Michael Harris
Senior Lecturer in Resource Economics
Michael Harris graduated from the Australian National University with a BEc (Hons.) in 1984 and from the University of Melbourne with a PhD in Economics in 2001. He first worked at ABARE, then at the University of Melbourne in the (then) Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry, then (from 1996-2000) at the university’s Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research. From 2001-2003 he lectured at La Trobe University, until being appointed Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney in January of 2004.
Michael’s main research interests centre on natural resource accounting (or environmental or “green” national accounting); the adjusting of official economic growth measures for resource depletion and environmental degradation. His co-written paper assessing the state of the art of green accounting research won the Best Article prize for papers published in the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics in 2002. He is now involved on a research project with the CSIRO on “Measuring and Modelling Inclusive Wealth”, a pilot study being conducted in regional Australia, in conjunction with a study of Stockholm county in Sweden through the Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics. He has written on various other topics including agricultural R&D, intellectual property, and industry dynamics. His teaching experience has included both general microeconomics and macroeconomics subjects and was coordinator of the 4th year honours program in economics and finance at La Trobe University, and at Sydney he is teaching in resource economics subjects and benefit-cost analysis.
Michael has presented papers at various national and international conferences, and was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Davis, in 1995. In 2003, he visited Taiwan as an invited presenter at conference on green accounting, and to assist with running workshops with Taiwanese academics and bureaucrats who will be working on revising their national accounting system. In April 2004, he participated in workshops in Italy with an international group of scholars and national accounting practitioners on inclusive wealth measurement. While in Melbourne he was Secretary/Treasurer and then President of the Victorian Branch of the Australian Agricultural Economics Society in the early 1990s and has been on the organizing committee of one of its national conferences.
- “Natural resource accounting in theory and practice: A critical assessment”, Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics, 46 (2), 2002, 139-192 (with I. Fraser).
- “Measuring and modelling sustainable development at the regional and national scales in Australia”, Proceedings of the Inaugural National Regional Research Colloquium: Regional Dimensions in National Development, 19 Feb 2004 (with L. Pearson).
- “Comparing paradigms in resource and environmental accounting: From satellite accounts to inclusive wealth”, in Proceedings of the International Conference on Green National Accounting, Taipei, Taiwan, September 29, 2003.
- “Revaluations and obsolescence in natural resource accounting”, submitted, under revision.