A QUARTER-CENTURY OF CSAE CONFERENCES

To mark CSAE’s 40th Anniversary, we’ve been working with Simon Quinn to analyse the content of CSAE conferences back to the year 2000. The CSAE Conference has run annually since 2006; before that, there were a combination of related conferences in 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2004 (the 2020 conference was cancelled after papers had been accepted and the programme published). Using a combination of CSAE records and the Wayback Machine, we have been able to recover the full text of about 90% of CSAE conference papers: the following figure shows the number of papers in the programme for each year, and the share in our analysis dataset.

This allows a fascinating insight into the academic content of the past quarter century at CSAE: the intellectual debates, the empirical focus, the quantitative methods, and so on. To illustrate, the following map shows the geographic distribution of data studied in CSAE conferences (limited to those papers that each study a single country). The map shows a broad coverage across many low- and middle-income countries — with African countries receiving the overwhelming focus, of course.

The CSAE has been funding African scholars to attend the CSAE Conference and present their research since 2007. In 2019, we built on this process by launching the CSAE Economic Development in Africa Workshop, a pre-conference event, hosted by a different African university each year.

The Workshop provides a unique opportunity for the funded participants of the CSAE Conference to receive feedback on their research from faculty at the University of Oxford and the host institution, access training, and build lasting academic networks. Staff and students from the host institution are also invited to attend both the Workshop and the CSAE Conference in the UK. In 2025/26 we supported 40 early career researchers from across Africa to attend both the CSAE Workshop and CSAE Conference, a record number for the Centre in honour of our 40th anniversary.