Secretary's Report (2002)
Econometrica, Vol 71, No. 1 (January, 2003)
THE ECONOMETRIC SOCIETY ANNUAL REPORTS
REPORT OF THE SECRETARY
VENICE, ITALY
AUGUST 24, 2002
1. Status of Membership and Circulation
THE FIRST SECTION of this report describes the evolution of the Society's membership and of the number of institutional subscribers. Information is provided on members and subscribers on both a mid-year and end-of-year basis. In each case, circulation is "real", tied to actual banked receipts of dues and subscription revenue.
The latest information available, as of June 30 of the current year and of previous years, is provided in the top half of Table I. The bottle half of Table I reports the final number of paid-up members and subscribers as of the end of 2001 and previous years. For any give year prior to 2002, the figures in the bottom half of Table I are larger than in the top half, reflecting those memberships and subscriptions for a given year that are initiated between the middle of that calendar year and the middle of the following calendar year.
Averaging out year-to-year fluctuations, the bottom section of Table I shows that the circulation of Econometrica remained relatively stable in the 1990's, averaging 6742 for 1990-99 but then dropped to an average of 6270 in 2000-2001, roughly a 7 percent decrease. Of this total circulation decrease of 472 between 1990-99 and 2000-01, 255 was due to a decline in regular memberships (7.6 percent) and 153 was due to a decline in institutional subscriptions (6.0 percent). The remaining decline was spread across the remaining categories.
The figures for June 30, 2002, shown in the last line of the top part of Table I show that regular memberships in the three years 2000-2002 have declined about 9 percent from the average of 1990-99. because of substantial rate increases applied to OECD libraries in 2001-2002, it is interesting to compare the extent of the decline in institutional circulation in those two years with the preceding ten years when rates were roughly unchanged in real terms. The decline in institutional circulation for 2000-02 was 1.9 percent at an annual rate, compared to 0.9 percent at an annual rate in the preceding decade (1990-2000). The mid-year 2002 measure of total circulation is 2.0 percent higher than the mid-year 2001 figure but is exactly 10 percent below the average for 1990-99.
The comparative full-year 2001 figures for the Econometric Society and the American Economic Association are displayed in Table II. (For the membership category these figures include regular, student, free, and life members for both the ES and AEA). The "E/A" ratio for members in 2001 of 0.206 was higher than the 0.197 ratio observed in 1990-99, indicating that the AEA has experienced a somewhat more rapid decline in membership than the ES. The "E/A" ratio for institutions of 0.488 was substantially below the 1999 and 2000 figures but still was above the 0.476 average of the years 1990-99. Thus the slippage of both members and insinuations for the ES is slightly slower than that of the AEA in the past year compared to the decade of the 1990's.
