Preliminary Results of the Readership Survey

The Transition Newsletter’s organizational setup and ownership will undergo major changes this year. The hope is that these changes will not only build on the goodwill we have achieved during 13 years of uninterrupted publication, but will also take into account the tremendous changes the world has undergone in the past decade. Before we embarked on these changes we considered that learning more about our readers’ interests, preferences, and suggestions was extremely important, which is why the previous issue included a readership survey. These preliminary results are based on 76 responses, which represent about 0.7 percent of our readership. As they came from 28 countries (70 percent from industrial countries and 15 percent each from transition and developing countries), they would seem to be a relatively good representative sample. The preliminary results were as follows:

• Ninety-nine percent of the respondents want the newsletter to continue publication.

• Almost 60 percent of the respondents work as researchers, 40 percent teach at universities or colleges, and almost 20 percent work in business or consulting (respondents could indicate more than one field of work).

• About 15 percent of the respondents have a government job and 10 percent are part of the development community. Relatively few work in the NGO sector (7 percent), in finance (6 percent), and the health sector (4 percent). We also received responses from students, journalists, a public school teacher, an industrial researcher, and an engineering specialist.

• Most respondents are interested in economics (76 percent); international development (almost 50 percent); social policy (33 percent); management (almost 30 percent); banking, international relations, education, and administration (22 to 25 percent each); and health (10 percent). Respondents also mentioned journalism, telecommunications, environment, transport, law, public finance, governance, trade, policy advocacy, rural development, and personal investment.

• Respondents use Transition mainly as an information source for research (80 percent), to find out about recent publications (65 percent), to learn about World Bank activity (52 percent), and to read about conferences (40 percent). About 33 percent of the respondents use it as a teaching material and 25 percent as a tool for assessing policy options. For 10 percent of the readership it is a source for business decisions, and for some it is a general source of information.

• Ranking various sections of the newsletter on a scale of 1 to 3 (3 is extremely useful, 2 is fairly useful, and 1 is not useful) respondents gave the following average scores: feature stories: 2.7; New Books and Working Papers: 2.6; Bibliography of Selected Articles: 2.3; Agenda: 2.2; Conferences: 2.0.

Most comments were positive, for example: "It’s good as it is." "Review and summaries of current research on transition economies are very useful." "Good balance between longer and shorter articles." "Helpful to my research, keep up with the good work." "Present structure is very well balanced." "It is the best World Bank publication." "Very good and factual." "The only source of current information about CEE-NIS economic activities." "I love your cartoons." "Maximum useful content in fewest pages, alerts to papers I would never find on my own." "Try to find a paper that duplicates Transition. There isn’t one." "I have read Transition for many years; please continue." " No other publication covers so many niche publications, conferences, etc." "I find it a tremendously useful publication for keeping abreast of research in the field of transition economies." "It provides a great service. Please don’t cancel it!"

We received plenty of suggestions that we hope will be adopted in the new Transition. Many readers suggested that it "extend coverage to general issues of development policy." Others want "Asian, Latin American, and African topics," "global finance," and "transition lessons for other developing countries" to be included. Some would like to see thematic surveys that compare countries’ performance, including comparisons of transition, emerging, and industrial economies. Readers propose "more coverage on FDI and portfolio investments" and more coverage of "resource allocation issues," "government and business relations," "more information on Asian transition economies," and "articles that analyze the effects of policy choices over 5-15 years and report on prospective changes." Respondents want to see "less financial content and more information on reform in social sectors, including the health care system." According to another suggestion, "The newsletter should deal regularly with controversial views on specific topic in the form of roundtables," while other respondents noted that "the newsletter should have more Internet links to published papers" and should "publish articles on activities of partner organizations and NGOs from a World Bank perspective."

A reader suggested always placing the Agenda, New Books, and Conference sections at the back of the newsletter. Some readers urged us "to reduce redundancies, publish shorter articles, and instead of the economic focus, sometimes use other academic disciplines." One reader stated that interviews are much less informative than news analysis.

As you can see, we have changed our design, taking the advice of those readers who wanted a "more sexy" appearance. As one of our reader put it: "A little bit of color will not hurt anybody."

We would like to thank everybody for their contributions and encourage those who have not yet responded to send us your completed questionnaire.

Senior Editor, Richard Hirschler

(Jennifer Vito’s help in assessing the survey’s results is greatly appreciated.)