Dr. Rico Ihle is an associate professor at the Agricultural Economics and Rural Policy Group of Wageningen University. He holds a PhD from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Germany).
His teaching focuses on agricultural economics and policy analysis for agricultural and food market as well as quantitative research methods and research skills for market and policy analysis. Among others, he has taught at Göttingen University, Hohenheim University (Germany), the University for Development Studies (Ghana) and Talca University (Chile). At WUR he is teaching the BSc courses Econometrics (AEP21306), Agriculture, Food and Policy (AEP21806) as well as the MSc course Economics of EU policies for sustainability transitions (AEP30306) and the PhD course Intro to R programming for Social Sciences at WASS. He has organized BEB study tours to Slovakia, Morocco, Hungary and Munich (YSS21303). Currently, he is supervising the theses of 6 PhD students and of several BSc and MSc students.
His research interests are centered around SDG2 of "Zero hunger". They include the analysis of agricultural markets and food prices, economic aspects of violent political conflict, the effects of public policies on food markets and economic aspects of food system resilience. He is especially interested in EU agricultural markets, food markets of the Middle East, Northern Africa and Indonesia as well as food price analysis and monitoring. He also works occasionally on other food-related topics in Sub-Saharan Africa and other regions. He has a broad expertise in quantitative methods with a specialization on time series econometrics. He is publishing his research in major agricultural economics journals such as the European Review of Agricultural Economics, Food Policy or Agricultural Economics and has co-authored more than 100 conference contributions. Most of his working papers and conference contributions can be found here.