Tauhidur Rahman

Tauhidur Rahman is a development economist. He is the Founding Director of The Initiative for Agency and Development (IfAD). He is an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Department of Economics (Courtesy) at the University of Arizona. In November 2022, he was appointed as a member of the Economic Advisory Council (ECA) of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a United States Agency for foreign aid. He was a visiting professor of law and economics at University of Oslo, Norway, in 2011. He was trained as an applied econometrician, with research interests in the fields of development economics, behavioral economics, law and economics, and program evaluation. He has studied issues such as measurements and analysis of human well-being, child labor, child and elderly health, environmental justice and environmental regulations, interlinkages between poverty-agency-wellbeing, economic viability and sustainability of smallholding farmers, and community-driven development programs. His current research is on the issues of agency, behavioral impacts of development programs, decision-making under climate uncertainty, political economy of development, and effects of emotion and burnout on performance.

He has served on panels of United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), US Environment Protection Agency (US EPA), National Science Foundation (NSF), and has collaborated with United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and United Nations (UN) institutions. His research and outreach programs have been supported by grants from USDA, NSF, NOAA, NSF, Arizona Department of Environmental Quality, Western Extension Risk Management Education Center, World Bank, International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). He was a Co-PI (with James Elser and Rimjhim Aggarwal, Arizona State University) of the National Science Foundation’s multidisciplinary Research Coordination Network (2012-2018) on a Sustainable Food System. He has been PI/CO-PI/CO-I of approximately $10.63 million grants and contracts.

He is the coauthor of Environmental Justice and Federalism (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2013). He has served as Guest Editor of Social Philosophy & Policy, for a volume on “Poverty”.  He is currently working on two-volume book tentatively titled as Empowering the Poor. He is co-editor (with Fabrizio Felloni and Indran Naidoo, IFAD) of a book tentatively titled as Targeting of the Poor (in progress). 

For more information visit: https://agencyfordevelopment.org/tauhidur-rahman/

Degrees

• Ph.D., School of Economic Sciences, Washington State University, Pullman, WA, 2004
• M.S., Statistics (ABD), Washington State University, Pullman, WA
• M.A., Economics, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi, India, 1997
• B.A. (Honors), Economics, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, India, 1994

Awards & Honors

• Grants from World Bank, National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and US Department of Agriculture.

Classes Taught

• AREC 339-Economic Statistics
• AREC 512-Development Economics
• AREC 596-Graduate Seminar

Recent Publications

The Effect of Urban Air Pollution on Small Businesses: Evidence from Beijing (with Xiaoou Liu and Xiangrui Wang). Energy Economics. 2024.

The Rise of Social Safety Nets and Social Insurance in the West: Implications for Developing Countries (with Anna Aizer, Price Fishback, and Adriana Lleras-Muney). In The Handbook of Social Protection: Evidence to Inform Policy in Low- and Middle-Income Countries, Rema Hanna (Harvard) and Ben Olken (MIT), editors, MIT Press. 2024

The origin and progress of the Sustainable Development Goals (with Babatunde Abidoye and Selma Karuaihe). In Handbook on Public Policy and Food Security, Edward Elgar Publishing, Pages: 14-23, 2024. 

Poverty, Agency, and Development. Social Philosophy & Policy (Lead article), 40(1):9-35, 2023. 

In the pursuit of an appropriate calorie intake norm for Indian States (with Zakaria Siddiqui). In Achieving Zero Hunger in India: Challenges and Policies. Springer Nature Singapore, Pages: 47-67, 2023.

Wealth Status and Health Insurance Enrollment in India: An Empirical Analysis (Preshit Ambade and Joe Gerald). Healthcare, Vol.11, No. 9: 1342, 2023. 

Drain on your health: Sanitation externalities from dirty drains in India (with V Dayal and Anand Murugesan). Review of Development Economics, 26(4): 2251-2273, 2022.

Explaining Caste-Based Disparities in Enrollment for National Health Insurance Program in India: A Decomposition Analysis (with Preshit Ambade and Smita Pakhale). Journal of Racial and Ethnic Health Disparities, PP:1-15, 2022. 

Multi-level determinants of crop choice to water stress in smallholder irrigation system of Central Nepal (with Bhuwan Thapa). Climate and Development, Volume 13 (7): 581-592, 2021.

The Quiet Resignation: Why Do So Many Female Lawyers Abandon Their Careers? (with Jane Bambauer). Volume 10, Issue 3, U.C. Irvine Law Review (Lead article), 2020.