, Non-Market Valuation and Empirical Methods is capped at no more than 30 participants.
• Participants completing the program will receive a framed professional development certificate of successful completion.

Participants

Professionals working in government, NGO's and the private sector. 

Workshop Topics

• Empirical Methods
  • Data manipulation and descriptive statistics
  • Effective graphs and maps
  • Linear and nonparametric estimation
• Cost-Benefit Analysis
  • Theory and limits of cost-benefit analysis
  • Linear models of costs and benefits
  • Conducting cost-benefit analysis with limited data
  • Discounting and decision-making under uncertainty
• Non-Market Valuation and Impact Evaluation
  • Ecosystem services and the need for non-market valuation
  • Revealed preference methods
  • Stated preference methods
  • Impact Evaluation

Faculty Bios

Randy Bluffstone​​
Randy Bluffstone is Professor of Economics and Director of the Institute for Economics and the Environment at Portland State University.   He is also co-facilitator of the Environment for Development (EfD) Initiative Forest Collaborative and associate editor at the journal Forest Economics. Prior to coming to Portland State, he taught at the University of Redlands and until September 1999 was deputy director of the International Environment Program at the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) at Harvard University. Randy’s research and teaching interests focus on environmental and natural resource economics, including pollution policies, climate change, deforestation in low-income countries and urban forests. He is the author of a number of papers, book chapters and three edited books, most recently Forest Tenure Reform in Asia and Africa: Local Control for Improved Livelihoods, Forest Management, and Carbon Sequestration with Elizabeth J. Z. Robinson. Randy is currently working on an introductory environmental economics textbook for students with little or no economics background.

Sahan. T. M. Dissanayake 
Sahan T. M. Dissanayake is an Associate Professor of Economics and the Program Director for the Graduate Certificate in Sustainability at Portland State University, Oregon, USA.  Sahan’s research centers on ecosystem services and conservation and uses choice experiment surveys to elicit preferences for public goods and environmental policies and mathematical programming methods to study conservation targeting. As an applied economist working on policy relevant issues Sahan regularly engages with policy makers and practitioners and much of his research has also been published as policy briefs and technical reports. In addition, Sahan has organized and conducted multiple capacity building short courses and workshops on the Economics of Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity (TEEB) in Sri Lanka for mid-level government ministry officials, NGO staff and students. He also organized the 2017 NAREA Workshop on Climate Change and Land Conservation in D.C., was the faculty coordinator for the 2019 Conservation Finance Bootcamp hosted by the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State and taught for the Kinship Conservation Fellows summer professional development course program in 2019 and 2021.
 

John Gallup
John Gallup is Associate Professor of Economics at Portland State University where he has won multiple teaching awards. Prior to coming to Portland State, he was a research fellow at the Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard University and received his PhD in Economics and MA in Demography from U.C. Berkeley. John has served as a consultant for the World Bank, UNDP, Asian Development Bank, International Labor Office, USAID and the governments of Bolivia and Vietnam, working in several languages. John’s teaching focuses on development economics and econometrics. He teaches a course about efficient data analysis and created the most popular user-written addition to Stata statistical software. His research interests include the economic impacts of health and geography and the causes and consequences of inequality. Recent papers are Environmental Degradation, Tropical Diseases, and Economic Development and Cognitive and Economic Development.