Chris Blattman

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Where do economists go?

Stefan Dercon creates a Wordle of country studies in the top 5 economics journals, by country. The result:

About 63% of the articles were on the US and 12% on the UK. Canada is the next in line with 2.7%. China and India were each covered by just under 2% of the articles. The whole of sub-Saharan Africa had 1.8% of articles.

Here is the Journal of Development Economics:

Latin America is somewhat overrepresented with 30%, India gets 12%, China 11% and Africa 18%.

Stefan’s fuller analysis here.

One Response

  1. This analysis would be more accurate (but also somewhat less dramatic) if it properly took into account that a person’s perception of the size of a two-dimensional object is roughly proportional to the area of the object, not the characteristic linear dimension such as font size. A better visualization would be created by making the font size proportional to the square root of the fraction of the economics research that features a particular country.

    The number of letters in a particular country’s name also affects the perceived size, of course, but I can see where that might reasonably be neglected in a very quick and informal analysis such as this.

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