Annual reports 2007

Presidential Address

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

The Association continues doing well. We got 55 new members due to the great conference we had last year in Istanbul. We record about 190 participants at our International IO Meeting on Managing the Environment this year in Seville, and we are all set for our 17th International Input-Output Conference in Sao Paolo next year. After that we might well move to a yearly international conference with 200-300 participants, marking the maturity of our Association.

Our Journal is also doing well thanks to the intellectual efforts of Erik Dietzenbacher, helped by Bart Los in his last editorial year 2008. Next year Manfred Lenzen and Bart Los will take over. We wish them success in keeping up and possibly even raising the standard, and Erik for his 15 year long, excellent service of editing of our Journal Economic Systems Research.

Aside from a much better contract with Francis & Taylor the publisher of our Journal and a subsequent partial reduction of membership fees with room for further reductions, the other great news is the start of the IIOA Newsletter by José Rueda-Cantuche, which you all must have enjoyed like I did. Other news is the continued improvement of our website and the start of an Input-Output Working Paper Series, to be edited by Erik Dietzenbacher and Bent Thage, which will be run through our website.

Jan Oosterhaven
President, IIOA

Membership

As of June 15, 2008 the IIOA counted 424members, 45 of whom were nominated by our 15 institutional members. This represents a significant increase in the net membership base, up 28% from 332 in 2007. 123 members joined in 2007 and 2008, of which 55 had received a two-year free membership based on their participation at the Istanbul Conference. The number of institutional members slightly decreased.

Membership (as of June 15, 2008).
Individual members (including 45 members nominated by institutional members): 424

Institutional members: 15

Work of the Management

The work of the Management – Secretary and Treasurer - embraced the following usual activities: (a) Membership administration, (b) Recording of payments of Membership Fees, including dispatching reminders, (c) Responding to letters from members and others, (d) Communicating with the Council, (e) Communicating with our Publishing Company (subscription of members, address changes), (f) Communicating with the Editor of the journal Economic Systems Research, (g) Updating and enlarging the website together with the webmaster, (h) Organising the Council meetings and the General Assembly, (i) Acting on order of the Council, (j) Supporting the preparation our the Conferences.

Immediately after the Istanbul conference, the Secretary sent a feedback questionnaire to all participants in order to survey the satisfaction of the participants and to collect proposals for improvements. The overall evaluation of the conference was very excellent. Areas of desirable improvements were seen in the following issues: more direct information on the conference preparations (not only via the website, but also via e-mails; e.g. reminders on deadlines; papers should be available before the conference (this should be more helpful to choose the sessions to be attended and would increase discussion); it was appreciated that the “no-shows” were considerably smaller than in past conferences, but still disturbing and should be further reduced. A stricter regime as regards full paper and registration fee may be needed.

In 2007 an additional important task was performed in the designing and development of the new web-based membership administration system which was rolled out in June 2008.

On 15 January 2007 an irregular session of the General Assembly took place in Vienna (based on the old statutes) in order to decide on the revised statutes. The revised statutes were drafted by the statutes review committee consisting of Thijs ten Raa (Chair), Jan Oosterhaven, the late Chris de Bresson and the Secretary. Their draft was later discussed and on approved by the Council. In the development of the revised statutes also an Austrian Lawyer was engaged in order to ensure that the draft is consistent with the Austrian law. The irregular session of the General Assembly approved the revised statutes with smaller changes, most of them for clarification purposes.

Results of the Council Activities 2007

During the Istanbul Conference the Council held two meetings (1 and 3 July 2007). The usual items on the agenda are both administrative ones, such as the reports of the management, the report of the Editor, approval of the financial report and decision on the budget of the next two years, the preparation of the General Assembly, as well as strategic ones, such as the scientific activities of the IIOA, especially the organisation of the intermediate and the international input-output conferences.

In between the face-to face council meetings the Council works and decides on written procedure by e-mail exchange. During the year 2007 the following main decisions were taken:

• The next intermediate input-output meeting will be held in Seville, 9 – 12 July 2008, with the title “Input-Output Meeting on Managing the Environment”; Local chair: Manuel Alejandro Cardenente Flores; Programme Chair: Emilio Fontella (due to his sudden death the programme chair was function was taken over by Thijs ten Raa).
• 17th International Input-Output Conference will be held I Sao Paulo, 13 – 17 July, 2009; Local chair: Joaquim Guilhoto, Programme chair: Geoffrey Hewings.
• Conferences should collect an extra fee from non-member participants which would be used to finance an extra two/four years free membership in the IIOA for them.
• There will be a Sir Richard Stone Prize for the best article in the ESR over the last two years. The Prize is financed by our publishing house. The Council installed a Stone Prize committee to select the best papers. The first best paper awarded was the paper by Wier, Mette, Christoffersen, Line Block, Jensen, Trine S., Pedersen, Ole G., Keiding, Hans and Munksgaard, Jesper (2005) 'Evaluating sustainability of household consumption—Using DEA to assess environmental performance', Economic Systems Research, 17:4, 425 — 447.
• Due to the death of elected Council member Chris DeBresson, the Council appointed Jiemin Guo as Council member who was next in the order of votes received in the last Council elections for the rest of the election period of Chris DeBresson (2012).
• The Council decided the publishing of a (quarterly) newsletter and appointed Jose Rueda-Cantuche as editor.
• The Council decided on a newly negotiated contract with our publishing house Taylor & Francis which much more favourable for the IIOA.
• Based on a proposal by the management, the Council decided to order a web-based membership administration system with new functionalities for the members. The council ordered that the management should search whether a cheaper offer might be possible.

