by Jörg Baten and Julia Muschallik (University of Tübingen)
In spite of a rapid globalization of our discipline, surprisingly little is known about economic history as a discipline and the scholars who are representing it: How many economic historians are there in the world? In which countries or world regions are they concentrated, and where are they lacking? Can we explain differences in the number of economic historians who are participating on world congresses, and which determinants encourage or limit participation propensity? We also provide a forecast of world congress participation in 2012.
This study is based on the first initiative to estimate the extent of the field in the world. Using an email questionnaire we analyze the global situation of this discipline. Overall 59 countries could be surveyed in this overview, including countries such as Vietnam, Ghana and Haiti. We estimate the overall number of economic historians in the world to be around 10,400 scholars, and the numbers of the global elite that had some economic history exposure around 39 million.
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