This journal uses ScholarOne (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/nier) for online submission and peer review. ScholarOne is a “comprehensive workflow-management system for scholarly journals, books and conferences”. Further information on ScholarOne can be found here, and queries can be directed to the Editorial Office (NIERsubmissions@niesr.ac.uk).

A new Editorial Board has taken over the National Institute Economic Review with the aim of placing the journal as a reference outlet for policy oriented and current debates research. The aim is to improve its quality and place it solidly within the category of similarly minded journals such as the Brookings Papers in Economic Activity, Economic Policy, and Oxford Review of Economic Policy. For this reason, we’d like our referees to follow a simple set of instructions when reviewing papers that will improve the service to authors, editors, referees and readers alike.

• We need to receive your referee report within SIX WEEKS (or by the reasonably close date agreed with the editor). We know this is a tight deadline, but we believe we should be doing better to improve our publishing process. In exchange, you will receive timely decisions on the papers you may submit to NIER.
• If you have refereed this paper before, please bring that to our attention immediately.
• As a form of guidance, you could explicitly divide your report into THREE sections: Summary, Essential Points, and Suggestions.
• Summary : a brief summary of how you see the contribution of the paper which is standard in reports already.
• Essential Points : the points that are essential for the authors to address if the paper is to be published in a journal of NIER’s quality. Note that we are not aiming to publish papers akin to those in top Economics journals, but papers with a practical/policy orientation that can attract both academic and practitioner’s readership. Please, consider this when thinking about these essential points. If you are recommending rejection, this section can explain the main problem(s).
• Suggestions : everything else. This is the authors’ paper. Authors want to write the best possible paper and thus benefit from suggestions from expert reviewers like you. But it is not the role of referees or editors to micromanage papers. In the end, it is the authors’ paper.

We are not looking for long referee reports. Two pages should be enough for most papers. Sometimes one page will suffice.