Will Masters was Interim Executive Director of the Center on Globalization and Sustainable Development and a Visiting Professor in the Department of International and Public Affairs for academic year 2003-04, on leave from his position as Professor of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University.  Separate pages detail his proposal for using prizes to reward innovation in African agriculture and other current research and news.  You may also be looking for his course materials (for "Economics of Food and Agriculture in International Development", offered Spring 2004).

Professor Masters is the author or co-author of numerous articles on agriculture and food policy. He has written extensively on food markets, and on the role of trade policy on agriculture.  His most recent work focuses on the determinants of technical change and economic performance, including a new proposal for funding R&D published as "Research Prizes: A Mechanism to Reward Agricultural Innovation in Low-Income Regions" in AgBioForum (2003).  Other recent papers include "An African Growth Trap" in Review of Development Economics (2003), "Complementarity and Sequencing of Innovations" in Economics of Innovation and New Technology (2003), "Welfare Gains from Quality Certification of Infant Foods" in American Journal of Agricultural Economics (2002), and "Climate and Scale in Economic Growth" in Journal of Economic Growth (2001). He is also the author of Government and Agriculture in Zimbabwe (Greenwood Press, 1994). 

Prof. Masters attended Deep Springs College then graduated from Yale University in 1984, and received a Ph.D. from the Food Research Institute of Stanford University in 1991. He has been on the faculty of Purdue University since 1991, and in addition has been a consultant to the World Bank, USAID, ICRISAT, IFPRI, and ASARECA, and a researcher at the University of Zimbabwe and at Harvard University.

Tel: 765.494.4235
Fax: 765.494.9176
E-mail: wmasters@ei.columbia.edu

Link to: Prof. Masters' website at Purdue

Return to People