Books

Food Economics: Agriculture, Nutrition and Health (2024)

At last, an reader-friendly open-access volume summarizing the economics of food!
The first half offers a gentle introduction to how we explain, predict and evaluate change in food systems using economic principles, and the second half describes how food systems have changed with charts of data from the U.S. and worldwide.

Details, support materials and a teaching blog are here: https://sites.tufts.edu/foodecon, and we explain the book in these podcast videos:

Norbert Wilson (Duke University) – The Leading Voices in Food podcast (16 min.)
Anotida Chikumbu (U Mass) — Book Series interview (51 min.)

The Economics of Malnutrition (Handbook chapter, 2022)

For advanced students, a book-like chapter (87 pages!) in the venerable Handbook of Agricultural Economics is here, and also available freely in PDF form.

The Economics of Agricultural Development: World Food Systems and Resource Use (4th ed., 2021)

This textbook, first published in 2006, aims to serve traditional courses in agricultural economics and is now in its 4th edition. Details and requests for an eBook inspection copy are available from the publisher’s website, and physical copies can be ordered from there or your local bookstore.  Used copies can readily be obtained from any online bookseller.  Also check out the cover of the Japanese edition, or read a review of the first edition in ERAE.

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