Category: Methodology

Ranking Heterodox Economics Journals: A New Approach

jcoronadoarciniegasLeave a comment

by Jos茅 Alejandro Coronado and

There is growing concern about the increasing emphasis on journal rankings in academia. This is of special consequence in economics: given theoretical and methodological cleavages, heterodox outlets tend to be marginalised in traditional ranking systems.

Despite this, journal rankings are used and may indeed be useful. , we explored how to build a ranking that appropriately reflects the reputation of heterodox economics journals amongst heterodox economists (Coronado and Veneziani, 2025).

We are not the first ones to build rankings for heterodox economics journals. Fred Lee and others (e.g., Lee et al., 2010; Cronin, 2020) developed heterodox economics journal rankings based on subjective peer evaluations combined with bibliometric indicators. These composite “quality” indices had the objective of measuring research quality in the heterodox economics community.

In contrast, we measure reputation and intellectual influence within the heterodox economics community by focusing exclusively on bibliometric indicators. Thus, we capture the views of the heterodox economics community through their citation choices.

To build our ranking we require, first, a tool to rank journals based on bibliometric data. We adopt the Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2004) (PV) index 鈥� a theoretically-founded measure of intellectual influence within citation networks. Unlike simple citation counts or impact factors, the PV index accounts for both the quantity and the prestige of citations received, capturing the recursive structure of intellectual influence.

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Fieldwork as a Feminist Methodology in Economics

ritwikapatgiriLeave a comment

What is a feminist methodology? Academicians and scholars of gender and feminist studies have focused on feminist research methodology since the introduction of gender studies as a course in universities.Feminist methodology has developed as a result of several objections towards traditional positivist research. Theory and methodology can be seen to be closely interrelated in a wherein a feminist methodology can validate feminist theory and indicate the need for modifications. Many of the social sciences have theories that speak about human beings. But theory is rooted in reinforcing of experiences, perceptions, and beliefs of men. Even if women are being studied, the perspective and mode of the study have . As a result, research outcomes often end up justifying the status quo and the existing power relationships and myths about oppressed and other vulnerable communities. For instance, has tended to reproduce gender stereotypes by portraying behavior in the marketplace (considered to be men鈥檚 domain) as guided by rational pursuit of self-interest, and behavior in the household (seen as women鈥檚 domain) to be governed by altruism.

Photo: Women in rural Assam weaving a mekhela chadar, which the women use for their own consumption but also try to sell whenever possible. There is a thin line of separation between work and leisure for most rural women.

Traditional science, moreover, maintains that the researcher and the researched are in different spaces. Positivist social science research requires the researcher to be value-free, neutral, and uninvolved, thus, maintaining a hierarchical and non-reciprocal relationship between the research subject and the research object. describes women researchers in such situations to be trapped in a 鈥渟chizophrenic situation鈥�, one where the researcher has to constantly repress, negate, or ignore her own experience of sexist oppression and have to maintain a so-called rational standard of the male-dominated academic world. Such an approach further hinders exploring areas like women鈥檚 perception of their own work, which have remained 鈥渉idden鈥� due to andocentric biases. Mies鈥� historic work on details such 鈥渉idden women鈥� through the example of official Census data. While her estimate of women lace makers was about 100,000 in the area, these women were not recorded in the official Indian census statistics of 1971. The 1971 Census enumerated only 6449 persons as being engaged in household industry in Narsapur taluk, making the 100,000 women 鈥渋nvisible鈥� despite the Census definition of the household industry covering exactly the type of work that these women did! Women workers, thus, remain invisible by official statistics by not including them as workers, even with abundant empirical evidence of their productive work. It is important to mention here that to conduct 鈥渙bjective鈥� quantitative research, one does not have to be detached and unconcerned about the topic. Having a strong opinion on women鈥檚 work being hidden or invisible historically does not necessarily mean that research decisions will be any more biased thanif those opinions are not held.聽聽

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When economists shut off your water

jethron akallahLeave a comment
Researcher Irene Nduta in Kayole-Soweto.

By Adrian Wilson, Faith Kasina, Irene Nduta and Jethron Ayumbah Akallah

In August 2020, people all over the development world   about water in Nairobi. There was a lot of anger, and some calls for sending people to the guillotine. The reason: the publication of  (RCT), run by two American development economists, working together with the World Bank. In order to compel property owners in Kayole-Soweto鈥攁 relatively poor neighborhood in eastern Nairobi鈥攖o pay their water bills, this experiment disconnected the water supply at randomly selected low-income rental properties.

