Field expert. 12+ years in West Africa. Analyst by training. This is not an academic exercise — it's a position built on a decade of being inside the systems I write about.
I moved to West Africa in 2014. Not as a consultant on a three-week assignment. Not as a researcher collecting data for a paper. I moved because the world I knew had collapsed and I needed to build a new one.
Over the past twelve years, I've worked across Ukrainian and Nigerian jurisdictions simultaneously — exporting, importing, navigating customs, fighting tax authorities, building trade channels where none existed. I've watched how markets actually function when you strip away the models and the slide decks.
What I found is that the real rules are invisible to outsiders. The distribution networks that move 80% of Nigeria's paint. The cold chain infrastructure quietly captured by Chinese capital. The tax systems that punish exporters for succeeding too slowly. None of this appears in the reports. All of it determines who wins and who loses.
I've been on both sides — exporting from Ukraine, importing into Nigeria, watching the same money get stuck between two bureaucracies that don't understand each other and don't care to.
Asymmetric Economics exists because there is a gap — an enormous one — between what institutional analysts write about these markets and what actually happens on the ground. I fill that gap. Not with theory, but with data, pattern recognition, and twelve years of operational experience.
This is a research platform built on field intelligence. Every article is grounded in primary data: customs databases, market surveys, direct interviews, and personal operational experience. The analysis is mine. The conclusions are mine. The mistakes, if any, are mine too.
The platform covers two clusters. Research maps the economic structures of complex markets — agriculture, logistics, distribution, trade policy — primarily in West Africa. NeoGovt examines the relationship between state institutions and economic actors, with a focus on how governments become obstacles to the activity they claim to promote.