Joseph Edmundson

Joseph Edmundson graduated from the Georgetown University Walsh School of Foreign Service in May 2022 with a BS in international economics with minors in mathematics and international development.  His academic interests include rural and agrarian economic development with a focus on environmental, health, and economic externalities.  Joseph’s first exposure to India was in December 2019 when he traveled to New Delhi on a two-week immersion trip to collect local experiences and perspectives on water utilization.  Leaving the country with a profound desire to continue engaging with and working in India, he spent the remainder of his undergraduate years investigating rural Indian economic initiatives.  This culminated in his honors thesis on the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act’s theoretical impact on wage dynamics.  

During his undergraduate years, he was also involved with nonprofit consulting.  Following his graduation, Joseph spent two years with Goldman Sachs Public Global Banking and Markets Division in New York City. 

In India, Joseph is excited to spend his free time continuing to develop his yoga practice as well as learn new culinary techniques, two of his favorite hobbies.  Joseph also enjoys playing the tenor saxophone and piano, and is an avid art museum goer.  Besides, he has performed as a dancer in Georgetown’s Rangila, an annual South Asian dance recital fundraiser.

In his Fulbright-Nehru project, Joseph is researching the implementation of two technology-based agrarian market interventions, the National Agriculture Market (eNAM) and AgMarknet; eNAM is a pan-India online trading platform for agricultural commodities with the goal of enabling large-scale market integration, while AgMarknet is an initiative to collect, analyze, and disseminate market information to agricultural market stakeholders.  In his project, specifically, he is examining where these interventions have been successful and the kind of barriers they had faced; he is also studying the initiatives’ market efficiencies; besides, he is looking at the environmental and economic externalities brought about by these initiatives, including in terms of decision-making related to cropping practices and patterns over time.