Johan F. M. Swinnen

Dr. Johan Swinnen is Professor of Economics and Director of LICOS Center for Institutions and Economic Performance at the University of Leuven in Belgium. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels, and Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Center on Food Security and the Environment. His fields of interest include institutional reform and development, globalization and international integration, media economics, and agriculture and food policy.

Among his latest books are Political Power and Economic Policy (with Gordon C. Rausser), Global Supply Chains, Standards, and the Poor, and From Marx and Mao to the Market: The Economics and Politics of Agricultural Transition. He has been a guest editor for World Development, Development Policy Review, The World Economy and the European Review of Agricultural Economics, and associate editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. He was the keynote speaker at several International Association of Agricultural Economists Conferences, chair of the Agricultural & Applied Economics Association (AAEA) International Section, and chair of the European Association of Agricultural Economists (EAAE) Congress Program Committee. He was elected a Fellow of the EAAE in 2008.

From 2003 to 2004 he was Lead Economist at the World Bank, and from 1998 to 2001 Economic Advisor at the European Commission. Recently, Dr. Swinnen has worked as an economic advisor to many governments, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the World Bank, the OECD, and the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization. He has been an invited expert on land markets and agricultural policy at several recent EU Commission workshops.