Secretary's Report (2010)
Econometrica, Vol. 79, No. 1 (January, 2011), 309–317
THE ECONOMETRIC SOCIETY ANNUAL REPORTS REPORT OF THE SECRETARY
SHANGHAI, CHINA AUGUST 16, 2010
1. MEMBERSHIP AND CIRCULATION
THIS REPORT STARTS by describing the evolution of the Society’s membership and of the number of institutional subscribers. Information is provided on both a midyear and an end-of-year basis. The latest information available, as of June 30 of the current year and of selected previous years, is provided in the top panel of Table I. The bottom panel of Table I reports the final number of members and subscribers as of the end of 2009 and selected previous years. For any given year the figures in the bottom half of Table I are larger than in the top half, reflecting those memberships and subscriptions that are initiated between the middle and the end of that calendar year.
The membership of the Society has been very stable in the last five years, with a mean of 5,634 members and a standard deviation of 92 members. How- ever, there has been a significant decrease in the number of student members, from 1,222 in 2005 to 867 in 2009, which has been compensated by the increase in ordinary members. The mid-year figure for 2010 suggests that this year there will be a jump in membership, possibly due to the very high number of submis- sions to the World Congress in Shanghai, China. In fact, it is very likely that there will be more than 6,000 members at the end of the year, a record figure in the history of the Society.
At the same time, the number of institutional subscribers has continued its declining trend, reaching 1,761 subscribers in 2009. The mid-year figure for 2010 suggests that this year there will be a further reduction in the number of subscribers. This could be related to the significant increase in institutional subscription rates agreed by the Executive Committee in 2009. The Commit- tee decided to move from a two-tier to a three-tier pricing scheme based on the World Bank classification of countries and to increase the rates for print subscribers, which implied a jump in institutional rates, especially for the new category of middle income countries.
