Aspirations for Apparel?

Why Nepal should try to promote manufacturing in apparel and footwear

While politicians constantly hail Nepal's many development, the fact is that in terms of economic development, it has been stagnant. Nepal has no manufacturing industry to speak of, and it is far from being a services based economy. Agriculture is now no longer an attractive career proposition for most people due to the nature of the backbreaking work involved. 

There is scope for tourism, but it cannot be a panacea. Tourism simply cannot be as large a sector as manufacturing. Even in a country like Thailand, which has marketed itself as a tourism haven for decades, manufacturing is by far the largest sector in terms of contribution to GDP. 

Manufacturing is the only real savior for Nepal. Now there are many questions that can be raised about the type of manufacturing that should be suitable for the country. Obviously, given the size and quality of the workforce, Nepal cannot hope to manufacture complicated products. Thus, the focus should like on simpler products like footwear and apparel. 

Yes, we will need to compete with the likes of Bangladesh, Vietnam and Indonesia, among others. But the fact is that the market for footwear/apparel is so large it can accommodate another country. Further, it is not just that the market is so large; the market is also qualitatively different. People don't just want to buy known brands anymore as a result of self-awareness; they are also on the lookout for good, but unknown brands. People know now that brands such as Nike charge a premium based not only on the quality of the product but also on the brand value. But many people aren't willing to pay those hefty premiums anymore.  

Thus, if Nepal could be a workshop for less popular, but good brands (or could even develop its own products), it could be in a position to become an important player in that market tomorrow. If we develop good products, they will find their way to savvy customers and the brand value could increase. 

What this blog is about

This blog is about geopolitics. Or at least, one of the themes will be geopolitics. I intend it to be mainly about Asian geopolitics, but I will cover other subjects. I will write about Nepal, as it is my country of birth, and where I live now, but I will take a more holistic view about this country, locating it within the larger Asian geopolitical context. 

You can't write a new blog on geopolitics without seeming a bit presumptuous. Who is this fellow who came out of nowhere, you might ask. He doesn't have the right credentials. How does he think he's qualified to write about these things? 

People who ask these questions have a point. I think there are many, many people who are very qualified academically, to write a blog about geopolitics, but who don't. But I believe that academic qualifications are neither necessary nor always sufficient to write about important subjects of global importance. Academics often have deep knowledge about a particular subject but find it difficult to broaden the scope. By contrast, I won't pretend to be an expert on anything, but I can write a good deal about a lot of things. So that is the value I bring, I think. In any case, that is for you, the reader to decide whether this blog is worth your time or not. 

 Writing a blog is a hard task. Well, if you want to write sensibly, that is. Our world is full of information. Oftentimes, the blogger surely asks himself/herself why another blog? Why, indeed? We have a host of platforms that offers information, discussions, and analyses. What will another one do? 

Well, it might not be of much consequence for the world, but it could be good for you. If you are really lucky, then the blog could be popular and monetizable. If you equate the success of your endeavor by its popularity or its ability to make money, then that could be an incentive to work harder on your blog. However, that is not guaranteed. There are lots of blogs out there. Some are very good. But most don't make much money. Therefore, money should not be a prime motivating factor if you want to stay in this business for long. 

So, why not give up on the whole idea and just keep a diary? Well, for the simple reason that you might reach out to people who need to read your blog. Even it is only one other person, somewhere far, far away, what you write could make a difference to his/her life. That is reason enough, I think, to keep going. That's what I intend to do. There will be ups and downs. Sometimes you might just not feel like writing. That's okay. Take a break. That's what I did. I had planned to be very consistent, producing at least one blog per 3-4 days no matter what happened. But I didn't meet my own goals. Most likely, in the beginning you won't either. But that's okay. Just keep going. 

 

Judicial reform in Isreal: A harbinger of more democratic backsliding? 

Across the world, we are witnessing countries roll back democratic norms and the pace appears to be increasing. The most surprising country to join this club is Israel, which had, for a long time always prided itself on being the only democracy in the Middle East. And yet the way in which events are unfolding in that country suggest that a truly profound change is happening in that country's political culture. 

In Israel, there always had been a clear separation of powers between the executive/legislature and the judiciary. Israeli judges had the power to strike down laws as unconstitutional if they thought they were. Although they didn't use the power often, they did not shy away from using it either. 

The current crisis was years in the making, but gained traction recently because of the precarious situation of the current government led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu, fighting corruption charges, began losing most of his erstwhile allies and formed a coalition government with members of the ideological, extreme right. The latter, meanwhile, saw at the present moment an opportunity to get rid of judicial overreach. The extremists had always had an animus with the judiciary, who they thought was composed of liberals who wanted to erase the Jewish identity of Israel. Thus the two coalition partners, Netanyahu and the extreme right, were in bed together for different reasons. Netanyahu had pragmatic reasons as he wanted to fight off corruption charges whereas the rightists saw in this moment an opportunity to shape the future of Israel in their own ideological colors. 

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have gathered to protest the judicial overhaul but Netanyahu has not given an indication that he is going to back down. It will be interesting to see what happens in that country in the weeks and months to come. 

 Lack of data is severely hampering development in Nepal

The education sector in Nepal

  

The Central Board of Statistics in Nepal has been renamed as the National Statistics Office. Well and good, but what difference does a change of nomenclature make if it is not followed by a change in actual practices? 

