John likes to entertain us all with his academic tales of woe, so I thought I would join the pity party*. I received one of the fastest rejections of an academic journaI article I've ever seen--less than 48 hours.
The paper in question was sent to a mid-level economic development journal on Monday. We received the following message from the journal editor this morning:
The problem that you tackle is a most interesting one. However the methods are inappropriate for the scientific standards that we try to keep at [unnamed journal]. In particular, I simply do not buy the use of contingent valuation analysis for this problem. I want to see longitudinal data which with proper treatment and control groups analyzed over time. That type of study I would find most interesting.
Economic journals have scientific standards? Whodathunkit?
Read on for details...
A little background. The paper in question deals with payments for environmental services in developing countries. More specifically, are rural farmers in Ecuador and Guatemala willing to accept government payments to undertake certain environmental conservation measure that might reduce their on-farm productivity and/or income. Here's the abstract:
Payments for environmental services (PES) are becoming a tool of watershed conservation in Latin America. These payments are directed mainly to people inhabiting the upper reaches of drainage basins, people with modest and variable incomes whose acceptance or rejection of PES hinges on measures they take to raise earnings and deal with risk. The importance of the livelihood strategies of rural households is revealed by contingent valuation (CV) analysis of conservation payments that we have undertaken in two settings, one in Ecuador and the other in Guatemala.
Why did we choose to use the contingent valuation method--a somewhat controversial survey based technique--to assess rural willingness to accept payment for watershed conservation? Easy, because there are very few cases of actual payments being made in developing countries which we could use as a study site. In other words, we intended to use CV as proof of concept that payments for environmental services are feasible in rural areas. A point we made in the paper.
But in the editor's view, CV is not a valid method and the only way to study PES programs is to study those programs that exist. But no such programs exist. So to study whether payments for environmental services are feasible in developing countries we would need to study existing programs that provide payments for environmental services over a long period of time. You know, the kind of programs that don't currently exist and which we intended to show were possible using a technique designed to provide incite into the value of goods, services and policies not currently in existence.
Arg.
*This post is probably only interesting to John, who always enjoys my disappointments.