There鈥檚 no doubt that water is a problem in Nairobi. As Elizabeth Wamuchiru , the water system in the city has a built-in spatial inequality inherited from the British colonial era. Visitors to the city can readily see the differences between the cool, leafy, green neighborhoods of Kilimani and Lavington鈥攕egregated white neighborhoods under colonialism, now home to rich Kenyans, foreigners, and NGOs鈥攁nd the gray and dusty tin-roof neighborhoods of Mathare, Kibera, Mukuru, and Kayole, home to the lower-income Kenyans excluded from Nairobi鈥檚 prosperity.

Today鈥檚 water system reflects this history of inequality. Nairobi鈥檚 water is harnessed from a combination of surface and groundwater sources; however, the city鈥檚 groundwater is naturally salty and . Piped water systems, provided to upper- and middle-income housing estates, do not exist in the vast bulk of the city鈥檚 poorer neighborhoods, where people must instead buy water from vendors鈥攐ften salty water pumped from boreholes, or siphoned off from city pipes through rickety connections that are frequently contaminated with sewage. In the richer neighborhoods, Nairobi Water Company, a public utility, sells relatively clean piped surface water for a fraction of the price paid by poorer Nairobians鈥攁 disparity that  to often be the case in other cities in the global South. , in poorer neighborhoods such as Kayole-Soweto, 鈥渨ater provision costs more, is less safe, and is less consistent than in other richer parts of the city.鈥�

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Neoclassical Economics and Urban Planning: A Contentious Theoretical and Policy Making Relationship

ngarzacsudheduLeave a comment

Neoclassical economics 鈥� and contemporary extensions of it 鈥� has an outsized presence in academic and policy making circuits. This position of privilege builds upon more than a century of theoretical development, comprising the contemporary 鈥渕ainstream鈥� of economic science. The characteristics and rise of this mainstream, determined in many cases by means beyond pure intellectual merit, has been regularly documented in the existing scholarship.

Economic imperialism has been one of the results of mainstream dominance, and its academic impact on other social sciences has been widely documented, including their corresponding areas of policy making. In this regard, I present here an approach to the problematic relationship between Neoclassical Urban Economics and Urban Planning. These are two related social science disciplines, which however have very different epistemologies and approaches to policy advice.

The main difference between academic mainstream Economics and Urban Planning is methodological, in terms of what is considered a valid approach to scientific knowledge. Economics builds upon logical positivism; it first performs deductive theory construction that 鈥渄escribes鈥� reality, and then subsequently tests its theoretical predictions, which in some cases (not all the cases) lead to policy prescriptions. In contrast, Urban Planning is an action-oriented and problem-solving scientific discipline. It inductively produces normative theory, which explicitly shows the analyst鈥檚 point of view regarding the topic and how to intervene on it (public policy advice).

Mainstream Economics is in essence defined by the method and theoretical approach, not by the topic (the economy). This allows it to engage with a wide variety of topics, one of them being the spatial analysis of the built environment, which is also the topic of academic Urban Planning.

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So, Global or International Development: Why Not Both? Marx in the Field, Planetary Immanent Development, and Centering Political Economy in Development Studies

alemezzadriLeave a comment

In a compelling new contribution in the journal Development and Change, a political economy collective led by builds a strong case against calls to 鈥渦niversalize鈥� Development Studies shifting the focus from 鈥淚nternational鈥� to 鈥淕lobal鈥� Development. Indeed, many such calls at universalization 鈥� at least in the two influential 鈥減andemic papers鈥� the collective thoroughly revises, one is main-authored by and the other by 鈥� are misguided. As convincingly argued by the collective, these calls tone down the structural historical nature of the Global North-Global South divide; they erase development paradigms and understandings from the Global South and trivialize the nature of challenges emerging from long histories of colonialization and plunder, which still regenerate along global value chains and networks, as authors like have shown, as well as distinct regimes of social reproduction and contemporary crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, as I explain here and .

Yet, universalizing and globalizing are not the same thing; they can be operated in distinct ways, and through entirely different intellectual projects. Moreover, the discipline of Development Studies, in its mainstream dominant avatar, badly needs 鈥済lobalizing,鈥� given its Eurocentrism 鈥� yet in ways that center the experiences in/of the majority world; think through plural frameworks and locations; and speak to the extraordinarily diverse material realities and practices of power, inequality, and subordination across our planet. Crucially, such experiences, realities, and practices are, at once, the result of trajectories mediated by the Global North-Global South Divide, as emphasized in critical International Development frameworks, yet also always been global in nature 鈥� calling for Global Development lenses 鈥� unlike what narrow development economic theorizing heavily relying on modernization theory has and still suggest/ed. Ultimately, one may wonder: in the debate between 鈥淚nternational鈥� and 鈥淕lobal鈥� Development, why and what exactly do we need to choose?

