What Have Canadian Economists Been Doing for the Past Twenty-Five Years?

Abstract

This paper attempts a quantitative survey of the research activities of Canadian economists during the twent.y-five years since Tony Scott described the anatomy of the Canadian social science community in his 1967 presidential address to the Canadian Political Science Association, the meetings during which this association was founded. My focus is on the research activities of Canadian economists, drawing on data from the Canadian Economics Association (CEA) membership directory, from publications noted by the Journal of Economic Literature from 1969 through 1990, and from economics research grants awarded from 1969 through 1990, at first by the Canada Council and from 1979 on by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The paper will start with some rough demographic information about who the economic researchers are and how their numbers have changed over the past twenty-five years. The first of the two main sections to follow will deal with the research activities of PH 1)-trained economists who were members of the CEA in 1990 and have published once or more in the journals and books whose contents have been noted in the Journal of Economic Literature. The focus will then turn to the research projects financed by the Canada Council and SSHRCC, and to preliminary assessment of the links between the research grants and research publications,