The Map of Policy-Relevant Economics is an interactive map of what the policy institutions’ economists write, what that literature is built on, and what engages with it: OpenAlex records from 1945 onwards, of which a core were written by someone at one of 47 institutions — the IMF, the World Bank, the Federal Reserve system, the major central banks, the multilateral development banks, the OECD and the UN economic bodies.
The boundary is drawn by citation rather than by subject. Macro and micro are no longer cleanly separable, and OpenAlex’s own field labels cannot draw the line — half of its economics field sits in one unlabelled catch-all topic. So a paper outside the institutions is on the map if it cites at least three of their works or is cited by at least three of them. A World Bank randomised trial that cites five macro papers is in; one that cites none is out.
The layout is fitted on the institutions’ own research alone and everything else is projected into that space, so the institutions draw the map and the academic literature is placed on it. Positions come from SPECTER text embeddings reduced with UMAP; clusters are found with HDBSCAN, grouped by Ward agglomeration, and named from samples of their titles.
The map is an interactive canvas application and needs JavaScript. Pan, zoom and search it at https://hieuphay.com/econ-policy-map/.