Diogo Souza Monteiro

I am food economist and the director of the Agribusiness Bachelor’s degree at Newcastle University. Before I started my academic career in 2000 I worked for 6 years in the Portuguese Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development and at Delta Cafes, the leading coffee company in Portugal.

I got my doctorate degree in Resource Economics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where I was supervised by Professor Julie Caswell. In 2006 and got a lectureship post in marketing at the Imperial College at Wye and the Kent Business School. Over the past seven years, I developed a research program in applied economics food and marketing. My main interest and expertise in understanding how firms and consumers use information on their decisions. My research is mainly applied and is currently focused on the investigation of consumer demand and industry supply of healthier foods. I am also working on the economics of food fraud, investigating the effect of market size and alternative monitoring strategies on the propensity to fraud in brands with collective reputation. Other research interest are the economics of traceability and food standards. I have also worked on management of animal diseases, coordinating a team of economists, epidemiologists and veterinaries on a project evaluating alternative emerging animal disease surveillance schemes. This research was successfully at the Journal Preventive Veterinary Medicine.

Currently I am working in two main projects:

1. Smart nutrition labels –This ongoing project with colleagues at the Kent Business School and the School of Economics at the University of Kent. Our aim is to examine whether the provision of aggregate nutrition information on the content of food shopping basket helps consumer make healthier food purchases. This research is sponsored by the British Academy.

2. Fraud in Green markets – I am collaborating with colleagues at the Grenoble Applied Economics Lab, which is a joint venture between INRA and the University Pierre Mendes France. We developed an economic experiment to investigate the effect of market size and alternative monitoring and enforcement rules on the mitigation of fraud in labels with collective reputation (such as organic). This research has been sponsored by the INRA and the University Pierre Mendes France.