The PEJ and the PREB were born just two years apart. The PEJ's maiden issue was in the first semester of 1962, while the PREB's first came out in February 1964 (it was then known as The Philippine Review of Business and Economics). The PEJ was of course, the house journal of the Philippine Economic Society, while the PREB, initially the journal of the University of the Philippines College of Business Administration, came to be jointly published with the UP School of Economics when the latter was established in June 1965. Over the years, both journals flourished with articles coming principally from the core of the Philippine economics profession, but with significant contributions as well from foreign scholars interested in Philippine economic studies.

In early 1999, however, the Board of the Philippine Economic Society decided to seek a merger of the PEJ with the PREB. Since the mid-1990s, the PEJ began to suffer from irregularity in its publication. This was brought about by a confluence of factors, among which were the lack of permanence of the editorial office and the periodic changing of the guard in the Society's officialdom. At about the same time, the UP School of Economics and the UP College of BusinessAdministration agreed toend their partnership in the PREB to enable the two colleges to produce separate journals that serve as specialized fora for the concerns of their disciplines. The UP School of Economics faculty also thought that as they share a common objective with the Philippine Economic Society in producing a scholarly journal on Philippine economic and related concerns, a merger of the PEJ and the PREB was but natural. The primary consideration was to continue the tradition of relevance of professional economics in the Philippine social science scene. Thus was The Philippine Review of Economics (PRE) born, with its first issue having come out in June 2000.