Introduction to First Set of Papers Accepted by the New Editorial Team

• Author: David Stifel,Andy McKay,Anke Hoeffler,Henrik Hansen,Sambit Bhattacharyya
• Date: 01 August 2016
• Published date: 01 August 2016
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/rode.12276

Editorial

Introduction to First Set of Papers Accepted by the

New Editorial Team

We took over as editors of the journal from the beginning of 2015, but this is the

first issue of the journal that contains papers accepted by us as editors. We are

pleased here to publish these papers. Those published in the journal in 2015 and

the first two issues of 2016 comprised papers that had been accepted by the

previous editor and creator of the journal, Professor Kwan Choi, and his co-editors.

This is an appropriate moment for us to pay tribute to the substantial

achievements of Professor Kwan Choi as well as his fellow co-editors in running the

journal up to this point. Kwan had the vision to identify the need for another

development economics journal, which was launched back in 1997. He led the

editorial team from 1997 to 2014. There was definitely space for this journal at that

time and that has been reflected by the quality of many of the articles and special

issues published over this period. Some well cited examples of this include articles

on income inequality and growth (Zou and Li, 1998); regional inequality over 50

years in China (Zhang and Kanbur, 2005); school participation in India (Kingdon

and Dr

eze, 2001); intellectual property rights and economics growth (Greenaway,

Foster-McGregor and Falvey, 2006); caste and poverty in India (Borooah, 2005);

aid (Pattillo, Wagh and Gupta, 2006); and the Kuznets Curve (Acemoglu and

Robinson, 2002). To add to this there have been many special issues on a wide

variety of development themes.

Over the period the journal has reached out increasingly over time to attract

authors based in the developing world, for whom publishing in international

journals is often more difficult, while still maintaining a good standard of quality. It

is important that the journal is also able to fully integrate contributions and

perspectives from those based in the very developing countries on which the journal

is focused. Some of these have studied in the developed world, but others have not.

The establishment and running of this journal for 18 years was a major service to

the profession that we should all recognize and applaud. We now appreciate just

how much work editing a journal is and we wish Kwan and his co-editors a well-

earned rest from this!Kwan’s contribution is all the more impressive given over

much of this period he was also running the Review of International Economics,

which he established at the same time, and which is now a very well established

journal.

We also would like to recognize the major contributions of Kwan’s co-editors

over this period, including William Darity, Jr, Elias Dinopoulos, Ira Gang, Hossein

Farzin, Sajal Lahiri, Ngo Van Long, Makoto Tawada, Francisco Rivera-Batiz and

the late Xiaokai Yang. We personally would like to thank Kwan, Sajal and Elias

for the help and support they gave to us in the handover period.

Looking forward, we currently have a good pipeline of accepted papers as well as

two forthcoming special issues and we are pleased about the quality of some of the

submissions we have been receiving. A lot of good development economics work is

currently been done across the world and we hope that moving forward the Review

Review of Development Economics, 20(3), 635–636, 2016

DOI:10.1111/rode.12276

©2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd