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Meet Spiro Stefanou, Head of the Economic Research Service

1 January 2021 1,095 views No Comment

Spiro Stefanou

Spiro Stefanou has been the administrator of the Economic Research Service (ERS) at the US Department of Agriculture since August 2020. He provides leadership and guidance for the agency research, analytical, and technical operations. Prior to his arrival at ERS, he was professor and former chair in the food and resource economics department at the University of Florida and professor of agricultural economics at Penn State University. He is a fellow of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association and held visiting positions at universities in Greece, The Netherlands, Italy, and Austria. Stefanou is past editor of the American Journal of Agricultural Economics and Applied Economic Perspectives and Policy and has served on the editorial boards of six national and international journals.

What about this position appealed to you?

The Economic Research Service is a world leader in conducting objective, policy-informing research addressing the current trends and emerging issues impacting agriculture, the food system, the environment, and rural America. In addition, ERS is one of the 13 federal statistical agencies, and we are a data-driven operation. We produce data products, use data products generated by other federal statistical agencies, and acquire proprietary data products. Leveraging these data assets with our human capital expertise offers tremendous potential to have an impact. Given this potential, ERS has a unique opportunity to re-envision how we conduct business and craft the research and outreach agenda leveraging new staff ideas and a new location in America’s heartland.

Describe the top 2–3 priorities you have for the Economic Research Service.

My priorities revolve around our goals to undertake relevant, timely, and objective economic research to promote the growth of US agriculture and rural areas as we are mindful of our environmental impact. Part of being relevant is being ready to address the challenges on the horizon. These horizons will demand that we operate at the nexus of agriculture/food, the environment, and health. This prism of systems demands connecting with new partners across disciplines and across the public-private divide. We are revisiting the range of branded ERS outreach products beyond our current portfolio to more rapidly address these timely and emerging needs.

What do you see as your biggest challenge(s) for ERS?

I would like to identify two important, serious challenges. The first is a challenge most enterprises encounter that revolves around operating in the short run while planning for the long run. I always see these challenges in the context of a sports analogy. This is a team effort; everyone needs to keep their head up and take care of business. At the same time, we need to move without the ball to be in a position to make the play. Bringing this back to ERS, we need to balance the demands for timely, rapid analysis of emerging issues and, at the same time, craft and invest in research and outlook programs that anticipate future needs to continue producing timely and relevant research and data.

The second significant challenge is the responsibility of being a federal statistical agency, which entails a high bar to clear that centers on trust. The role of trust is a burden we proudly bear, and honesty and judgement are the foundations of trust. We count on data providers to trust that information collected for statistical purposes will be protected and that these data will be used for the purposes the agency described. Having no way to independently verify the completeness and accuracy of statistical information, data users must trust the credibility of the information and products we provide.

How can the statistical community help you?

The statistical community can assist us with the methodological and computational challenges of communicating our data products. We, as data-driven economists, are at our best when we can communicate insights into how policies impact stakeholders’ decisions. As we combine data with more detail over individuals, households, time, and space, there is an evolving need to find effective and impactful mechanisms to translate the data into insights. Our ‘customers’ face narrowing bandwidth and have a need for creative translation of new trends and their impacts.

Prior to your tenure, what do you see as the biggest recent accomplishment of the agency?

The decision to undertake significant investment in data products from proprietary sources and to creatively merge them into federal data products. These combined data products create more fuel for our research activities and stimulate new directions for our research programs.

Tell us more about your research and how it overlaps with the work of ERS.

My research activities address themes of competitiveness and growth and related policy implications. This research revolves around how firms make decisions when current decisions impact future production possibilities. How firms choose to adopt effective technologies and their capabilities to extract the maximum potential from these technologies is a key feature of these frameworks. Investment and innovation patterns, firm learning, and capacity utilization are key features of these investigations.

With agriculture being a natural resource–based activity, productivity gains are going to come from innovation. My long-standing work in productivity and economic performance are topics of relevance to USDA’s goal to promote growth in agriculture. Along with several colleagues, we’ve developed the theoretical foundations for addressing efficiency and productivity in a dynamic production environment and generated many studies and considerable discussion in economic policy circles across nations.

A core mission of ERS is to undertake objective economic research on trends and emerging issues that impact agriculture, the environment, food, and rural America. Assessing opportunities and impact of policies that can promote growth and well-being in this part of our economy is a key part of this mission. The policy stories associated with the dynamic capabilities and productivity have wide interest, since growth can come from firms wasting fewer resources or adapting their size to extract the full potential of technologies in place and/or firms looking to push the technological envelope.

How does your research inform how you lead ERS?

I have always been drawn to the short-run, long-run story of economics. We are always operating in the short run. Rutherford Aris has a great statement in his book Discrete Dynamic Programming that left an indelible impression on me:

“… If you don’t do the best you can with what you happen to have got, you’ll never do the best you might have done with what you should have had …”

Optimal decisions are linked forward “… to the best we might have done …” and backward “…with what you should have had. …” This is a statement about realizing our potential! Planning is essential to realizing our potential. The plans can provide a guidepost, but plans can be revised.

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