President’s Letter

Dear Fellow NABE Members,

Global greetings to you.  I say global as we at NABE are planning for the future and it is top on our mind as economists that global is a necessary feature to our professional prospects.  As we engage in establishing skills sessions and topics for the 50th Annual Meeting, several offerings will have a global focus.  As many of you know, we have affiliations with non-U.S. professional organizations such as the Canadian Association for Business Economics (CABE).

Gene Huang and I are about to take a trip to Shanghai and Beijing to gather groups of professionals in the business economics field.  There we will talk about establishing NABE chapters and launching mutually beneficial exchanges of data, analysis, and yes, networks.  We have learned from the excellent organization in Philadelphia, the Global Interdependence Center, that establishing ever more alliances with practicing professionals in other countries is a key to a vibrant hub of activities and growing experiences.  Send us your ideas!

Travel log:  I have been invited to visit several chapters in coming months and please let me extend my appreciation to the membership for these unique opportunities to speak on a variety of topics.  So far, my remarks have centered on topics as wide ranging as the credit crisis, sustainability and autos, global growth, real options analysis and green bonds, our NABE/Caltech Forecast Aggregation Experiments, the NABE value proposition, and careers in economics.  Since most presentations need to be crisp and allow for equal time for discussion, questions, and comment, the remarks are brief and sometimes barely touch the surface of these topics.  That, of course, can be a source of frustration.  At the same time, it does crystallize and focus the important messages to convey – without undue distortion.  Does that sound like a tagline for those of you briefing busy business leaders?
Many of you have contacted me about a variety of issues.  I have been thirsting for feedback.  Here are some comments:

• "Loved the policy conference since you really know how to keep the signal to noise ratio very high."  Thanks to Robert Fry, Ken Simonson, and all the NABE Board members and many others – an efficient team, many with great contacts to motivate the speakers to accept our invitations. Others members of the team included Chris Varvares, Richard Brown, Ann Dunbar, Dean Foreman, Devon Herrick, Sydney Smith Hicks, Bruce Kellison, Stuart Mackintosh, Robert McGee, Maia Pykina, Brooks Robinson, John Silvia, Kevin Swift, Sean Snaith, Bill Strauss, and Charles Steindel. We are excited about professional growth.
• "Need to bring something back to my job that I can apply to business problems my customers are asking me to work on – it has to be state of the art analytical tools."  Yes, that is what our Education Initiative is all about – expanding these cutting edge offerings for professional development AND recognizing you for pursuing development offerings so you get credit and promotional opportunities from your employers.
• "What is the NABE story anyhow?  How do these professional networks thrive in the virtual world of information technology?"  What a loaded question.  We will provide robust answers at our 50th Annual Meeting.  You must be there.  The "NABEsters" attending will tell you stories.  We will invite you to share your recollections for a NABE history project, so watch for details soon on the topics and deadline.  Our new Get Connected members are really excited about the next stage of our professional organization. Getting LinkedIn is part of our future growth.  I will tell you that after giving a talk to 100 University of Michigan students last week, they are hungering for information about a professional career that uses the economic education they are completing.  They see their friends in the undergraduate business school pursuing a B.B.A. with lots of information about career prospects.  Our education and experience embodied in NABE can and should help them to find these professional pathways. 

Finally, in closing, this may sound like I am lobbing a tennis ball across the court, but I am very thankful that I found this profession nearly 20 years ago.   As Paul and I returned from Africa and set out to find professional roots, we discovered the economic science through the back door of studying about international development.  That led through the kitchen (fundamental analysis) and then to graduate fields of interest in public finance and monetary theory, all done with many part-time jobs and generous professors with research and teaching assistantships in hand.  While there is rust on my differential equations, I do value highly the education and the way it has allowed for examination of the great global dynamics now underway in our newly minted economic history. 

Best wishes,

Ellen Hughes-Cromwick
NABE President