Out for the count

The situation in my department following a recent meeting on the upcoming research assessment exercise, due to be completed in December 2000, is a stark one. Apparently, no funding will come forth for any ranking lower than 3A.

The criteria are simple: for a researcher to "count", they must produce four articles in approved-list journals. A book is counted as one publication if deemed a monograph and not a textbook or other lower form; an article in an edited book or non-approved journal will have little or no status.

Why the distinctive status of the (approved) journal article? The implicit logic is well-known in the profession. Economics, being (almost) a hard science, has little need for books, especially of the kind that ask fundamental questions of the discipline. What are needed are solid bits of research on the specific theoretical and empirical conundrums that remain to be solved. Articles in books have often been associated, especially in the UK, with distaff opinion.

The criteria now being used by the RAE raise the question of whether we are observing a distinctively British pattern of behaviour. In the postwar world, financial losses and poor performance were tolerated for decades in key industries. With the advent of Mrs Thatcher, all had to be transformed overnight, even at the cost of a decline in industrial capacity and a rise of unemployment so severe its effects are still being felt. Just so, the sudden "thrusting" drive to transform university economics departments has resulted in crude quantity indicators that would have embarrassed a Soviet central planner, combined with an implicit intolerance of deviant thoughts and approaches to the discipline.

Perhaps the economists involved in setting these targets ought to keep in mind that David Ricardo (a low output researcher), in his theory of comparative advantage, made differences between economies the basis for trade and mutual benefit. Many of the British economists most famous in the US are well-known precisely because they represent something that cannot be easily found there. To compete with the US merely by replicating the range of output there is to risk adopting a dominated strategy.

These RAE criteria are being used to draw up priorities in economics departments and to evaluate individuals' careers. As economists, the panel members are unlikely to deny the powerful effects of material incentives. The RAE will set the trajectory of the development of economics in Britain well into the next century.

Paul Auerbach Reader in economics Kingston University