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. 

Any hope for manufacturing?

 In his book The 10 rules of successful nations (itself abridged from his larger book The Rise and Fall of Nations), Ruchir Sharma lists investment and manufacturing to be extremely important. In fact, he argues that the ideal level of investment for a growing country should be about 25 to 35 percent of GDP. 

Sharma has a database of 56 post-WWII economies whose performance he has tracked across various indicators. He finds that when countries were investing within the range specified, growth, on average exceeded 6 percent or more for a decade or more. 

That would mean that over a period of ten years, a countries GDP would increase almost 1.8 times if it grew at that rate. There are of course, many other variables that could affect a country's rate of growth, but most other factors are not necessarily linked to what policies a government could take to quickly reach a growth target. One other thing that a country can do is to devalue its currency and appear "cheap" but that option only really makes sense if it does export goods and services at scale, as Sharma also points out. 

Manufacturing can help a country to get a leg up. Most countries that have developed since WWII have used manufacturing to lift themselves up. This includes Japan, South Korea, China and other Asian 'tigers'. Today, Bangladesh has significantly improved the standard of living of the majority of its people by being a manufacturing hub for apparel and shoes. 

Another important thing to keep in mind is that countries can go 'up' the manufacturing value chain. Start with basic, low-tech outputs like shoes and clothes, invest the proceeds obtained from their sale in R&D or workplace training and keep moving up.