Report on the General Assembly held on 5 July 2007 in Istanbul

Our new statutes intends to hold the regular sessions of the General Assemblies in connection with our International Input-Output Conferences that are taking place every two years, and also at the place where the Conferences takes place in order to ensure maximum participation of our members.

The General Assembly in Istanbul on 5 July 2007, held in the Conference Hall, Macka Campus, Istanbul Technical University, 18.00 - 20.05, was thus the first one under the new conditions. 69 members participated. The Agenda items were dealt with:

• Installation of the first three IIOA Fellows

According to the decisions of the Council taken at the Sendai conference in 2006 to elect Fellows of the IIOA to honour appropriate members of the IIOA for their scientific contributions to the field of input-output analysis, broadly defined, the Council nominated the first three Fellows and handed over the certificate to them:

• Andras BRODY (could not attend the Istanbul conference)
• Anne P. CARTER
• Karen R. POLENSKE

• Approval of the Annual Report 2006

The Annual Report 2006 was mailed to the members in June 2007. Additional explanations to the Annual Report were given by the officers. The General Assembly approved the annual Report 2006 unanimously.

• Approval of the financial statement 2006

The financial statement 2006 was also mailed to the members in June 2007. Further explanations were given by our Treasurer. The General Assembly approved the financial statement 2006 unanimously.

• Approval of the new membership fees

The membership fee was US $ 60.-per annum without any differentiation. The Council decided to propose to the General Assembly the following annual membership fee structure: for members resident in OCED countries the membership fee should remain at US $ 60.-, for members resident in non-OECD countries and for students there should be a reduced membership fee of US $ 15.-.

The discussion at the General Assembly resulted in two more proposals suggested by members: the first one, the reduced membership fee of US $ 15.- should be valid for all members; the second one, the reduced membership fee should only be applicable for students. It was also discussed that the differentiation between OECD and non-OECD is a quite rough indicator for income size; however, an operational and easy criteria is necessary for easy and unambiguous administration.

The General Assembly voted on all three proposals: The proposal of the Council received a majority and will thus be implemented from 2008 onwards.

• Conferences
  • The President and the Local organizers informed on the future conferences:
• Intermediate conference on managing the environment, July 2008 in Seville, Spain
• 17th International Input-Output Conference, July 2009, São Paulo, Brazil
  
  
• Discussion on future initiatives
• The President reported on further initiatives of the Council. Some quite concrete initiatives are the following:
• Regular editing of a newsletter (Newsletter editor: José M. Rueda-Cantuche); the first issue was distributed in February 2008 (http://www.iioa.org/News-newsletters.htm)
• Press releases, especially of interesting ESR articles

Preparation of the 17th International Input-Output Conference, July 13 - 17, 2009, São Paulo, Brazil

The IIOA together with the Department of Quantitative Methods and Economic History of the University Pablo de Olavide will held an Intermediate Input-Output Conference focussing on al aspects of input-output analysis and modelling related with environment, taking place on 9 – 11 July 2008 in Seville, Spain.

Thijs ten Raa acts as chairman of the Scientific Programme Committee and M. Alejandro Cardenete as chairman of the Local Organising Committee.

Further information may be obtained from the conference website: http://www.upo.es/econ/IIOMME08/index.php
and from the IIOA website: http://www.iioa.org/conferences-seville.html

Norbert Rainer
Secretary, IIOA

Report on the 16th International Input-Output Conference, July 2 - 6, 2007, Istanbul, Turkey

The conference ran over 5 days with an exciting excursion on foot, coach and boat in and around Istanbul in the middle of the week. The scientific programme was organized in 6 to 7 parallel sessions to accommodate about 220 paper presentations. The largest topical themes were the ‘Environment’, ‘Globalization’, and ‘Supply and Use Tables’.

The conference started with a welcoming session for participants and a special welcome session for young scholars which was later followed up with special evening teaching sessions (interregional modeling offered by Dirk Stelder and Jan Oosterhaven, and Life cycle assessment and industrial ecology for input-output economists by Sangwon Suh). In addition there were four very interesting keynote presentations by Geoffrey J.D. Hewings, Yuichi Moriguchi, A. Erinc Yeldan, and Erik Dietzenbacher.

The Leontief Memorial prize for the best conference paper went to I. Kagawa, Y. Kudoh, K. Nansai and T. Tasaki for their paper on ‘Economic and Environmental Consequences of the Automobile Lifetime Change and Fuel Economy Improvement’.

