Research specialisations

The Agricultural and Resource Economics research group consists of researchers in a variety of areas of agricultural, environmental, resource and development economics. Within these broad areas, particular research interests and specialisations include:

1. Agricultural economics, including analysis of agricultural markets, international trade in agricultural products and other commodities, agribusiness, agricultural production and risk, macroeconomic linkages to agriculture, and biotechnology and intellectual property in crop varieties.
2. Environmental economics and natural resource management, including the analysis of economic issues surrounding the use and management of water, the measurement of sustainable development, the economic analysis of ecological thresholds and ecological resilience, the development of environmental markets, the impacts of climate change, and bio-economic modelling.
3. Economic development, and economic issues affecting developing countries, including agricultural production and markets, natural resource management in a smallholder and village context, and the impacts of changing institutions, provision of public goods, governance, and corruption.
4. Experimental economics in the context of natural resource management, and environmental and energy markets. This specialisation is a combination of method and topic area, as experimental economics represents a way of doing economics. Through the establishment of REEML (the Resources, Energy and Environmental Markets Laboratory), researchers in the group will be conducting experiments on how economic behaviour affects environmental decision-making, the development and application of market-based instruments, mechanism-design issues, and economic issues in the provision of energy.

Research in the group has been supported in recent years by agencies such as the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), AusAID, and Land and Water Australia.