Agricultural and Applied Economics—Without Apology
A few months ago I was interview by Aadi Gholchha for his podcast The Economics Review. In the course of the interview, we discussed my book and the general state of the economics profession.
You can listen to the interview here (but note that the final product sounds like it has been slowed down, lowering the pitch of my voice and making me sound like an anonymous witness on 60 Minutes!)
Fresh from the newly released Journal Citations Report, here is the new top 5 of journals in the “agricultural economics and policy” category:
The number to the right of each journal name is the journal’s impact factor, which has been calculated on the basis of calendar year 2021 citation numbers.
Congratulations to the editors of the CJAE, whose decision to publish a special issue on COVID-19 before anyone else did paid off handsomely (and also demonstrates the power of Stackelberg first movers). Of note is the fact that the CJAE’s new impact factor places them in… the top five of all economics journals! I wish them luck in handling the incoming Old Testament-grade flood of submissions that one would expect this to bring.
Gentle ribbing of my Canadian colleagues aside, this has not been a good year for the AJAE, which I have been co-editing since January 2020, as our impact factor went from 4 to 3.757; our ranking also tumbled to tenth in the Agricultural Economics and Policy category. A small silver lining is the fact that by impact factor, the AJAE is slightly behind the Journal of Health Economics and slightly ahead of the Economic Journal.
My chapter with Jeff Bloem and Sunghun Lim titled “Producers, Consumers, and Value Chains in Low- and Middle-Income Countries,” which we wrote for the sixth volume of the Handbook of Agricultural Economics, is finally out, and freely available for download until July 12. Get it while you can! (And if you read this after July 12, 2022, email me for a copy.)
Here is an outline of the chapter:
The task of summarizing the literature on agricultural value chains was a monumental one given how much of it there is. That task was made even more monumental because we wanted to summarize both the literature on within-country value chains (i.e., how agricultural commodities go from the farm gate to final consumers or exporters, in section 2), which is what Jeff and I have written about, as well as the literature on between-country value chains (i.e., global value chains, or how agricultural commodities that may be produced in a given country end up consumed in another, in section 3), which is what Sunghun has written about.
Anyone interested in this topic can be brought up to speed by reading sections 1 to 3. But for me, most of the value added of this chapter is in the future research directions we lay out in section 4. This should be of interest to graduate students, early-career researchers, and others interested in working in this area, where new thinking is required, as I have made the case here and there. The research gaps we identify are as follows: