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The Way We Were: Reflections on the Comparative History of Comparative Economics

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Abstract

This paper examines the characteristics of comparative economics during the period 1977–1992, using computational tools to collect data on the character of publications. These data depict the distinctive characteristics of comparative economics, for example, whether it was neoclassical or new-institutional, and the balance between theory and empirics. Complete systems were a centerpiece of comparativists’ research, leading to an early focus on institutions, culture, and law. Consequently, the field chose a distinctive point on the trade-off between using advanced techniques and focusing on topics not amenable to study with those techniques. Possibly, this was why comparativists had a distinctive approach to transition.

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Notes

  1. A revised version of the Presidential address to the 2011 Annual Meetings of the Association of Comparative Economic Studies, which was presented on 8 January 2011. This version incorporates further reflections especially those based on the comments of participants at the meetings. Martin Schmidt provided invaluable research assistance. Peter Grajzl and Valentina Dimitrova-Grajzl provided helpful advice.

  2. Unfortunately, machine-accessible information on Comparative Economic Studies is not available for the pertinent years.

  3. For a fuller discussion of these issues, see Murrell and Schmidt (2011).

  4. The searches for the JCE and the JDE also used exactly the same web source (and therefore database), and would therefore be the most comparable of any of the searches in this paper.

  5. The cause of this unreliability must lie in the generation of the database, a procedure whose characteristics are not transparent to the external researcher. This provides a general cautionary lesson to those relying on computer-generated databases for research: there might be design features or even errors that are unknown to the researcher and produce highly spurious results. At the time of writing, Scirus has not responded to repeated enquiries about the reason for this problem.

  6. The four journals are the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, and the Review of Economic Studies. Econometrica, which is usually included in this group, contains articles that are too focused on mathematics and econometrics to be a relevant comparator for members of the Association.

  7. EEE is accessible in JSTOR.

  8. Programs are available on request to the author.

  9. Standard plurals are included without the use of the asterisk.

  10. JSTOR: ‘Wildcards take the place of one or more characters in a search term…An asterisk is used for multiple character searching. Wildcards are used to search for alternate spellings and variations on a root word…. A search on bird* finds bird, birding, birdman, birds, and other words that start with bird-’; Scirus: ‘Use an asterisk (*) to replace multiple characters anywhere in a word. It replaces 0 or more characters in the word (ie a search for car* will return car as well as carbon, etc.): parasit* finds parasite, parasitic, parasitology, parasitemia’.

  11. Scirus does not seem to have the equivalent of JSTOR's ‘Using the number sign (#) after a word stem performs a search that finds all related variations of a term. For example: operate# finds operate, operating, operation, and operative’.

  12. Here, as in the economics discipline in general, the word socialism is taken very generally to mean economic systems in which non-capitalist ownership is predominant and particularly those that existed before 1989 in Eastern Europe and the USSR.

  13. Of the 17 papers that I wrote before tenure, only 1 was an explicit comparison between socialism and capitalism and only 6 referred specifically to socialist economies.

  14. The raw numbers are available on request to the author.

  15. The smoothing criterion is least squares.

  16. And in the more prestigious research organizations, such as those within some multilateral organizations.

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Murrell, P. The Way We Were: Reflections on the Comparative History of Comparative Economics. Comp Econ Stud 53, 489–505 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/ces.2011.29

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