Secretary's Report (2011)
Econometrica, Vol. 80, No. 1 (January, 2012), 459–467
THE ECONOMETRIC SOCIETY ANNUAL REPORTS REPORT OF THE SECRETARY
OSLO, NORWAY AUGUST 24–25, 2011
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 2010 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 Society reached the historical record of 6,046 members at the end of 2010, of which 4,990 were ordinary members and 1,056 were student members. The increase of 580 members relative to the figure in 2009 is probably due to the very high number of submissions to the World Congress in Shanghai, China. The midyear figure for 2011 suggests that the increase is going to be reversed this year.
In contrast, the number of institutional subscribers accelerated its declining trend, reaching 1,639 subscribers in 2010, which represents a 6.9 percent reduc- tion with respect to the figure in 2009. This reduction could be related to the tightening of library budgets in high income countries as well as to the increase in institutional subscription rates agreed on by the Executive Committee in 2009, which was especially significant for the new category of middle income countries. The midyear figure for 2011 suggests that this year there will be a further reduction in the number of institutional subscribers.
Table II displays the division between print plus online and online only mem- berships and subscriptions. Since the choice between these two alternatives was offered in 2004, there has been a continued shift toward online only. This is es- pecially significant for student members, 86.9 percent of whom chose this op- tion as of June 2011, but the shift is also very significant for ordinary members, for whom the proportion of online only reached 61.6 percent in June 2011. It is also noticeable in institutional subscriptions, although in this case, the propor- tion of online only may have stabilized, going from 36.5 percent in June 2010 to 37.3 percent in June 2010.
