NBER) for a conference on economics and control theory. That conference in May 1972 at Princeton was attended by roughly sixty economists and engineers. Selected papers from that conference and the annual meetings which followed it for the next live years were published in special issues of the Annuls of Economic and Social Measurement. Professors Chow and Athans jointly edited the lirst three of these sets of papers and then passed that responsibility along to the two of us in 1975.
Papers which were presented at these conferences employed methods from stability analysis, optimal control and econometrics to analyze a broad variety of economic problems. Also, some of the papers were concerned with improvements in methodology as economists and engineers learned new methods from one another.
In 1978 the' NBER decided to discontinue publication of the Annals and shortly thereafter North-Holland Publishing Company agreed to the establishment of the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control (JEDC) to continue the publication of the types of papers which were in the special 'control' issues of the Annals. Thus more papers in this field could be published than was possible in the one or two special issues of the Annals which were devoted each year to these subjects.
Simultaneously with the creation of the JEDC, the Society for Economic Dynamics and Control (SEDC) was organized to sponsor international conferences and thus to continue the tradition of the NBER conferences. Gregory Chow agreed to serve as first president of the Society.
Thus in the JEDC and the SEDC we intend to continue the tradition of the special issues of the Annals and of the NBER conferences to welcome engineers, economists, mathematicians, statisticians, operations researchers