Dr. Sunghun Lim completed his dissertation in 2020 under the supervision of Marc Bellemare and was recognized with the Department’s Outstanding Dissertation Award. His dissertation summarized how the rise of global value chains, wherein the different stages of the production process are located across different countries, has changed the nature of agricultural production around the world. In his dissertation, Lim found evidence that modern agrarian countries transform their structure of economies by participating in agricultural global value chains. In addition, Lim examined the relationships among risk aversion, crop diversification, and food security using a sample of Ethiopian households.
Lim is now an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics at Texas Tech University. His research lies at the intersection of international trade, agricultural development, and agricultural trade policy. Most recently, he studied how US and Chinese agricultural trade policies affected the 2020 US presidential election and exacerbated political polarization in the US. This paper is in the AgEcon Search repository Dr. Lim’s research has been featured in the 2020 FAO the State of Agricultural Commodity Markets (SOCO) edition as well as the 2021 NBER Conference on Risks in Agricultural Supply Chains. In 2020, Dr. Lim was invited to become a member of the International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium. In his first year at Texas Tech University, he was awarded a USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Capacity Building Grant by collaborating with agricultural science scholars and stakeholders.