Zvi Lerman

Zvi Lerman is Professor Emeritus of Agricultural Economics in the Department of Environmental Economics and Management, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. He earned his PhD degree in Finance in 1984 from the School of Business Administration at The Hebrew University and became Full Professor in 2000, before retiring in 2011. In the 1980s he worked on financial performance of agricultural cooperatives in Israel and the U.S., and based on this expertise he was invited in 1990 to join the first World Bank mission to the then Soviet Union to advise on reforming collective agriculture in line with market principles. This mission was a major turning point in his academic interests, and since 1991 his research has focused on land reform and farm restructuring in transition economies. He has conducted farm-level surveys in various countries of the former Soviet Union and Central Eastern Europe, covering large farm enterprises, family farms, and rural households. His research findings on agricultural transition and cooperatives have been extensively presented at international conferences and reported in numerous journal articles, books, and monographs. Many of these publications have been translated into Russian and other languages.