Congratulations to the Organizers of the 2021 African Meetings of the Econometric Society

We want to congratulate the organizers of the 2021 African Meetings for arranging such a successful event, including hosting the Society’s first hybrid meeting. Thank you to our host institution, Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Statistique et d’Economie Appliquée (ENSEA), Abidjan, Côte D’Ivoire, program chairs Prosper Dovonon (Concordia University) and Ismael Mourifié (University of Toronto) and the full Program Committee plus ENSEA’s local organizers, in particular Hugues Kouadio (ENSEA) whose help was instrumental. We also thank the African Regional Standing Committee chaired by Yaw Nyarko (New York University) with Secretary Prosper Dovonon  (Concordia University).

The program chairs assembled an excellent program and conference, with a total of 158 presentations in parallel sessions and about 210 registered participants. These are record numbers for Africa meetings. We also want to commend the same group for just completing the first Africa Summer School in Econometrics (ASSE), also hybrid, a school we hope will become a permanent Society fixture along with our three Asia summer schools, our international summer school, and the Latin America Workshops. 

We are pleased to report that through the Society’s Fund for African Scholars, we were able to provide registration and travel scholarships to young scholars attending the meeting. The Fund was established in 2018 with the generous support of our members and under the leadership of past presidents Tim Besley, Stephen Morris, Orazio Attanasio, current President Penny Goldberg, and the African Regional Standing Committee. 

Finally, we would like to thank all of our invited and contributed speakers whose time and talent we so appreciate and could not hold such an academic meeting without: James Heckman (University of Chicago, Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics – 2000), Manuel Arellano (CEMFI, Madrid), Lisa Cook (Michigan State University), Pascaline Dupas (Stanford University), Kirabo Jackson (Northwestern University) and Yaw Nyarko (New York University).

In addition to this year’s meeting in Abidjan, recent African regional meetings took place in Algiers (2017), Cotonou (2018) and Rabat (2019).