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 and Politics of European Integration (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). He is the coordinator of the staff and PhD EconMonday seminar of the Section Economics. Currently, he is supervising the theses of 4 PhD students and of several BSc and MSc students.

His research interests include the analysis of agricultural markets and food prices, economic aspects of violent political conflict and the effects of public policies on food markets. He is especially interested in EU agricultural markets, food markets of the Middle East and Northern Africa, the EU dairy market, food price monitoring and 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 published in the major agricultural economics journals such as the European Review of Agricultural Economics, Food Policy or Agricultural Economics and has co-authored more than 60 conference contributions. Most of his working papers and conference contributions can be found here.

He is currently serving as founding coordinator of EconMonday, the internal staff and PhD  researchseminar of the Section Economics, as well as an associate editor of “Agricultural Economics - The Journal of the International Association of Agricultural Economists" and "Food Security - The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food". He is member of the International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium (IATRC) and associate member of the Courant Research Centre “Poverty, Equity and Growth” of Göttingen University. He has a wide international network with contacts to several countries in Europe, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

He is member of the general board of the International Network for the MBA Agribusiness and Commerce (AgriMBA) for which he has taught courses at Kazan State Agricultural University and the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine. He is the WUR contact person for the subject area Economics and Management of the Euroleague of Life Sciences (ELLS) as well as for the International Student Summit anually organized by the Tokyo University of Agriculture. Together with the Kyiv School of Economics, he has organized the webinar on "Implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for global food markets and food policies". 

For more information, take a look at the Curriculum Vitae or the Research@WUR profile of Dr. Ihle.

Dr. Ihle has been lead analyst of the report for the European Parliament on "The EU Cattle Sector: Challenges and Opportunities - Milk and Meat" as well as of the analysis conducted for the Joint Research of the EU on "Monitoring of Prices and Margins in EU Food Supply Chains: Existing and Alternative Approaches". He was lead econometric analyst for the Agro-Nutri Monitor 2020: Monitor prijsvorming voedingsmiddelen en analyse belemmeringen voor verduurzaming as well as the Agro-Nutri Monitor 2021 and the Agro-Nutri Monitor 2022. Currently he is leading one work package of the e-AgriMBA project which focuses on establishing a new AgriMBA program at the Technical University of Moldova.