Jong Woo Kang is Director of Regional Cooperation and Integration Division at the Economic Research and Development Impact Department (ERDI) of the Asian Development Bank (ADB). He is a seasoned economist with extensive knowledge and experiences on policy and strategic issues. He was Principal Economist at ERDI, Senior Advisor to the Managing Director General of ADB, and Senior Economist at Strategy and Policy Department at ADB. He leads the annual publication of Asian Economic Integration Report. Areas of his research interest include regional integration, inclusive growth, macroeconomic policies, international trade and finance, and aid effectiveness. He published articles in economics journals such as Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Applied Economics and Journal of World Trade. Before joining ADB, he was director at Ministry of Finance and Economy of Korea until 2006. He had got his BA in economics and MA in public administration from Seoul National University, and Ph D in economics from University of Washington.

Junjie Zhang is a Professor of Environmental Economics in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University and the Director of the Initiative for Sustainable Investment (ISI) at Duke Kunshan University (DKU). His research focuses on empirical issues in environmental and resource economics, covering air pollution, energy transition, and climate change. He has received funding from reputable sources, including the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, China National Natural Science Foundation, China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, the Energy Foundation, The World Bank, and Asian Development Bank.

Zhang is a co-chair of the Committee of Environmental Economics in the Chinese Academy of Environmental Science, a member of the Advisory Board for the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, and the Chief Economist of the Green Finance Forum of 60. Zhang is also an associate editor for the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization (JEBO) and an editorial board member for the Journal of the Association of Environmental & Resource Economists (JAERE) and the Journal of Environmental Economics & Management (JEEM).

Zhang served as the founding director of DKU’s Environmental Research Center and International Master of Environmental Policy Program. Before that, he was an associate professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. He was the Volkswagen Visiting Chair in Sustainability in the Schwarzman Scholars Program at Tsinghua University. He also served as a senior advisor for the Asia Society, an auditor for the Asian Association of Environmental & Resource Economics, and a co-editor for the China Economic Review.

Zhang holds a B.S. from the Renmin University of China, a B.S. and an M.S. from Tsinghua University, and a Ph.D. from Duke University.

Sunhee Suk is an associate professor in the Interfaculty Initiative in Planetary Health as well as the Graduate School of Fisheries and Environmental Sciences at Nagasaki University. She obtained her PhD in Economics from Kyoto University. Her research focuses on government policies based on market mechanisms to solve environmental and climate change problems and analyze their impacts from various angles. Specifically, the topics of study are to understand the carbon pricing, which is emerging as a key policy for climate change countermeasures, and to analyze the impact of linkage of carbon markets among Northeast Asian countries, specifically Japan, People’s Republic of China, and the Republic of Korea on their respective economies and environments.