The conference papers can be downloaded form our website:

Klaus Hubacek
Chair of the Scientific Programme Committee
Umit Senesen
Chair of the Local Organisation Committee

Report of the Webmaster

During the last year we have continued updating and improving the IIOA web provisions. To facilitate communication amongst members of the IIOA and general users of input-output techniques a Message Board had been provided. Content of the notification emails has been improved. Currently, about 250 users have signed up.

Following the suggestion by Eric Dietzenbacher an electronic working-paper database with a search engine has been designed and tested. It has been further refined with inputs from potential users and administrators. The new working paper series will be launched at the forthcoming IO conference in Seville.

Klaus Hubacek
Webmaster, IIOA

Editor’s report

Volume 19 (2007) had 465 pages, which was almost exactly our annual page limit (of 464 pages). The aim is to publish one special issue in every volume, but 2007 was an exception with two special issues. In June, we published “Economic Modeling for Disaster Impact Analysis” for which Yasuhide Okuyama acted as guest editor. In September, the special issue “New Developments in Productivity Analysis within an Input-Output Framework” was published, with Marcel P. Timmer and Pirkko Aulin-Ahmavaara as guest editors. Two special issues dealing with topics that are highly relevant and where input-output data and/or techniques may play an influential role.

By the end of 2007, I was completing the work on a special issue that Christian DeBresson had started a couple of years ago. Due to his untimely death, however, he was not able to finish his work as guest editor. “China’s Growing Pains” will contain a nice overview of recent input-output research in China and on China.
A full account of the number of submissions and their status on January 1, 2008, is given in Table 1. It provides a detailed overview for 2007 and a comparison with the four foregoing years. The results indicate that the number of submissions has been fairly stable in the last five years. An interesting aspect is that the majority of papers were submitted in the second half of the year, which explains why an unusually large number of papers were with the referees by the end of the year. As always, it will be my pleasure to receive many more high-quality submissions so as to improve the quality of the journal further.

Table 1. Overview of submissions and their status.

^a Percentages are based only on the ordinary submissions, i.e. excluding the contributions to special issues. The rejection rate includes the withdrawn papers and the remainder consists of submissions with the referees or with the author(s) for revision.

Erik Dietzenbacher
Editor, Economic Systems Research

Report of the Treasurer

Fiscal year 2007 was characterized by two significant developments in IIOA accounting: a) start of the development of the IIOA web-based membership administration system (WEBADMIN) aimed at facilitating online membership contributions, decentralized member address data updating, real-time access to fully updated member contacts, and individual password based access to free ESR downloads; and b) introduction of IIOA online banking for the main operational accounts, which facilitates faster alignment of the IIOA financial database with wire transfers from private and institutional IIOA members.

Auditing of the IIOA accounts remained in the hands of Otto Kremser, the chartered accountant appointed in 2006, and Joachim Lamel who has served IIOA as auditor for many years.

The financial report compiled by the treasurer is stated in US dollars while the bigger part of the IIOA expenditures accrue in Euros. Therefore the sharp rise in the US$/Euro exchange rate triggered a notable increase in costs expressed in US$ after adjustment for periodicity. The financial report for 2007 indicates that projections for the fiscal year had been somewhat overly pessimistic on the revenues side but reasonably precise on the expenditures side. The surplus of US$ 17,175 must be read with caution: the payment by the IIOA to Routledge for publishing and distribution of the journal ESR to our members has been delayed to January 2008 due to belated invoicing by the publishing house. These reduced expenses artificially boost the surplus by US$ 11,730. Since IIOA applies pure revenues and expense accounting, adjustments of periodicity are not permitted in displaying of our accounts.

On the revenues side, membership contributions slightly increased from their 2006 level due to new members attracted by the IIOA Istanbul Conference. The level of membership contributions for individual members continued to amount to US$ 110 for two years or US$ 60 for one year. Interest revenue soared due to savings moved from regular savings accounts to a call-money account, and also US$ 1,648 in delayed interest obtained for 2006. Royalty revenues obtained from Routledge remained at the level of the previous year. There were no refunds paid to IIOA from the Istanbul conference organizers. However, the conference organizers refunded more than 7,000 Euros in IIOA council travel expenses, which reduced expenditures as explained in the following paragraph.

On the expenditure side, the cost of publishing the ESR journal increased notably due to the rising number of members, yet these costs are stated in the estimate for 2008 due to delayed invoicing by Routledge in January 2008. The item Banking charges and tax on interest accrued increased notably since IIOA had increased interest revenues. Expenses for mailings dropped slightly as there were no Council elections in 2007. Administration costs decreased slightly to US$ 3.3 thousand. It shall be noted that this is less than 10 percent of what other scientific organizations with a comparable membership base spend. ICT expenses increased by US$ 1,600 due to website migration expenses. These were triggered by two changes of web-hosters for the IIOA website, the first of which was an emergency migration. The appointment of IIOA fellows and reimbursement of their travel to IIOA conferences has been newly introduced in 2007. The conference costs for Istanbul exclude the direct reimbursements for IIOA council travel expenses by the conference organizers, as these reimbursements were not made via IIOA accounts. Prizes and awards doubled to $ 2,000 due to the introduction of the Sir Richard Stone Prize in 2007.

Christof Paparella
Treasurer, IIOA

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