CEA Fellow: Brian Copeland

Brian Copeland is an internationally renowned economist who is best known for his work on the interactions between international trade and the environment. He developed a passion for environmental and resource economics while an undergraduate at UBC, where he was inspired by people such as Tony Scott (one of his teachers), Colin Clark, Gordon Munro, and others who made fundamental contributions to resource economics. Erwin Diewert also played a key role in inspiring him to become an economist.  While a graduate student at Stanford, he focused his studies on international trade.  Soon after his return to UBC, where he is currently a Professor of Economics and has been faculty member since 1985, he began to focus on questions bridging the two fields. His most prominent work in this area comes from a line of research asking how international trade affects environmental outcomes. His papers “North-South Trade and the Environment” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1994) and “Trade and Transboundary Pollution” (American Economic Review, 1995) with M. Scott Taylor developed groundbreaking models of trade with endogenous environmental policy.  This was followed by work on how differences in pollution policy interact with other determinants of international trade flows and competitiveness.  His 2001 paper “Is Free Trade Good for The Environment” with Scott Taylor and Werner Antweiler (American Economic Review, 2001) used a theoretical model as the basis for empirical work that estimated the effects of trade on environmental outcomes.  That paper has been very influential in stimulating empirical work in the field and received the 2012 Publication of Enduring Quality Award from the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists. More recent work with Scott Taylor studies effects of trade on the sustainability of renewable resources (American Economic Review, 2009).

Brian has also made several important contributions to our understanding of the interplay between trade and environmental policy, including an early paper on trade agreements as incomplete contracts (Canadian Journal of Economics, 1990), an early paper on border pollution taxes (Journal of International Economics, 1996), and the first paper on piecemeal policy reform in economies with both trade restrictions and pollution problems (Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 1994). He has also worked with Scott Taylor on the surprising general equilibrium effects of carbon taxes in open economies (Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 2005), and with Basak Bayramoglu and Jean-François Jacques on the difficulties in negotiating international agreements on fisheries subsidies (Journal of International Economics, 2017).