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Established in 2006 as a Community of Reality

Welcome to the Neno's Place!

Neno's Place Established in 2006 as a Community of Reality


Neno

I can be reached by phone or text 8am-7pm cst 972-768-9772 or, once joining the board I can be reached by a (PM) Private Message.

Established in 2006 as a Community of Reality

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Established in 2006 as a Community of Reality

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    Where do economists focus their research: They don't necessarily always look in the right places.

    Rocky
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    Where do economists focus their research: They don't necessarily always look in the right places. Empty Where do economists focus their research: They don't necessarily always look in the right places.

    Post by Rocky Fri 19 Mar 2021, 2:23 pm

    Where do economists focus their research: They don't necessarily always look in the right places.

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    There is an old joke that a policeman saw a drunk man looking for his keys under a lamppost and offered to help find them. After a few fruitless minutes, the officer asked the man if he was sure he had thrown his keys at that particular location. The man replied, "No, I lost them in the garden." So why are you looking for it here, the officer asked him. The man replied, "Because this is where the light is." For years, this story has been used to illustrate a simple question of great relevance to social science researchers: What you find depends on where you look. For much of the history of economic research, economists have studied a very small group of countries. An analysis by The Economist of Britain of more than 900,000 papers published in economic journals found that, as of 1990, nearly two-thirds of the papers published focused on wealthy English-speaking countries: America, Australia, Britain, Canada and New Zealand .
     
    The boom in the developing world and a greater focus in economics research on empirical research has expanded the coverage of "lamp light." The share of scholarly journals listing countries in the Middle East, Africa, Asia or Latin America has risen from 17% in 1990 to 41% today. However, many parts of the world, such as some poor African countries, remain largely underestimated. Some countries get more attention than others, even within the same regions. A recent Africa survey conducted by Obi Porteous of Middlebury College in California found that 65% of research papers on African economies published in the five leading economic journals focus on just five countries: Kenya, South Africa, Ghana, Uganda and Malawi. Forgetting to study places may be a blessing: economists ’interest has not always been followed by economic success. But the more countries in the world that economists study, the better the direction of their research is likely.
     
    Economic research patterns are mostly explained by a small number of factors. The size of a country's economy is the most important, accounting for nearly 80% of the variance in research interest. The importance of economic output in shaping research options has a certain logic. Developing and complex economies provide rich variants for researchers to explore. If the lessons learned from research on large economies can be translated into better policies in those countries, then such research will benefit more people than if researchers focus their efforts on smaller economies (about half of humanity lives in the ten largest economies in the world. ). Data quality and availability are also important, although it is less influential than economic size, as is the case with a country's use of the English language. About 90% of research papers published in leading scientific journals are written in the English language.
     
    Professional incentives play a role as well. A World Bank analysis of more than 76,000 experimental research papers published between 1985 and 2004 found that the top five economic journals published about 6.5% of all papers written about the United States during that period, compared to only 1.5% of papers about other countries. Senior economists are likely to write about the United States. Even if the results of the analysis are adjusted based on the prestige of the research book, this does not completely eliminate the research focus gap.
     
    Do countries that get less attention necessarily suffer as a result? The recent increase in research on the developing world has not been cheap. This has been driven, in part, by the emergence of controlled randomized trials, in which researchers randomly distribute participants into different groups, and only some receive "treatments" (such as a small loan or access to educational opportunities). Well-constructed experiences can provide valuable guidance on how best to mitigate the worst harms of poverty. However, critics argue that such experiences provide little information on how to achieve sustainable economic development. They also pose ethical questions: as to whether the desperate and governments can really provide information voluntarily. Professor Angus Deaton, a 2019 Nobel Prize winner, noted that such experiments are almost always performed.
     
    Nevertheless, countries with bad policies will benefit the most from careful testing of how those policies have failed. Regional success stories, such as the experience of Chile or the Czech Republic, are receiving much more attention than researchers would expect due to their basic characteristics related to failed trials in the same regions, such as Venezuela or Belarus. Reform-minded governments in ill-considered countries can falter, if they come to power, due to the paucity of good research on them, which shows how past pitfalls have contributed to creating and sustaining the current poverty. Research biases may also mean that very little light is shed on the failures of interventions by large and influential institutions such as the International Monetary Fund that may have exacerbated the problems of struggling countries.
     
    You have to pay attention. In fact, another reason economists spend more time studying countries that have not been studied before is that expanding research horizons would improve the profession of economists themselves, thus enabling economists to better provide their services to governments. There are many unanswered questions in economics about some matters of humanity that have received little attention. The 70 least-studied countries in economic research account for only 1% of all cited in economic papers published over the past three decades .
     
    Although economists' increasing focus on empirical research is welcomed, the focus of research within the "spotlight" provided by the data means that some questions are asked more than others: in particular, those that can be answered through statistical analysis. Attempts to pay more attention to countries that are least able to provide high-quality data, which often face difficult paths to development, will force economists to approach matters through qualitative rather than quantitative studies. If the important contributions of research to development matters come from difficult-to-measure differences in cultural factors, then geographically focused studies will have difficulty detecting them. Therefore, both the world and the economics profession will be poorer because of this.
    * Professor of Economics and Political Science, Kansas State University, USA.
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