About Research in Government and Economics

Research in Government and Economics

Overview and identity

Research in Government and Economics is a Chinese-language academic journal founded in 2025 by the Academic Center for Chinese Economic Practice and Thinking (ACCEPT) at Tsinghua University in Beijing. It appears on the official Tsinghua University Press journal list with ISSN 2097-7115 and is published on the press's SciOpen platform. The journal is supervised by the Ministry of Education of China, sponsored by Tsinghua University and published by Tsinghua University Press. Its subject is the emerging branch of economics known as government and economics: the study of government as a direct participant in modern market economies, of governmental behaviour and the incentive mechanisms that drive it. Although its concerns overlap with public economics and political economy as studied elsewhere, the journal exists to advance a specifically articulated research programme — one built at Tsinghua over the past several years — and to do so in Chinese, for the scholarly community building an autonomous Chinese social-science knowledge system.

Founding and institutional home

The journal's founder institution, ACCEPT, was established in April 2018 by Professor David Daokui Li, the Mansfield Freeman Chair Professor of Economics at Tsinghua and a former founding dean of Tsinghua's Schwarzman College. ACCEPT's stated purpose, as Li expressed it at its founding, was to draw lessons from international economic theory, to summarise and refine theory based on the experience and basic facts of China's development since reform and opening up, and to make the practice and theories of Chinese economics accessible to — and accepted by — international colleagues; the centre's English acronym was chosen with that hope in mind. Its first major collective product was a report on the economic lessons of China's forty years of reform and opening up, presented in December 2018. Research in Government and Economics, founded seven years later in 2025, gives that centre a journal of its own: a standing publication venue, supervised by the Ministry of Education and sponsored by the university, through which its research programme can be developed issue by issue rather than only through conferences and reports.

The field it serves: government and economics

Government and economics, as its founders define it, is an emerging body of work that aims to better understand the government's role, incentives and behaviour in a modern market economy, and how government actions shape the economy's performance. In a programmatic paper of 2021, David Daokui Li and the Nobel laureate Eric S. Maskin set out the field's premise: mainstream economics has paid insufficient attention to the fact that governments are not only referees standing outside the market but major economic actors within it, and that their incentives — like those of firms and households — can and should be analysed with the tools of economics. The field therefore studies such questions as how governments cultivate markets, how government structure and incentives affect growth and development, how regulation and governance work in practice, and how these relationships have operated through economic history. Research in Government and Economics is the Chinese-language journal dedicated to advancing the disciplinary development of this field, and its aims statement adopts the field's founding premise directly.

Governments as direct actors: the journal's theoretical stance

The journal's SciOpen description is explicit about the theoretical gap it addresses. At the theoretical level, it confronts a fundamental economic reality: governments are not only rule-makers but also direct actors in market activities, and their behaviour profoundly shapes the trajectory of market economies — a fact, the journal argues, that fills an important gap in contemporary economic theory. Its research focus follows from that stance: it examines governmental behaviour and the underlying incentive mechanisms, aiming to improve government incentives, better leverage the role of government, and promote the high-quality development of the market economy. In other words, the journal treats the design of government itself — what officials and agencies are rewarded for doing, how different levels of government interact, how public actors respond to markets they also regulate — as a central object of economic analysis, on the same footing as the behaviour of firms and consumers in conventional models.

China's economic practice as source material

At the practical level, the journal's founding statement points to experience. The lessons drawn from China's economic development and from the development experiences of other countries and regions urgently need, it argues, to be distilled into economic theories that can guide China's further high-quality development and benefit the global community. This is the ACCEPT method carried into a journal: begin from the documented practice of Chinese economic governance — local government competition, industrial policy, public finance, state-market interaction — and from comparative experience abroad, and build theory that explains it and travels beyond it. The journal states that it fosters theoretical innovation grounded in China's economic practice yet possessing general explanatory power, and that it contributes to the construction of an autonomous knowledge system for Chinese social sciences. Publication in Chinese is integral to that mission: the primary audience for building such a knowledge system is the Chinese-language scholarly community itself, even as the field's concepts are simultaneously debated internationally through other channels.

Supervision, sponsorship and publication details

The formal publishing arrangements are recorded on the journal's SciOpen page. Research in Government and Economics is supervised by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China — the supervising authority for journals sponsored by Chinese universities — sponsored by Tsinghua University, founded by ACCEPT, and published by Tsinghua University Press, the university's publishing house in Beijing. It is a Chinese-language journal, a detail that distinguishes it within the Tsinghua University Press list, which is better known internationally for English-language science titles. Its registered identifier on the Tsinghua University Press journal list is ISSN 2097-7115, and its home on the SciOpen platform is under that ISSN. The combination of a ministry-supervised, university-sponsored structure with publication on the press's modern digital platform places the journal squarely inside China's established system for academic periodicals while giving it the production and dissemination infrastructure of SciOpen.

Editorial ambitions and standards

The journal describes its own ambitions in terms of substance, process and reach. It strives, its SciOpen statement says, for significant topic selection, efficient editorial processes and broad impact. It adheres to rigorous academic standards while maintaining an open and inclusive dialogue — a pairing that reflects the field's position as a young discipline arguing for its place within economics: standards must be high enough for its claims to be taken seriously, while the conversation must stay open enough for a new research programme to recruit contributors beyond its founding circle. Its declared contributions are to support the development of government and economics as a discipline, to foster the theoretical innovation described above, and to add valuable insights to the construction of an autonomous knowledge system for Chinese social sciences. For a journal founded in 2025, these aims define success institutionally as much as bibliometrically: the test is whether a recognisable field, with its own questions and literature, consolidates around the title.

The wider ecosystem: ACCEPT, SAGE and a separate English-language journal

Research in Government and Economics does not stand alone; it is the newest element of an institutional ecosystem built around the field. ACCEPT, founded in 2018, conducts research and convenes the Annual Conference of Government and Economics, first held in April 2019. In April 2019 Li Daokui and Eric Maskin jointly established the Society for the Analysis of Government and Economics (SAGE), an international scholarly society for the field, of which both serve as co-presidents. Readers should note one distinction carefully: the English-language Journal of Government and Economics, published with Elsevier as SAGE's international journal and co-edited by Li and Maskin, is a separate title from Research in Government and Economics. The two journals share a field, a founding institution and a research programme, but they differ in language, publisher and ISSN: the journal profiled here is the Chinese-language title founded by ACCEPT in 2025, published by Tsinghua University Press on SciOpen under ISSN 2097-7115. The distinction matters for citation and identification, and the existence of the pair — one Chinese-language, one English-language — reflects the programme's dual aim of building a domestic knowledge system and an international conversation at the same time.

Readership and significance

The journal's readers are economists and social scientists working on government behaviour, public finance, governance, regulation, development and China's political economy, together with policy researchers for whom the analysis of government incentives is directly practical. Its significance is best understood institutionally. New academic fields rarely acquire, within a few years of being named, a dedicated research centre, an international learned society, an annual conference, an English-language international journal and a Chinese-language journal of their own; government and economics, built from Tsinghua since 2018, now has all of these, and Research in Government and Economics completes the set on the Chinese-language side. Published in Beijing by Tsinghua University Press, supervised by the Ministry of Education, sponsored by Tsinghua University and founded by ACCEPT, it is the disciplinary home journal of one of the most deliberately constructed new fields in contemporary Chinese economics.