Clara Garcia Bouyssou

My PhD research is embedded in a larger project aiming to investigate the role of income, demographics, climate, and trade policies in the development of the animal food sectors internationally. I focus on the demand side of the story. The first paper of my PhD project is a meta-analysis of food demand elasticities with an emphasis on animal food elasticities, which provides the meta-data to estimate disaggregated meta-elasticities for different animal foods (e.g., beef, pork, and poultry). Expenditure and price elasticity estimates are key parameters to project future market developments, it is, therefore, essential that they are reliable and comparable not only within products but also across countries.  In the second paper, I use the meta-data collected for the previous paper to project food demand meta-elasticities under different Shared Socioeconomic Pathways using machine-learning models. Finally, the third paper builds on my previous research and examines possible policy scenarios targeting sustainable and healthy diets.

The three papers could inform policy makers, industry members, and other stakeholders on likely developments of animal food demand under different scenarios and policy schemes.

Moreover, modelers could use the output from my first and second papers to increase the disaggregation of the food sector and improve the foundation surrounding the behavioral parameters of the models, and hence help them to better answer timely research questions on the consumption of animal food products.

I really like that IFRO is an interdisciplinary department and that I can join events like the weekly Friday seminars where I learn from colleagues coming from very different disciplines. Doing a PhD can put a lot of pressure on oneself, but here I found a friendly environment in which I can grow and challenge myself as a researcher without taxing my mental health. The welcoming PhD community is a plus!

It is hard to narrow down the list, so I will mention a few. First, I am very curious, and I enjoy problem-solving. Second, I like using empirical methods to try to answer questions that help to inform policy makers and other stakeholders in their decision-making to achieve better environmental, health, and societal outcomes. Third, I am driven to contribute to the scientific literature. More specifically, I like that the solution I propose to my research question produces intermediate outcomes that are transparent, robust, and useful enough to potentially serve as an input to other researchers.