On Thursday, June 11th, ISET hosted Mr. Brain Kuns, Ph.D. student at the University of Stockholm, who presented his doctoral work titled “Swedish Black Earth: The trials and tribulations of the publicly listed, investor-led, Western farming model in Russia and Ukraine”.
In his study Mr. Kuns had examined four super large-scale Nordic owned publicly traded corporate farms operating in Russia and Ukraine from 2006-2007. As Mr. Kuns highlighted, despite the scales of the farms, modern technologies and, in general, implemented western farming models, these agro corporations are not profitable for investors. The author tried to address the main question – why have these investments not been successful? The study showed that the main reason of these unsuccessful investments was the mixed role that finance played in the corporations – investors were more interested solely in land than in production on that land. More specifically, investors acquired large amounts of land at lower prices compared to land prices in Nordic countries with the expectations of price increase. In addition, some investors did not properly appreciated the unique climatic and other local challenges in the region.
ISET welcomes Professor Maksym Obrizan as a Visiting Professor for the period of May 24 through June 27, 2015. Prof. Maksym Obrizan currently holds a position of Assistant Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics and of Senior Economist at Kyiv Economics Institute.
At ISET Prof. Obrizan will be primarily engaged in teaching Macroeconomics V, obligatory 3-credit course and Financial Econometrics, an elective 3-credit course during miniterm V. He will also provide informal advice to second-year students who work on their MA theses.