2014 Volume 86 Issue 2 Pages 162-165
The main symposiums of the AESJ annual meetings have had a tendency toward two biases: first, temporary issues of agricultural and rural policies have been eagerly discussed; second, the senior members aged in their 50s have been dominating the roles of presenters and discussants at these symposiums. These two biases have weakened the strong point of the AESJ, its characteristic of respecting the evidence from a large number of empirical analyses. As a result, low submission rates to Nogyo Keizai Kenkyu (JRE) and JJRE have not improved yet, and the interest of young members in the symposium has continued to decline. This article points out that the biases have split the current AESJ members into three groups, “policy talk lovers," “obligation performers," and “research lovers," then, the AESJ has got trapped in a fallacy of composition. To resolve the biases, the AESJ planning committee asked young researchers including a government official to make presentations with the support of middle and senior discussants in the two business years of 2012 and 2013.
