Pluralism In Economics And The Evaluation Of Economic Research In Italy

We analyse Italy’s research evaluation exercise to discuss the issue of evaluating re-search in economics. We claim that evaluation and its criteria, together with its linkage to research institutions’ financing, are likely to affect the direction of research, in a problematic way. We claim that the ranking criteria adopted in Italy bring to a risk of disregarding histori-cal methods in favour of quantitative and econometric methods, and heterodox schools in favour of mainstream approaches. In order to preserve pluralism and originality of research, we propose a simple quantita-tive index based on field-normalisation.