Institute: Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Other affiliation: SLU Global, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
About
Assem is an associate professor in food and agricultural economics at the Department of Economics, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala. He is also an associate professor in economics and rural development at Suez Canal University in Egypt.
His research interests revolve predominantly around international food and agricultural trade and trade policy, food consumption and production and their linkage with food security, demand analysis and commodity markets, and rural and development economics. Exploring the determinants and impacts of China’s involvement in developing countries has always been a strong dimension in his research agenda. His work in recent years has focused on the political economy of food and agriculture by looking at the role that food price volatility did play in the emergence of political unrest of 2011 in North Africa. More recently, Assem has been involved in a prospective study on the future of tertiary agricultural education in Africa.
Assem had served as a research fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies of Brown University (USA), and as an assistant researcher in the College of Economics & Management of Northwest A&F University. He had been a visiting scholar at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences UMB, the Chinese Center for Agricultural Policy CCAP in Beijing, and Corvinus University in Budapest.
He has been awarded multiple graduate fellowships and his research has received funding, including from the Norwegian Scholarship Council, the China Scholarship Council, the Hungarian Scholarship Board, the International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies, the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), the China Academy of Sciences, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, the Egyptian Ministry of Higher Education, and the Swedish Institute (SI).
In 2013, Assem was awarded the Distinguished Scholar Award by the Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development. He has also recently been elected as a member of the Arab-German Young Academy of Sciences and Humanities (AGYA).
