Report of the Managing Editor

Overall, 2003 was a fair year for the Journal. Importantly, the target of a four-month average turnaround for submissions has been achieved and further steps have been set in train to reduce lags on papers in the tail of the distribution. Although the JAE slipped in to second place behind the AJAE in 2002 on the Institute of Scientific Information's ranking, the JAE's impact factor was higher than the average for recent years. An initial assessment of the JAE on-line usage is positive with nearly 9,000 hits being recorded since the service was introduced in July 2002. This activity translates to over 500 hits per month, of which around 12% are downloads of full papers. Future growth of online usage is expected. Copyright 2004 Agricultural Economics Society.