ECONOMETRIC SOCIETY AUSTRALASIAN MEETING, ESAM96, PERTH, AUSTRALIA Les Oxley University of Waikato 1. Introduction What do Olga Korbut (gymnast), Nadia Comaneci (gymnast), and the Econometric Society Australasian Meeting 1996 (ESAM96) have in common? They can all claim membership of an elite club scoring the (near) perfect 10 out of 10 from a panel of their peers! Numerous letters and email messages of congratulations for an excellent conference were received by the organisers, with many saying it was ‘the most well organised conference they had ever attended’. What was it that made the conference so outstanding (future organisers please note)? The Department of Economics at the University of Western Australia (UWA) acted as the perfect host for the Meetings which spanned the period 10 – 12 July 1996. The UWA campus (according to many participants, ‘the most beautiful they had ever seen’) acted as a wonderful back-drop to the conference, and the Perth weather was superb. The conference represented the most westerly meeting of ESAM and the furthest that Australasian participants had travelled for a regional meeting. This fact, however, did not seem to deter many potential delegates with 143 registrants from some 17 countries, including Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands, UK, Japan, Hong Kong, USA, Canada and Brazil. This figure would give ESAM96 the third highest attendance of the 11 meetings to date. Pre-conference the local committees, headed by Michael McAleer and Paul Miller (Program Co-Chairs) and Kenneth Leong and Christine Ong (Local Organising Committee Co-Chairs), made extensive use of email to contact potential and actual delegates. (This is probably the first time that two PhD students had been Co-Chairs of a Local Organising Committee of an international conference.) During the conference, email facilities were made available to all delegates, the first time ever at an ESAM conference, and around 30% of the participants used them at some time over the three days. The now almost obligatory World Wide Web page was up-and-running months before submission deadlines began to bind and was updated regularly. These features were universally welcomed. Only two of the paper presenters did not have email facilities and in these cases fax messages were sent. Registration for those who ©BlackwellPublishersLtd.1997 CUSTOMER REF.:JES S / R MCS REF.:JES H239 0950–0804/97/01 0115–08 JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC SURVEYS Vol. 11, No. 1 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997, 108 Cowley Rd., Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 238 Main St, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.