Research collaboration in development economics

Achieving greater geographical diversity in economics in general, and in the field of development in particular, is a desirable objective due to ethical and utilitarian reasons. In this article, we analyze geographical diversity in the main academic journals of the discipline, providing a detailed look at articles written in collaboration between researchers from developed and developing countries. Our results confirm the striking prevalence of articles written by researchers based in developed countries. We also detect an increase in collaborative research in time and highlight the importance of non-academic institutions in the conformation of these collaborative research teams. In terms of contents, most of these collaborations address the study of a country or a region, and many of them are empirical, mainly using quantitative approaches. Integrating a collaborative research team allows researchers located in the developing world to publish in higher quality journals and get more impact, at least in terms of citations.