Fellows Address

Julian Alston

"Reflections on Agricultural R&D, Productivity, and the Data Constraint: Unfinished Business, Unsettled Issues”
Tuesday, August 1 - 8:30 am - 9:30 am
Salon II/III on the 7th floor

Julian Alston is a distinguished professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics and the director of the Robert Mondavi Institute Center for Wine Economics at the University of California, Davis.  Previously, he was the Chief Economist in the Department of Agriculture and Rural Affairs in Victoria, Australia.  He has a PhD in Economics from North Carolina State University.

He is a Fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association (AAEA), a Distinguished Fellow of the Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society (AARES), a Distinguished Scholar of the Western Agricultural Economics Association (WAEA), a Fellow of the American Association of Wine Economists (AAWE), and an Honorary Life Member of the International Association of Agricultural Economists (IAAE).  He currently serves on the executive committees of AARES, The Beeronomics Society, and the IAAE, as well as several editorial boards.

Alston is an agricultural economist known for his work on the economics of agricultural and food policy.  Recent projects have emphasized science & technology policy and the economics of agricultural innovation; and food & nutrition policy, and the global challenges of poverty, malnutrition, and obesity.  He has written hundreds of academic journal articles and chapters related to these subjects, as well as numerous (co-authored) books, notably Science Under Scarcity: Principles and Practice for Agricultural Research Evaluation and Priority Setting (1995), Persistence Pays: U.S. Agricultural Productivity Growth and the Benefits from Public R&D Spending (2010), and most recently The Effects of Farm and Food Policy on Obesity in the United States (2017).