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Colonialism and Indian Famines: A Response

Tirthankar RoyLeave a comment

Tamoghna Halder criticized one of my writings on nineteenth-century Indian famines. Halder distorts my views and wrongly implies that I suppressed data. He misreads the very nature of the Indian famine debate, thinking it is about facts. It is not. It is about method, about how economic historians and development scholars should read the history of climatic shocks. The piece demands a response and a clarification of the issues involved.

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Colonialism and the Indian Famines: A response to Tirthankar Roy

Tamoghna Halder5 Comments

Responding to Sullivan and Hickel’s recently published research article (in ) and an opinion article (in ), Tirthankar Roy, points out how the authors are wrong in claiming that British colonial policies caused several famines in India. All that is fine, except that these articles neither investigate nor come up with any original claim regarding the causes of famines in colonial India. The central claim in their research article is that capitalism did not necessarily result in an improvement of human welfare in the 19th century – contrary to the relatively popular belief that it did. In the opinion piece, they argue the same, but solely with a focus on the negative impact of British colonial policies in India in terms of excess deaths, decline in wages and living conditions. In order to support this distinct set of claims, among other supporting evidence and quantitative techniques, Sullivan and Hickel cite one existing claim (from prior literature) that colonial policies induced multiple famines in India. And yet, as the term colonialism has become a triggering point for Roy in recent years, he titles his as “Colonialism did not cause the Indian famines”. If the intention of Roy is to refute Sullivan and Hickel’s original claim, he fails at it miserably. If the intention of Roy is to weaken Sullivan and Hickel’s set of supporting evidence, one may argue that he does so at least partially, but that鈥檚 true only for the opinion piece (and not the research article). However, I will argue in this response why Roy fails to achieve even that! This leaves one to speculate Sir Tirthankar Roy’s real intentions, which is not the task of the current article.

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On the perils of embedded experiments

jaandaraz1 Comment

There is growing interest in 鈥榚mbedded experiments鈥�, conducted by researchers and policymakers as a team. Aside from their potential scale, the main attraction of these experiments is that they seem to facilitate speedy translation of research into policy. Discussing a case study from Bihar, Jean Dr猫ze argues that this approach carries a danger of distorting both policy and research. 

Evidence-based policy is the rage, to the extent that even village folk in Jharkhand (where I live) sometimes hold forth about the importance of 鈥�ebhidens鈥�, as they call it. No one, of course, would deny the value of bringing evidence to bear on public policy, as long as evidence is understood in a broad sense and does not become the sole arbiter of decision-making. However, sometimes evidence-based policy gets reduced to an odd method that consists of using randomised controlled trials (RCTs) to find out 鈥榳hat works鈥�, and then 鈥榮cale up鈥� whatever works. That makes short shrift of the long bridge that separates evidence from policy. Sound policy requires not only evidence 鈥� broadly understood 鈥� but also a good understanding of the issues, considered value judgements, and inclusive deliberation (, 2020a).

Enormous energy has been spent on the quest for rigorous evidence, much less on the integrity of the process that leads from evidence to policy. As illustrated in an earlier contribution to Ideas for India (), it is not uncommon for the scientific findings of an RCT to be embellished in the process. This follow-up post presents another case study that may help to convey the problem. It also illustrates a related danger 鈥� casual jumps from evidence to policy advice. The risk of a short-circuit is particularly serious in 鈥榚mbedded experiments鈥�, where the research team works 鈥榝rom within鈥� a partner government in direct collaboration with policymakers.

The case study pertains to an experiment conducted in Bihar in 2012-2013 and reported in Banerjee, Duflo, Imbert, Mathew and Pande (2020)1. This is a large-scale, influential experiment by some of the leading lights of the RCT movement 鈥� indeed, a formidable quartet of first-rate economists reinforced by one of India鈥檚 brightest civil servants, Santhosh Mathew. The high technical standards of the study are not in doubt, and nor is the integrity of the authors. And yet, I would argue that something is amiss in their accounts of the findings and policy implications of this study.

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