Levan Elbakidze, Ph.D.
Professor, Graduate Coordinator for Natural Resource Economics
College of Agriculture and Natural Resources
West Virginia University
Editor, Agricultural and Resource Economics Review.
Contact: levan.elbakidze@mail.wvu.edu
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About me
I was born in Tbilisi, Georgia (no, not peaches... the original one - that was "always" on P. McCartney and J. Lennon's minds). The 1990's were not the most pleasant or promising times in that part of the world as V. Lenin's 70-year experiment came to it's logical end. Although the flaws of the experiment were apparent long before I was born (see for example one of my favorite accounts of the failed social experiment using a restaurant experience as a case in point, which about sums it all up, by John Steinbeck, 1948), I was unfortunate enough to witness the protracted demise in my teens. So, unsurprisingly, I considered myself lucky when an opportunity appeared to pursue undergraduate education in the United States.
Moving to the US was much more than a change of address and liberation from Soviet Dogma. It was my first real chance to see (legal) free markets at work and contrast the outcomes against the rigid central planning I had grown up with. Yet, the deeper I read and the more courses I took, the clearer it became that laissez-faire, for all its elegance, is hardly flawless. Pollution, congestion, biodiversity loss, health impacts and other side effects of economic growth pressed important questions, like Do markets always provide the best possible outcomes? What might cause markets to come up short? What happens when markets stumble? What are possible remedies? These questions intrigued and inspired me. After taking classes on public economics and environmental policy, I discovered that “market failures” I observed had names, causes, and sometimes even fixes. Externalities, public goods, common pool resources became the vocabulary that fueled my curiosity and shaped my scholarly path.
Equally transformative was joining the world’s most dynamic higher-education ecosystem. I heard leading scholars share perspectives and latest findings on economic growth, carbon taxes, watershed management, and other topics where market corrections may produce positive outcomes. Those experiences—witnessing markets at work, probing the moments when they don’t, and learning from the best minds in the field—crystallized my career’s central theme: understanding environmental externalities and public goods and looking for policies that help markets live up to their promise.
I graduated with a BS in Agricultural and Applied Economics and an MS in Resource and Applied Economics from the University of Nevada, Reno. I received my Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from Texas A&M, College Station. After a couple of years as a non-tenure track Assistant Research Professor at Texas A&M, I moved to the University of Idaho as an Assistant Professor in 2008, where I received tenure in 2014. In 2015, I moved to West Virginia University, where I earned tenure in 2018 and was promoted to Full Professor in 2022. Since 2018, I have been serving as a graduate coordinator for the Ph.D. program in Natural Resource Economics.
Today, my research and teaching interests span environmental and resource economics, mostly addressing externalities and public goods, although I have digressed occasionally. I mostly focus on water resources, energy, agricultural systems, and the economic impacts of environmental policy. I explore topics such as water quality and quantity management, including nutrient runoff, PFAS contamination, and efficient water allocation. I also investigate the economics of agricultural production, food safety, and unconventional oil and gas development. I have also studied the economics of animal disease mitigation, renewable energy policies, and the impact of environmental factors like air quality on social outcomes. My teaching interests align closely with my research, covering graduate and undergraduate courses in environmental economics, water resources, energy, and quantitative methods.
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