Secretary's Report (2013)
Econometrica, Vol. 82, No. 1 (January, 2014), 427–434
THE ECONOMETRIC SOCIETY ANNUAL REPORTS REPORT OF THE SECRETARY
GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN AUGUST 25–26, 2013
1. THE SOCIETY AND ITS MEMBERSHIP
THIS YEAR MARKED A NEW CHAPTER for the Society as its first year after in- corporation in December 2012 as a Delaware non-stock corporation. 2013 was also significant as the year that the members of the African Econometric Soci- ety voted formally to approve the accession of the African Econometric Society as the Africa Region of the Econometric Society.
The Society’s membership numbers are presented in Table I, where the membership is classified according to institutional membership and individ- ual membership. The number of institutional members continued to decline in 2012, continuing a long-running trend for both the Econometric Society and other comparable scholarly societies. However, individual membership has kept up strongly. The Society reached the historical record of 6,194 ordinary and student members at the end of 2010, probably due to the very high number of submissions to the World Congress in Shanghai, China. At the end of 2011 the total number of members had gone down to 5,202, a figure that is 14.0 percent below that of 2010 and 6.6 percent below the average of the period 2005–2009. However, the end-2012 was higher at 5,794 reversing the decrease in 2011.
Table II displays the division between print and 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 especially significant for student members, 90.9 percent of whom chose this option as of June 2013, but the shift is also very significant for ordinary mem- bers, for whom the proportion of online only reached 68.7 percent in June 2013.
Table III compares the Society’s membership and the number of institutional subscribers with those of the American Economic Association. (For the mem- bership category these figures include ordinary, student, free, and life mem- bers for both the ES and the AEA.) The ES/AEA ratio had been increasing, reaching a peak of 35.9 percent in 2010. Since then, the ratio has declined to 32.1% in 2012. For institutional members, the long-term decline in institutional membership has been broadly similar, ranging between 40% and 54%. In 2012, however, the ratio reached a historically low number of 43.8%.
