Conference Guidelines

Aims

The World Economics Association facilitates the organization of conferences with a view to support the development of research and to enhance its social nature in an inclusive and pluralistic context. Specific aims include the following.

To bring together high level on-going research works from contributors all over the world.
To facilitate discussion and interaction on the conference papers.
To encourage a large number of members to become involved in research and discussions
To support researchers at initial stages of their project to develop it further by drawing on the expertise of a large number of colleagues from all over the world

General

All conferences will be online. Conferences will have themes and they may be suggested by – indeed solicited from – members. The size and scope of conferences vary: some specialized conferences may attract only a few papers; others may have a wider scope and may be subdivided into Sessions. For each conference a Discussion Forum will be open on line and will be text based; comments and replies will be posted during the Discussion Forum period which will normally last four weeks. Leaders in consultation with the Chair of the COC can extend the period to give the papers a fair chance of being commented on. All papers and comments will be attributed. Authors are expected to reply to the comments. All authors are also strongly encouraged to take part in the Discussion Forum by commenting on other papers.

Papers can be submitted at various stages of development including work-in-progress on the empirics and methodology. An abstract should be included (see below, Guidelines for Manuscripts).

As with location-bound conferences, the authors are free to submit their papers for publication wherever and whenever they wish. Other than being part of the WEA, there is no formal or organizational connection between the conferences and the journals.

Conference proceedings will include all the papers and related comments and will be stored in the WEA archives. Conference papers and comments are citable

The editors of the WEA journals may offer publication to particularly good conference papers on the basis of their own judgement.

Organization

The WEA establishes a Conference Organisation Committee whose role is to facilitate the conferences not to organize them. The organization of each conference will be the responsibility of the Conference Leader.

The Conference Committee will have responsibility for:

Deciding which conference themes – and related leaders – to accept
Suggesting conference themes and seeking possible Leaders
Vetting the papers and related comments before they are posted to make sure that they do not contain unsuitable material
Support the Conference Leader in seeking contributions of papers and discussions/comments.

The Conference Leader is responsible for:

(a) writing up the conference theme/title and the scope of the conference;
(b) preparing the publicity/announcement material to be posted on WEA;
(c) soliciting papers;
(d) inviting possible discussants;
(e) soliciting comments to papers;
(f) establishing sessions- if the scope of the conference warrants it – and appointing session Chairs.

The Session Leader – in consultation with the Conference Committee – will be able to reject papers, but as with many location conferences the standard of papers is not expected to be at completion stage.

Guidelines for manuscripts

Manuscripts must be in English and the paper must be self-contained. They should not contain libellous or hateful statement. They should be processed in New Times Roman with line spacing 1 and font 12. Notes should be put at the foot of the page. Pages should be numbered consecutively starting with n.1 and the number should be placed at the bottom of the page and centred.
The first page of the manuscript should be formatted as per template in each specific conference. It should contain an abstract of 300-400 words detailed enough to encourage the reader to explore the whole paper.
Empirical material which cannot be easily fitted in the body of the article should be made available in appendices. Whenever full data cannot be easily fitted either in the body of the paper or in the appendices, authors should provide the relevant information for replicating their findings and invite readers to personal contact for fuller information.
Length of papers. We invite contributors to be concise. Papers should not be longer than 10,000 words, unless more space is really needed to make the main points. The World Economics Association reserves the right to demand that a paper is made concise before it is put online in the Discussion Forum.
Extensive mathematical derivation and proofs should be put in an appendix if possible and limited to the necessary. The introduction, premises and conclusions should be non mathematical. A non-technical summary should be provided.
The author(s) must disclose in a footnote any personal or professional links they may have with the industry/companies/institutions they are writing about or declare that there are none. Failure to disclose any material conflict of interest may result in temporary or permanent exclusion from WEA journals and – in cases of serious or repeated infringement – in exclusion from the World Economics Association.
Citations in the text should use the Harvard System of short referencing (e.g. Smith, 1986, 10-11; Brown 1993a). A full list of references should be given at the end of the articles in the following style:
Balassa, B., 1974, ‘Trade creation and trade-diversion in the European Common Market’, Manchester School, 92 (2), 93–135.
Baran, P.A. and Sweezy, P.M., 1966a, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order (1968 edition), Harmondsworth: Penguin.
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), 2010, World Investment Report 2010: Investing in a Low-Carbon Economy, Geneva: United Nations.

Book Stalls

Each conference will have Book Stalls in which individual members can advertise their conference-related books for a fee of £10. Conference leaders and authors of accepted papers for the conference will have their conference-related books advertised free of charge. Please send the following to the conference organiser:

- high resolution image of the book cover (preferably JPEG format)
- A URL of the preferred place where the book can be bought

Please pay at:

http://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/advertising/