PhD candidate: Economic Modelling of EU agricultural policies

Updated: almost 2 years ago
Job Type: Temporary
Deadline: 02 Jun 2022

Are you concerned about the long-term environmental impact of human activities and agriculture, the trade-offs with food security and the role of EU Green Deal policies? Are you interested in exploring how promising new technologies in agriculture could contribute to more safe and equal world in the future? Are you motivated to work with an established international team of researchers?

Wageningen University and Research is hiring a PhD candidate (4 years, full-time employment) to become part of a large international and multi-disciplinary project funded by the EU that aims to develop new models and tools to assess the future development of the EU agricultural landscape.

The PhD candidate will gain research experience in a variety of economic disciplines, from microeconomics, regulatory economics, to a macro-level (Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modelling). The candidate will contribute to the identification of the promising technologies relevant for Green Deal in agriculture, for instance Gene technologies and organic farming. Upon the collection of field-level data, the candidate will analyse the economics of the different production technologies in agriculture such that they can be implemented in the internationally established global CGE model MAGNET for long-term projections and scenario analysis (magnet-model.netlify.app). The MAGNET model is used for policy analyses and advice by the European Commission, FAO and OECD.
In the course of the elaboration of the thesis the candidate will gain experience by interacting with leading researchers in agricultural economics, stakeholders groups, international research teams and policy makers.

The research is embedded within the chair Agricultural Economics and Rural Policy at Wageningen University and within Wageningen Economic Research institute. The PhD project is part of the Horizon Europe BrightSpace project, in which 14 leading European research institutes are developing and applying models to analyse the synergies and trade-offs between socio-economic and environmental development of the EU agricultural sector in the coming decades.

The overall objective of the BrightSpace project is to design effective and sustainable strategies for assessing and addressing the challenges of EU agriculture to navigate within a safe and just operating space, including planetary boundaries as required by the European Green Deal. BrightSpace provides a set of analytical instruments to experiment, analyse, and coordinate the effects of innovative governance structures and policies related to agriculture to navigate within a safe and just operating space.

The candidate will be co-supervised by Prof. Hans van Meijl , Prof, Justus Wesseler and Dr. Zuzana Smeets Kristkova .



Similar Positions