The new website looks much like the old website. It is not attractive or user-friendly. But most importantly, it does not have much relevant data. The primary purpose of an organization such as the NSO is to be a repository of cross cutting data that will be useful in the country's development. The more comprehensive and accurate our data sources, the more informed and reliable our policy interventions will be. In the past, policies interventions were made without much regard to an actual understanding of actual facts on the ground; the result was that either the interventions failed in bringing about the required goals or that the interventions themselves were unnecessary, based as they were on a faulty understanding. This is most obviously seen in the education sector. The education sector has clearly failed Nepal despite (though not always) good intentions of the planners. Most Nepalese do not even have a minimum proficiency in mathematics and science, despite the fact that more of the budget is allocated to education than any other sector. 

Nepal's education policy has failed. We have neither produced people who understand civic virtue nor have we produced competent professionals who could push the country's development. The few world class professionals we produce rose on the basis of their own merit (and yes, connections) with little input from the state. But why has it failed? What did we fail to do? Armchair philosophizing can give us answers, but these will not be the right ones (except by chance). To find out the true reasons, or, in statisticians' parlance,  to maximize the chance of finding out the real reasons, we need accurate data. We need regional datasets to compare performances, we need time series data to understand trends, and we need longitudinal data to track progress (or the lack thereof). 

There are other ways to gather education-related data on a sizeable scale. Mobile phone usage among children can offer several metrics. Too much usage can be a size of addiction; too little may be a sign that children are too poor to take advantage of internet facilities. With the wealth of data available because of mobile phone usage, one need not even conduct costly surveys to obtain reliable estimates. Cross-verifying data obtained from mobile phone usage with demographic data can allow us to make educated guesses about mobile phone usage. Then, we can further refine the process to get more insights. The crucial thing is that we could not do this earlier because we did not have the data. Now, with the data available to us, we must ensure that we use it to the full extent. 

The new security and economic challenges facing East Asia

Part A: Japan's security dilemma 

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida's visit to Ukraine coincided with Chinese President Xi Jiniping's visit to Moscow. One would think that Kishida is deliberately provoking Putin. 

Kishida, a former Foreign Minister is no warmonger. But tensions amongst nations are running high, and even actions considered benign can have deadly consequences. The bone of contention between Japan and Russia are the southern Kuril Islands (which Japan calls its Northern Territories). Japan accuses Russia of illegally occupying the islands; Russia naturally disputes this. 

But Russia has done more. In 2020, it stationed the S-300 VR air defense missile system on the island, with the view that Japan (assisted perhaps by the United States) might try to annex the islands. (In 2022, it added another system, the Bastion Coastal Missile Defense System to augment the S-300s). The actions reek of paranoia, for it is difficult to imagine what Japan would gain by attacking its nuclear-armed neighbor, and this is true even today a year after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

China is thought to be Japan's main antagonist, with North Korea playing a secondary role. Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, relations between Japan and Russia were strained because of the latter's militarization of the Kurils but there were no outward shows of aggression. But Putin's invasion in Ukraine reminded the Japanese of the that they would do well not to ignore the threat posed by a belligerent Russia. 

Realizing that it lives in a dangerous neighborhood, and that relying solely on the United States as a guarantor of its safety would be foolhardy, Kishida has doubled the military budget for the coming years. It now aims to increase military spending to 2% of GDP, for a total till 2027, of USD 320 billion. The sharp increase in military spending worried all its potential antagonists, including Russia. The latter may have thought that the Japanese were serious about challenging its claims to the Kurils militarily for it has begun to send nuclear armed bombers over the Sea of Japan. 

(to be continued)

The days ahead: what might emerge?

 Welcome to my blog!

This is my attempt to make sense of the changes we are seeing around us today. Things are happening quickly today; some would say too quickly for us to try to make sense of what is going on in the world. 

 Think of what happened in the year 2022. We began to come out of the Covid menace. Economies were beginning to come back on track. But then Russia invaded Ukraine and the two countries became locked in an extremely destructive conflict that continues to this day. It was unthinkable for many people that a war in Europe of this scale would break out. 

At the time it first broke out, and perhaps even more so as the Delta variant began to ravage countries, people thought that Covid would change everything. Yet despite the obvious destruction it caused, we are already moving beyond it. A lot of people naively began to believe that the threat of a common global foe, a virus, would bring the world together. That didn't happen, even at the height of Covid. Countries took vastly different approaches in trying to control it. Countries blamed each other for allowing the virus to spread out of control. 

As the disease recedes from memory, so too the world is going back to business as usual and hostilities that had been temporarily buried are resurfacing with a vengeance. Who knows what the future will bring? Some prominent authors such as Yuval Noah Harari, believe that AI will be the ultimate gamechanger. AI will give corporations and governments the means to control human destiny. If you think this is far-fetched, consider that research suggests that we are far less in command of our own selves than we would like to believe. We humans like to believe that we are ultimately free, but the weight of the evidence increasingly suggests that we are not as free as we think we are. We can be conditioned like Pavlov's dog, and indeed are being conditioned even today. But Harari argues that in the future, we will be conditioned far more effectively than we already are. 

Will we? Who knows? While we may be eminently 'hackable', to use Harari's term, it is not clear that AI will be able to do it. Big claims have been made about AI, but in the real world their performance has often been subpar.