Didier Alia is a Research Assistant Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance, having initially joined the Evans School as a Research Associate in September 2017. Dr. Alia is an agricultural economist with a broad research interest and expertise in international development with a focus on agricultural technology adoption, agricultural transformation, climate risks and adaptation. In his doctoral dissertation, Dr. Alia uses agricultural panel survey data to explore and assess the effectiveness of various mechanisms or policies intended to increase farmers’ investment in modern inputs that lead to improved crop productivity in Africa. Other aspects of his recent research relate to agricultural price analysis, barriers to trade and developing countries’ access to global markets, and food safety and food regulation in the global food value chain. His research has gender and inclusion lenses and often covers issues related to urbanization, education, health, and trade and their implications for rural development in Africa.
Didier Alia is also the Lead Data & Analytics at the Evans School Policy Analysis & Research Group (EPAR) where he works across multiple data curation and agricultural development indicator construction using the World Bank LSMS-ISA and other large-scale household surveys.
Didier received his Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics from the University of Kentucky in 2017. He received a MSc in Statistics and Economics from Sub-Regional Institute of Statistics and Applied Economics (Cameroon) in 2009, and a MSc from Mathematics from the University of Abomey-Calavi (Benin) in 2006. He also spent a year as an international young fellow in the European Center for Development Policy Management in the Netherlands. Prior to graduate school, Didier worked as an economist-statistician at the AfricaRice center in Cotonou, Benin.
For more information on his research interests and publications, visit his website: https://sites.google.com/site/aliadidier/