The Economist explains
IN THIS week’s print edition, we show that economists are besotted with America. From 1985 to 2005 over 35,000 economics papers focused on America; fewer than 20,000 focused on Europe and Central Asia combined. There were fewer than 1,000 papers that dealt with countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
The authors of a recent paper* (older, non-paywall version), led by an economist from the World Bank, set out to explain the results. Surprisingly, they conclude that America is not a special case. For the vast majority of countries, there is a strong positive relationship between per-capita income and the extent of empirical research on that country. And larger countries are the focus of more research.
So the difference, say, between South Africa (721 published papers) and Niger (20 papers) is down to disparities in population and income. The same goes for India’s relatively healthy 1093 papers, compared to Bangladesh’s less impressive 284 papers.
America is rich and has a large population. Therefore it reports far more publications than smaller countries with similar per-capita incomes.
However, when we focus on five heavy-hitting journals (the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Review of Economic Studies) things change. Visually the imbalance is more severe:
This time, America is an outlier. The authors control for population and income, but papers focused on America are significantly more likely to be published in the "top five" journals. And after accounting for the fact that lots of great universities are located in America, the bias remains.
On the flip side, the data show that economics pretty much ignores a rather large number of countries. Not a single economics paper was written about 37 countries from 1985-2005:
The authors (and we) worry when economic research spends so little time on the world’s poorest countries. Bussing in wonkish economists is no panacea for the world's ills; but evidence-based policy cannot get off the ground until the economics profession changes its ways.
* Jishnu Das, Quy-Toan Do, Karen Shaines, Sowmya Srikant “U.S. and them: The Geography of Academic Research” (2013) Journal of Development Economics
Volume 105, 112–130.