Successful ISESSAH meeting for BEC

Last week, the International Society for Economics and Social Sciences of Animal Health held its 5^th conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia by University Putra Malaysia (UPM) and the Malaysian Agricultural Economics Association (PETA). Because of the Covid-19 restrictions, the conference was 100% on-line after initial plans to organize it as a hybrid meeting. For the attendance, originating from all continents, that could be challenging, joining a conference at nightly hours.

The meeting was very successful, with almost 100 participants and a large number of presentations on various approaches to understand and predict human behaviour regarding animal health decision making.

Also for the Business Economics group (BEC), the meeting was very successful. One of the key application area’s of BEC is the domain of animal health and three PhD students of BEC did present their work:

Xiaomei Yue presented a quantitative economic analysis, using propensity scoring and a difference in difference analysis, to evaluate the effect of farms to certified free of Bovine Viral Diarrhoea; Fanny Baudoin presented a qualitative analysis on differences between the Flemish veal and pig sectors regarding the use of antimicrobials;

Ruozhu Han presented her work on the economic efficiency of farms with different performance in longevity using an input-specific technical efficiency analysis and

Thanicha Chanchaidechachai presented a poster on the economic consequences at the farm level of a Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak in Thailand. At the end of the conference, Thanicha was awarded with the price for the best poster presentation.

Moreover, during the ISESSAH Annual General Meeting, Henk Hogeveen, personal professor in Animal Health Management at BEC, was elected as president of ISESSAH.