Professor Ken Thomson is an economist who has worked on agricultural and rural policy issues for several decades of university career at Newcastle upon Tyne and Aberdeen (of which he is a native). He is currently working part-time in SEGS for a limited period, mainly to assist the Group and its members to obtaining and successfully completing contributions to the Institute's overall mission.
He has been a principal or co-investigator, a consultant or a reviewer for various EU FP7 (and FP6, FP5, etc.) research projects, e.g. TOP-MARD, RuDI, CAP-IRE, CAPRI-RD, RURAL-ECMOD, and TERA-SIAP. He was Editor of the Jouirnal of Agricultural Economics between 1987 and 1993, and remains an active member of the UK Agricultural Economics Society. He was a member of the UK-wide Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) Agriculture Panels in 2001 and 2008, and has carried out similar work in or for Australia, Germany and Romania. He has been a specialist advisor to several Scottish and UK Parliamentary Committees, and is a Visiting Professor at the Countryside and Community Research Institute, University of Gloucestershire. He has acted recently as a consultant to OECD, FAO, and IFPRI.
His out-of-office activities include mountaineering (mainly hillwalking these days), music (mainly chamber and opera), and literature of various but not all kinds.
Much of Ken's work has focussed on the development of the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) as it has moved from market price support to "decoupled" direct payments, with rural development policy playing an ever-more important role for agricultural investment, agri-environmental land management and the wider rural economy. This work has involved number of modelling exercises carried out by Ken or his colleagues, e.g. the EU-wide "Newcastle" linear programming model of CAP markets in the 1970s and 1980s, and more recently SAM/CGE models at regional (e.g. the Scottish Western Isles with D. Roberts, and Greek regions with D. Psaltopoulos) or national/EU level. However, Ken has also written extensively on the political-economic arguments over CAP reform and related issues. He has carried out a number of projects in Central European countries, e.g. Poland, Romania and Serbia. From time to time, he has also dabbled in forestry, fisheries, rural tourism, and the host of issues raised by his 40-odd postgraduate research students over the years.
Links:
[1] http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Document.aspx?Document=PESFinalReport28September2011%28FINAL%29.pdf