The Curtailment of Critical Commentary in Australian Economics

Coelho, De Worken-Eley and McClure (2005) showed that, 1963 through 2004, critical commentary declined significantly in the American Economic Review, Economic Journal, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Review of Economics and Statistics. Using the same method, we investigated the same question for all of the economic journals produced in Australia, and then published the results in Australian Economic Papers (Dollery, Byrnes and Akimova 2007). We found the same trend in Australia for the period 1962 to 2005. This suggests that the downward trend may apply across economics journals generally. This short note simply relates the basic finding of our Australian Economic Papers article.