CPEC: Informed skeptics MIA

There is no dearth of sceptics in this country. Neither is there any shortage of conspiracy theories and propaganda and these have only been bolstered by the speed and vigor that social media provides to anyone with a phone. But opinion is cheap, available by a dime a dozen. What isn’t cheap is information, research and evidence-based analysis. And that’s what is ‘missing in action-MIA’ when it comes to CPEC.

Don’t get us wrong. There is a lot of noise on CPEC, from breaking news to page-long editorials every day in major newspapers of the country to CPEC conferences and seminars, but because as a society we are so fond of stating the obvious, thick with verbosity, thin in meaning; much of this noise is mere static. In worse case, these are also colossally failing the masses in informing them what the implications are of the “biggest game changer” this country could see.

The silence on the real issues, in fact, is almost deafening. And surprisingly, the intellectual community, researchers, academics, and think tanks alike have not completely embraced the huge opportunity, nay challenge presented to them.

True, there is that transparency issue. From the beginning, the project has been doused in mystery and it took nearly a year to get a sense of what and how many projects there are, how much money and where it will come from, how it will be financed, where does the Belt touch from a geographic and industry/sector point of view. There has not been a steady stream of information and credible data on it. In an earlier column, (read: “One belt, one road, one research” published on March 1, 2017), we spoke about how even the European Union lacks understanding on the OBOR corridors that pass through the four major cities: Rotterdam, Hamburg, Prague and Madrid, and needs better understanding of the Belt’s strategic implications.

But is it something new? Lack of information and data is typical in Pakistan. But for time immemorial, economists and researchers have managed to work with the scarcity of data and resources. It is certainly not a new phenomenon, and over the past year, a lot of information has been released in bits and pieces, so where is the research? Where is the ideation?

Is research informing the public, the businesses, and the government micro level opportunities CPEC can open Pakistan to? Have there been any sectorial studies that investigate what new areas investment can go into, which sectors will have what level of impact, what challenges these sectors may face over the period of time and how can policy be formulated to address them.

On Special Economic Zones (SEZs), there is one study published by PIDE that broadly highlights what CPEC SEZs are but this work is not enough. These need to be major expanded to deeper and more micro studies on specific clusters, sectors, producers and service providers and what impact they could potentially see if they use their cards right.

Another major pending research question is what CPEC means for SMEs that virtually run this economy. Couldn’t CPEC be the biggest opportunity for SMEs to grow—and couldn’t this be in fact, a chance for the government to incentivize the largely informal community to become formal? SMEDA has a five-year vision but simply having a “vision” is not enough. We need a systematic cluster wise studies to know the who, the what, the when, the how, the potential, the challenges, the projection, the utilization, in others words the building blocks toward a long term roadmap.

Perhaps one of the most important, and the least talked about is the socio-economic implications of CPEC that needs in-depth research on. How will it impact symptomatic poverty, unemployment and the widening inequality with the so-called wealth of the nation accumulating in certain pockets of the country, leaving other behind to pick off the leftovers?

And within this discussion, we need studies that assess the labor market. In an interview with us, Labor Economist Dr. Aliya said: “The CPEC is a wakeup call to give attention to some of the structural issues in our labor market… the true return to investment of CPEC will only come if we focus on human resource development and human capital formation”.

Where are the studies on how CPEC can be channeled to improve our workforce and include them in the productive sectors of the economy? Questions like, how to train and educate them, where do the opportunities lie, are labor laws vibrant enough, how can they be enforced, how can labor rights be strengthened, what can we learn from Chinese labor market and ultimately, how to improve employment and employability of our growing population?

We need to move beyond the rhetoric that politicians, and analysts parrot. If we have to be skeptic on CPEC, if we want to push the government in the right direction, toward transparency, disclosure, and coherent policy making, it should come in the form of specific and probing questions, highlighting from the macro to the micro level what needs to be done, what could be done—and in retrospect, what could have been done.

The intellectual community needs to up the ante. Without this work, any and all opinions, discussions and lamentations are merely regurgitated whims—and as Shakespeare says in the final act of Macbeth—“a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.