Three Issues in Quantitative Economics

In March 1979, the First Colloquium of the Chinese Society of Technology Economy (CSTE) was held. A group of 18 experts who participated in this colloquium and discussed issues related to the application of advanced mathematics and computing to economic research and management. They agreed that “economic-mathematical method” should be the proper name of the research field, but not of the discipline (or a school). As for what the new name should be, opinions differed vastly. Out of the dozen of names initially proposed, three were most favored: Econometrics, economic systematology and quantitative economy. Finally, quantitative economy was adopted as the new name of this discipline which was further changed into quantitative economics in 1984.It is by no means an easy task to name a discipline or a school which involves a series of issues such as research objects, methods, contents and systems. Opinions can be divergent for a long time. For instance, although statistics is a fairly old discipline, it is still undecided whether it is one discipline or several disciplines and disputes remain on its research objects. Given the youth of our quantitative economics, many problems are to be further discussed.