Welcome statement from the New Editorial Team

• Published date: 01 May 2015
• Date: 01 May 2015
• Author: Andy McKay
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/rode.12135

Editorial

Welcome statement from the New Editorial Team

I am very pleased to take over as Managing Editor of the Review of Development

Economics (RDE), and hope that we can build on the strengths of the journal that E.

Kwan Choi established first in 1997 and has edited tirelessly for 18 years since then.

To date we have appointed four new co-editors with whom I will work closely in

running this journal: Sambit Bhattacharyya (Sussex), Henrik Hansen (Copenhagen),

Anke Hoeffler (Oxford), David Stifel (Lafayette College) and we expect to appoint

one or two more in the coming months. We have asked former co-editors Elias

Dinopoulous (Florida) and Sajal Lahiri (Southern Illinois) to remain as co-editors for

a short transitional period so that we can benefit from their advice and support, and I

am grateful to them for agreeing to play this role. We will also update the Editorial

Board in the coming months.

Our commitment as an editorial team is to publish good quality development eco-

nomics work from any area of the discipline; our main concern is quality. We are

pleased to receive submissions from anywhere in the world, but will apply the same

quality standard to all submissions.

Wiley has established a website for online submission of papers and we ask every-

one to submit in this way, allowing us to provide a quicker service. Our commitment

as editors is to try to provide a speedy refereeing and feedback process. We will

review submissions on a weekly basis, taking decisions about whether to submit a

paper for review. In line with most journals, we expect to “desk reject” quite a few

submissions, but we aim to give you an answer within 3 weeks to a month (which we

will shorten over time) about whether your paper is being sent for review or not. In

that way when authors’ papers are desk rejected they will know quite quickly and be

able to pursue other options. We will then aim to get you the reviews and the deci-

sions based on these as soon as possible, aiming to complete this within a further

three months. Of course this depends on the cooperation of the referees, but we will

do our best to chase as needed. The editorial team sees providing a timely review

process as a major priority.

We ask that papers are at most 9000 words—we are unable to publish longer arti-

cles and may reject submissions on this basis. We also review all submissions for pla-

giarism and will immediately reject papers on this basis.

As in the past the Review is happy to receive proposals for Special Issues on topical

themes, though we will consider these on a case by case basis. We wish to preserve the

majority of the journal space for regular submissions.

There is lots of excellent development economics research being undertaken at

present and we look forward to receiving your submissions to the RDE!

Professor Andy McKay

Managing Editor

Review of Development Economics, 19(2), 209, 2015

DOI:10.1111/rode.12135

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons Ltd