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Bennett Chair in Sustainable Finance at the Bennett Institute for Innovation and Policy Acceleration, University of Sussex Business School
Professor Matthew Agarwala is the Bennett Chair in Sustainable Finance at the Bennett Institute for Innovation and Policy Acceleration, at the University of Sussex Business School. He is an economist interested in measuring and delivering sustainability, wellbeing, and productivity. Motivated by the belief that 21st century progress cannot be described by 20th century statistics, Matthew’s work seeks to transform economic measurement to better reflect sustainability, inequality, and wellbeing. He enjoys working across sectors and disciplines, and his co-authors include ecologists, economists, conservation scientists and practitioners, social anthropologists, civil servants, members of UK Parliament, and Nobel Laureates in peace, medicine, physics, and chemistry. Matthew regularly consults for governments and scientific organizations on topics of natural capital, ecosystem services, green finance, wellbeing, and sustainability.
In green finance, Matthew’s work uses AI to combine environmental-economic models with measures of sovereign credit risk to create the world’s first climate- and biodiversity- smart sovereign credit ratings. His work in economic measurement has contributed to the creation of the UN System of Environmental Economic Accounts, leading to the landmark adoption of global guidelines for measuring and valuing natural capital by the UN General Assembly in 2021. His work in productivity demonstrates how environmental impacts can be incorporated into productivity analyses at the sectoral and national level, providing integrated data and analytics for addressing Net Zero and productivity growth simultaneously.
Beyond Sussex, Matthew is a Research Affiliate at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy, University of Cambridge, a member of The Productivity Institute, Honorary Professor at Scotland’s Rural College, and Senior Policy Fellow at Yale University’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy.
Matthew regularly consults for governments and scientific organizations on topics of natural capital, ecosystem services, green finance, wellbeing, and sustainability. He enjoys working across sectors and disciplines, and his co-authors include ecologists, economists, conservation scientists and practitioners, social anthropologists, civil servants, members of UK Parliament, and Nobel Laureates in peace, medicine, physics, and chemistry. Matthew maintains active research networks in Canada, Hong Kong, Germany, USA, Japan, and throughout the UK. He is a regular media contributor (Bloomberg, NYTimes, FT, Guardian, Times, Channel 4 News, BBC).
