ASU Research E-Magazine: Trading Places

You might say that Eric Thor is in the business of hammering swords into plowshares. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, Thor was appointed to a government committee to oversee economic issues related to the breakup. The group’s goal was to promote economic health in order to prevent conflict between the emerging nations.

“Wars start over ethnic conflict,” says Thor, a professor of agribusiness and resource management and director of ASU East’s Center for Agribusiness Policy Studies. Consider that the former Soviet Union includes more than 40 distinct ethnic groups, and that the once powerful umbrella police state was defunct. Together, it seemed clear that internal conflict was inevitable.

“The bottom line is that we tried to underpin the trade education,” Thor explains. “Our feeling is that if these people can trade with the world, they’re not going to fight with the world.”

Thor now directs ASU East’s “Global Executives” program, designed by the government to exchange students between the United States and former Soviet controlled countries. Foreign students spend two to six weeks with ASU faculty and students from a variety of disciplines. They learn many aspects of business and trade. Their time is divided between classroom lectures, meetings with government and business leaders, and site visits to local companies.

“The theory is to bring ASU students together and give them new experiences that are useful to their marketing and finance and trade careers. At the same time, we find linkages with the best and brightest students in the former Eastern Bloc countries,” Thor says.

To date, the program has met with great success.

“Go to Brussels and see who’s negotiating now on behalf of countries like Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Ukraine. We have ASU certificate graduates representing all of those countries,” Thor adds. “We’re one of the world’s leaders in emerging markets education and training.”

ASU East’s Global Executives program receives excellent evaluations from participants, according to Gary Laidig, program leader for the Cochran Fellowship Program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The program has provided funding for the Global Executives exchanges.

“ASU is one of our key universities. We rely on them for good quality training. We consider ASU’s programs very well run,” he says. “[Participants] leave with technical training and a great experience of the United States as well.”

Student exchanges often lead to business opportunities between the countries involved. For example, sales of powdered milk from Arizona and California to Turkey are the result of one exchange.

“To date, we’ve done almost $10 million worth of business between partners,” says Thor.

The program addresses a wide variety of business concepts, from dealing with customs, to food safety, to basic market principles.

“We took a group to the Chicago Board of Trade,” Thor recalls. “We were down in the pit where every year about $700 trillion worth of financial options and products trade. The third-in-command of one country asked, ‘Who really is setting the prices? Somebody’s got to be setting the prices.’ I said, ‘No, what you’re seeing around you is the market setting the prices.’ He was used to prices being set by the government.”—Diane Boudreau