Course:ECON371/UBCO2024WT1/Reflections/Vaishali Raju
Reflection #1
This course addresses several prevailing environmental issues within Canada while also examining the environmental impacts of both industrial and individual consumption activities. It also delves into the implementation of government policies, such as the carbon taxes, and their economic consequences. By analyzing these challenges from an economic perspective, the course highlights key concepts like trade-offs, incentives, and constraints, quantifying their impact using mathematical models and graphs, which helps me better illustrate the extent of these effects.
As a management student, I was eager to learn the different interconnections between the economy and environment. Understanding how business activities contribute to economic challenges, such as oil spills and resource depletion, has enhanced my awareness for the importance of sustainable practices and their role in maximizing stakeholder utility. I have gained insights on how government regulations and corporate initiatives can diminish the impact of industrial activities on ecosystems, public health, and long-term economic growth. This knowledge is significant as I prepare for a career where I find the right balance between profitability and sustainability in a business. There is often a conflict of interest in situations like these, as business stakeholders propose different expectations.
Up to this point, I have gained a solid understanding of core concepts like assessing social welfare, measuring the benefits and costs of specific activities on the economy, and the imbalance between fairness and efficiency. During class, we discussed news items about ongoing challenges in local and provincial areas that help me draw parallels with the concepts we learned earlier. It not only brings awareness of the existence of environmental conflicts such as these but also brews interesting discussions in class as students and the professor share their personal experiences and correlate with the news items. It allows me to draw conclusions about the outcomes of specific regulations or major changes in certain areas, and more importantly, how they were received amongst the residents. This collaborative learning environment has improved my critical thinking and problem-solving skills by providing me with the knowledge to judge the repercussions of the actions taken in these news stories and its subsequent public policies. Furthermore, I have gained a deeper understanding of the broader implications of government actions, more specifically their negative impact on the economy due to partial and general equilibrium effects.
In retrospect, as we delve deeper into theories through the course of the semester, I am eager to see how the intersection between political priorities and sustainability initiatives could create an imbalance in economic objectives. As we have seen earlier, we covered the indifference between maintaining fairness and efficiency in an economy—achieving an efficient outcome may not always be fair to everyone. This would be an interesting overlap to analyze through different sectors of the economy. Additionally, I am looking forward to learning more about newly introduced technology, such as clean technology, that paves a path for a more efficient and sustainable future. I would be interested to see its economic impact quantified through mathematical equations and graphs, adding on my existing knowledge of clean technology. More importantly, I would like to see how high-impact industries like oil and gas would achieve sustainability without impairing natural resources. Further, I am particularly interested to see the advancements in smart infrastructure and digital innovation that could improve productivity as well. There are several technologies that can improve productivity and efficiency, but were abandoned due to its extensive costs - we examined one in class. Exploring more of such cases would definitely provide deeper insights into how companies make an informed decision when there is a trade-off between maximizing long-term benefits and managing the costs of technology advancements.
Overall, this course has motivated me to initiate a deeper interest in ties between the economy and sustainability. Rather than simply outlining recent sustainability initiatives and their impact on the economy, it also quantifies its effect on distinct groups of the economy. Additionally, it teaches us that government regulations are not always favourable to everyone, as they are designed to support a specific group of people while potentially disadvantaging other sectors of the economy. As I move forward in my career, I am eager to acknowledge this and apply the knowledge as I engage in sustainable practices that promote economic and environmental longevity.
Reflection #2
As the course draws to a close, I have taken the opportunity to address several challenges I faced during the first half of the semester and to reflect on the concepts I have explored more deeply as the term progressed. This course has significantly enhanced my understanding of prevailing environmental and sustainability issues in the world. As a management student, I have gained valuable insights into the ways we can incorporate sustainability in our decision making, after weighing in the benefits and costs. Moreover, I appreciated the opportunity to choose the topics we want to learn for the final weeks, which made exploring concepts in clean technology, poverty and population, and environmental global agreements more impactful. These topics are not only academically enriching, but also remain highly relevant to the business world.
Certain aspects of the course proved highly beneficial due to their significant impact on my learning and perspective. I found the weekly news item assignments highly valuable as it helped me draw meaningful parallels between course concepts and real-world scenarios. Conducting detailed analyses of news items not only introduced me to new concepts but also helped me learn how to effectively communicate their connections to an audience. This process sparked a growing interest in reading news articles related to environmental and sustainability issues. More importantly, it allowed us to view the concepts from a real-world perspective, which made the topics highly impactful and relevant. Furthermore, having opportunities to work on practice problems in class was very useful. It allowed me to apply the concepts we learnt and practice answering questions in an effective manner.
The topic I most related with was the poverty, population, and environment. Growing up in a developing country like Ethiopia, I have witnessed the challenges it faces in poverty, education, and sanitation. Ethiopia is also country divided by different tribal groups; therefore, tribal conflicts are very common in the country. These conflicts usually compromise the safety and well-being of individuals, inducing stress and fear within the community. Learning about “evolutionary heritage” and their tendencies give me an interesting perspective. By exploring various human and societal structures, I can better appreciate the complexities of tribal dynamics.
On another note, when it comes to addressing the incomplete segments of economic framing, I believe the study of economics considers efficiency, cost-benefit analysis, and immediate gains within its frameworks. However, when learning environmental economics, I have come to realize that these tools can be insufficient when measuring the benefits and costs of the environmental degradation. Traditional economic models do not gauge these intangible, long-term costs, such as biodiversity loss and other irreversible impacts, which are also commonly downplayed. This is evident when we examine externalities, where the true costs are not reflected in the market transaction. In response, regulators introduce taxes to internalize these externalities, by increasing costs associated to the transaction, ultimately leaving consumers worse off as producers increase the prices of goods and services. In retrospect, this brings us back to the imbalance between fairness and efficiency we explored earlier in the semester – achieving an efficient solution may not always be fair to everyone. Hence, this tells us that addressing environmental issues can lead to unequal distribution of costs as well.
Before this course, I was unaware of the limitations of traditional economic models, but as we view topics in environmental degradation and resource depletion, I have come to realize the long-term costs that these models cannot capture. While economics provides valuable tools to analyze market behavior, we tend to often ignore the complexity of these ecological systems. I see sustainability as a multi-faceted challenge that cannot be tackled with only efficient, market driven solutions. In the future, I am hoping to consider the long-term costs and benefits of market transactions, more importantly their social and environmental impacts. I plan to apply these insights into developing comprehensive models that incorporate sustainability within businesses.
Prof: Thanks for sharing your experience of growing up in a developing country. Tribalism is easier to identify there, although it underlies much of what we like to think of as a free democratic society.