The number of authors registered with the RePEc Author Service has surpassed 60’000. We take this opportunity to take a look at some of the characteristics of this group.
For starters, one has to realize that this is a really large group. While anybody can register (for example to exploit some of personalized RePEc services like MyIDEAS), the 60’000 are those who have any sort of publication listed in RePEc. This group of published economists is much larger than the body of economists who are members of the three largest associations in the profession: The American Economic Association, the European Economics Association, and the Econometric Society. They have a total membership of about 25’000, including individuals who are members of several societies. Does this mean that RePEc is comprehensive? One indicator is to compare those registered to some other listing of economists. For example, a ranking of the top 1000 economists computed in 2000 shows now that about 91% have a RePEc account. Of course, we would welcome a more recent analysis, and RePEc membership is likely “top-heavy,” yet we hope you are impressed as us.
How did we get to 60’000? Here is a short-time line:
| 5’000 | May 2004 |
| 10’000 | June 2006 |
| 15’000 | December 2007 |
| 20’000 | April 2009 |
| 25’000 | August 2010 |
| 30’000 | October 2011 |
| 40’000 | April 2014 |
| 50’000 | May 2017 |
| 60’000 | September 2020 |
Then, what is the composition of those 60’000? 25.5% are female, 1% are known to be deceased, another 2.5% have been lost, that is, their email address is bouncing and may have moved or died (update welcome!). In terms of geographic representation, we find economists in 167 countries and territories:
| Africa | 2.5% | South Africa 0.5%, Nigeria 0.4%, Tunisia 0.4%, Ghana 0.2% |
| Asia | 11% | China 1.9%, Japan 1.9%, India 1.5%, Turkey 1.4%, Pakistan 0.7% |
| Europe | 49% | UK 6.1%, France 5.9%, Germany 5.7%, Italy 5.1%, Spain 3.7%, Russia 2.3%, Romania 1.9%, Netherlands 1.9% |
| Latin America/Caribbean | 4.4% | Brazil 1.3%, Colombia 1.1%, Chile 0.7%, Mexico 0.6%, Argentina 0.5% |
| North America | 22.4% | United States 19.6%, Canada 2.8% |
| Oceania | 3.2% | Australia 2.4%, New Zealand 0.5% |
| No affiliation/unknown | 7.5% |
Defining our authors by field is more tricky. They do not declare a field upon registration. We cannot use JEL codes as the coverage in the publisher-contributed data is lacking. We infer fields from the proportion of working papers announced in particular NEP reports. There are eligibility criteria in terms of number of works in a field to be counted. Measured that way for the 46% that qualify, the top fields are (an author may be in several fields, 100% is all qualifying authors):
| Macroeconomics | 25.2% |
| Urban and Real Estate | 13.3% |
| Labor | 11.2% |
| Central Banking | 10.3% |
| Monetary | 10.2% |
| Environment | 9.6% |
| Dynamic General Equilibrium | 8.8% |
| Agricultural | 8.5% |
| International Trade | 8.5% |
| Energy | 8.3% |
| Banking | 7.9% |
The RePEc Blog 