VoxEU Column Frontiers of economic research

Welcome to Me Judice, our new Consortium partner

A new member of the Vox Consortium – the Dutch-language site Me Judice – goes public today.

The Vox Editors welcomes the newest member of the Consortium – the Dutch language site Me Judice. The team that set up the site is led by Kees Koedijk (Professor of Financial Management at the University of Tilburg) and Harry van Dalen (senior researcher at the Dutch Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute in The Hague and the CentER of the University of Tilburg). Me Judice’s editorial board includes several regular Vox contributors, such as Willem Buiter, Paul de Grauwe and Rick Van Der Ploeg.

The goal of Me Judice (Latin for “in my judgment”) is to set up a Dutch-language, politically independent discussion forum to stimulate debate among economists who write about issues affecting the public interest. The writing is aimed at a readership with at least a basic knowledge of economics. The managing editors of the site are Kees Koedijk and Harry van Dalen. The webmaster is Reggy Peters and Frieda Rikkers is assistant editor and copy editor.

Vox’s Expanding Consortium

The expansion of the Consortium to include a Dutch site is a great step in the direction of the Consortium’s goal of raising the level of public policy discussion by making research-based analysis and commentary more accessible to the informed public and bringing a wider range of researchers into the debate by lowering the entry barriers.

Enlargement of the Consortium will assure that the best contributions are translated into an expanding array of languages thus reaching further into the policymaking world. Despite English’s ascendancy on the web, only a narrow slice of professional economists are completely at ease with English. More analysis will be read and understood if it is presented in a wide range of languages. In this way, good research-based policy commentary and analysis should reach deeper into the global policy-making machinery than, for example, a Financial Times Personal View. Moreover, unlike many opinion-pieces in the print media, columns posted on the Consortium are freely downloadable (no subscription is required).

The Consortium is open to suggestions for cooperation with other existing or proposed sites that share our aim of raising the level of the policy debate by making it easier for researchers to draw out the policy implications of their work in a setting that is more informal than journal articles but less constrained than newspaper columns.