The Fiftieth year of Economic Analysis and Policy: How, why, and to what extent has it changed?

After briefly reviewing the role and nature of Economic Analysis and Policy (EAP) in its first 30 years of existence, this article explores how, why and to what extent it has changed in the last 20 years. Subsequently, the article considers how these changes have improved the global scholarly status of this journal. The major change in this period occurred as a result of a co-operative publishing agreement between the Economics Society of Australia (Queensland) Inc. and Elsevier, which came into force in 2014. This switch from EAP being published by a society to a large and efficient commercial international publisher of journals has dramatically increased the global reach of EAP and has resulted in a very favourable increase in the levels of its journal metrics. It has gone (for example) from being in the lowest quartile of SCImago journal rankings to being in the highest quartile. The scholarly value of relying on journal metrics to determine the scientific merit of journals and the quality of articles in journals is analysed. It is argued that a reinforcing feedback system (based on multiple factors) tends to attract the submission of higher quality articles to journals with superior metrics, and consequently, enhances their academic standing. The feedback-influences involved are explained. It is hypothesized that the system of relying on journal metrics provides large established commercial publishers with a competitive advantage over new entrants and smaller publishers of journals. The implications of this for industry structure are discussed. Given the changed landscape in the publishing of scholarly journals, it is concluded that without the symbiotic publishing arrangement entered into with Elsevier, EAP might have struggled to continue to exist in recent years, and undoubtedly would have a much lower scholarly impact than it has now.