Euan Phimister is a professor of Development Finance and head of Research at Stellenbosch Business School. He is an applied economist whose research focuses on agriculture, natural resources and the environment. This includes current work on farm households and rural development, access to energy and fuel poverty, and improving the control of invasive species.

After an honours degree in Agriculture at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, he obtained his MSc and PhD in Agricultural Economics from the University of Manchester, UK – the latter developing from time spent at the Centre for World Food Studies, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. His first permanent academic post was as a lecturer in Operational Research in the Department of Econometrics, University of Manchester, before he moved to the University of Aberdeen where, before joining Stellenbosch Business School, he was a professor of Economics in the Business School. During his career at the University of Aberdeen, he was head of Economics, deputy head, director of Research and director of Resources at the Business School. He has been a visiting researcher at INRA, Rennes, France and the Agricultural Economics Institute, The Hague, and is currently an honorary associate of the James Hutton Research Institute, Scotland, and a senior fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. He has also undertaken a range of consultancy projects, including work for the Angolan government and economy-wide modelling of rural development policies for the EU Commission.

Over the last 10 years, he has been involved in a variety of interdisciplinary externally funded research projects involving partners from Ethiopia, Ghana and Uganda. He is currently leading a Global Challenges Research Fund project on land and soil degradation in Ethiopia involving soil science, environmental modelling, economics and wider social science. Since 2019, he has also been part of a project with an international team of ecologists assisting in developing economic and financial models to improve invasive species management in Argentina, Chile and Brazil.
He was a member of the UK Research Excellence Panel for Agriculture, Veterinary and Food Science, which evaluated research by UK universities for the periods 2007–2014 and 2014–2021, the results of which formed the basis of the UK government’s distribution of core research funding to UK universities. He is also an associate editor of the Journal of Agricultural Economics. His research has been published in a variety of international peer-reviewed academic journals.