A note from Tavneet Suri, our Editor-in-Chief, on our four-year anniversary
Happy Fourth Birthday VoxDev!!
It has become a tradition for me to write a birthday column around the time of the VoxDev anniversary, and so abide by tradition we must.
As 2021 looks up for some of us in some parts of the world, and as vaccinations start to become the norm in the developed world, the developing world is still struggling under the effects of the pandemic. It has been truly heartbreaking to see the inequality of vaccine accessibility and the devastation the pandemic has brought to some parts of the world, especially while being in the US but with family and friends in places hit hard by the pandemic.
So, while I am extremely grateful that vaccines are bringing a semblance of normalcy back to some parts of the world, I hope and pray that we get vaccines far and wide as soon as we can. For those of you reading in places where the pandemic is far from over, please know that our thoughts are with you and yours.
In the craziness of the past year, I have been very proud of the VoxDev team for their commitment, dedication, and hard work through all of it. To date, we have had well over 500,000 visitors to our site, and we saw more growth in readership this year than in any previous year. So, a big thank you to our Managing Editor, Nikita Sharma, and our tireless Board, Rema Hanna, Robin Burgess, and Chris Woodruff. Rema recently left the VoxDev Board to join the American Economic Review as an editor – it has been such an honour to have her be a part of VoxDev the past couple of years, and much as we will miss her terribly, we are so excited for her. Thank you, Rema! We will be adding a couple of new board members in the near future – stay tuned!
Our big news of the past year was the launch of VoxDevLits, a set of dynamic literature reviews that are compiled by a broad community of scholars working on each topic. We now have three VoxDevLits up and running (the first two are on the verge of launching their second edition, or v2). The three Lits we have launched are on Training Entrepreneurs, Mobile Money, and Microfinance. Please check them out. A big thank you to all the senior editors and co-editors for their work on these. We have some more Lits lined up for the coming year! I will say I have loved seeing the Lits be born – there is so much enthusiasm for them and I can see how valuable they are, even to my own work.
As always, I cannot sign off without thanking all of you: our readers and our contributors. Without you, of course, VoxDev would not exist. We love hearing from you, so if you have any feedback, any new ideas, any papers that would be a good fit for us, please send all of it our way at [email protected].
Please keep well. I like to say that we are taught in econometrics that epsilon is mean zero. The last year or so has therefore led me to believe that there have to be some extremely large positive epsilons coming our way soon. So here’s to hoping that the next year will bring only good news for all of us,
Tavneet