Diversifying Economics Globally
Source: Greenspon and Rodrik (2021)
Issues and recommendations
Economics is currently undergoing a soul searching with respect to its gender and racial imbalances. There are many new initiatives underway in North America and Western Europe to address these problems. A missing component of this discussion on diversity is the geographic one – the relative scarcity of voices from the rest of the world in what should be a global discipline.
As the chart below shows, researchers outside the U.S. and Europe are not only severely under-represented in top economics journals, their presence is considerably smaller than the weight of their countries and regions in the world economy.
As the chart below shows, researchers outside the U.S. and Europe are not only severely under-represented in top economics journals, their presence is considerably smaller than the weight of their countries and regions in the world economy.
The barriers that researchers in the “periphery” face are sometimes related to training. But often they have to do with lack of information, social contacts, or mentorship, and the clubby nature of the profession. This center-periphery division makes Economics poorer, depriving it of new ideas, new problems to work on, and new talents.
The IEA has hosted three discussions on the general theme of “diversifying economics globally.” The first two sessions were devoted to hearing the perspectives of economists from around the world. The third session presented perspectives from presidents of leading research networks (NBER and CEPR) and editors of leading journals (such as AER and REStat).
These discussions have yielded some conclusions and guidelines, which we summarize here:
The value of promoting diversity
Diversity enhances and enriches the economics profession, since different local conditions give people different perspectives.
Being exposed to researchers with different national/regional background stimulates research on different issues/questions and helps the profession adopt different perspectives on existing issues/questions.
This is particularly important when analyzing issues related to the developing world and formulating policy recommendations outside the European and North American context.
How to promote diversity
Increasing local research capacity is the most important way of increasing diversity.
Research networks in US/Europe should make an effort to integrate researchers from the developing world, in particular by broadening membership to include researchers located in the developing world.
As with gender issues, institutions like NBER and CEPR should measure the participation of researchers based in the developing world and set objectives.
Researchers located in the developing world should make an effort on understanding the working of the profession, visit top departments, present their research in international workshops and conference, submit their papers to top journals.
Issues of relevance for the developing world should be on the agenda of the profession. Networks studying these issues must integrate local researchers and debate with the key policymakers to internalize the local perspective of these issues.
Journals should have explicit guidelines to avoid forms of unconscious bias against researchers not integrated in established networks. Systematic efforts to select editors and referees located in the developing world in one important measure. These efforts should also be quantified.
Top journals should be more willing to consider and accept empirical papers using data from developing countries. Measuring this and defining objectives is critical.
Promotion criteria in the developing world should not weight excessively top journals based in the advanced economies.
International networks (like the IEA or the Econometric Society) and regional institutions (like LACEA and RIDGE) should play an explicit role in promoting the interaction of researchers located in the developing world and researcher located in the top US/European departments.
Multinational institutions (such as the IMF, World Bank, ADB, IDB, CAF, …) should support such efforts by providing grants to networks integrating researchers from top US/European departments and local researchers, and to study issues of relevance to the developing world.
US/European departments have the resources to attract the top talent from developing regions. This is not undesirable per se (as the new literature on the “brain gain” suggests). But over time researchers tend to adopt the perspectives of the local context and tend to lose connection with their home economies. Researchers should ideally remain in contact with their country of origin, interacting with researchers there and helping to promote the development of research in their country of origin.
Authors: Omar Licandro (University of Nottingham), and Dani Rodrik (Harvard)