One of my responsibilities at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University is to be the editor (and sometimes author or co-author) of a new policy publication: The Mercatus Policy Series.

With this new series, I am hoping to achieve three important goals:

· to communicate with those in the policy world in a constructive and realistic way;

· to address unusual topics (because economics is not meant to be boring) that will prove useful to help social change; and

· to ground the endeavor as much as possible on field work research done by the PhD students at the department of economics at George Mason University (as well as the Mercatus team of scholars and others).

Keeping these goals in mind will hopefully make the series different from other policy publications that are out there. There is already a market full of very good policy periodicals (most of them given away by the various organizations that publish them), and successfully entering this world is not an easy task. However, I believe that our narrative approach to economic problems, our attention to local circumstances and knowledge, our understanding of the role of political groups, and our emphasis on good (Austrian) theory will set the The Mercatus Policy Series apart.

We launched the publication in February 2005 with three categories: Primers, Comments and Country Briefs. Primers are addressing ideas that we think are poorly known in policy circles. Comments are analysis of current situations that are relevant from a policy perspective. Finally, Country Briefs come from the idea that when our students go and explore small countries, they should be able to say something about them.

So far, we have dealt with institutions and entrepreneurship, property rights, the role of media, microfinance in the Philippines, and Botswana. Judging by the rate of downloads (more than 27,000 in total for the whole series at the end of July ’05, often one of the most downloaded items off of the Mercatus website) people have found the topics covered interesting and the approach useful. We have had reactions from people as far as Pakistan, and even from the IMF! The accent so far has been put on the issue of development, but I am hoping to enlarge this in the future and thus reach more policy audiences.

There are plenty of issues scheduled for the next months: SME financing in Romania, self-enforcing institutions, entrepreneurship (there is never enough of this one), fair-trade in Costa-Rica, picketing in Argentina, school vouchers in China, the role of development economics, Montenegro, and more. My co-bloggers have been put to the task (Chris Coyne on the role of media: highly recommended), and Pete Boettke and Pete Leeson are preparing issues.

I will be using this venue to announce new issues, and I hope those who read these lines will keep an eye on the exciting issues to come.