Islamabad’s policy discourse comes alive in December. One notices the annual moots of organizers like the SDPI and PIDE crawling with economists and those who are interested in social and economic research. But do such discourses, whose continuation is a healthy sign, matter to Pakistani policymaking? How much of what is agreed after those myriad panel discussions actually ends up on the proverbial policymaker’s table?
That theme was brought into sharp focus by Dr. Nadeem ul Haque (former Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission) when he gave the Mahbub-ul-Haq lecture on day two (December 13) of the PIDE’s 33rd AGM and Conference of the Pakistan Society of Development Economics.
Dr. Haque lamented the inability of Pakistan’s economist community in shaping, even generating meaningful debate on any policy issues. He laid the blame squarely on local academia’s feet for failing to produce Mahbub-ul-Haq’s of the modern era. Policymaking is always happening, he said. The policymaker has to take inputs from somewhere. And if local research community doesn’t provide such inputs, donors and their consultants will come in with their ready blueprints of “best practices”.
However, one could argue that the demand-side of research is really lacking in Pakistan. When businesses are enjoying rents courtesy the SROs, tax evasion, transfer pricing, nepotism, etc., there cannot be a huge demand for economic plumbers and their theses. When the political fix is in, what can the academics and their papers really do to change the rigged decision-making process at the top?
The outspoken economist suggested that Pakistan was destined to return to another IMF bailout as the country’s policymakers are resigned to old ways of managing the economy, paying lip-service to reforms. He found fault with continuation of donor-financed infrastructure projects, with little attention being paid to unlocking the software of growth by focusing on governance institutions, prioritizing human development and creating an open, inclusive society.
No fan of brick and mortar investments, Dr. Haque used the forum to again highlight the rising number of Pakistani universities with little research impact. Whatever quality human resource is produced in academia or civil service gets scooped up by donors, who are far better paymasters than the public sector. As for independent researchers and think-tank professionals, they are operating largely in silos, with limited horizontal or vertical collaboration among researchers based in Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore.
BR Research – a column whose raison d’être is to produce informed analysis and commentary to keep the economic discourse alive and constructive in this country to better inform policymaking – holds similar views on Pakistan’s research deficit. For more on that, read “Pakistan’s ‘intellectual’ crisis,” published September 15, 2017, and “Pakistan’s looming economists’ shortage,” published February 23, 2016.
It is critically important to find out the root-cause for lack of quality, groundbreaking academic research in Pakistan. One has a hunch that it may be linked to the inability and/or unwillingness among academics in Pakistan to pose questions, challenge assumptions and raise doubts over received wisdom. But what can really make critical thinking in academic research – and in higher education – flourish? Or is it too late?
Faisal Bari, a reputed researcher, succinctly concluded that dilemma in his Dawn piece dated October 20, 2017: “If critical thinking is to come, it has to come in all domains. Are we ready for that? To me the answer is clear: we are not ready at all. If it does not happen in all domains, it is hard to see how it can happen in higher education only.”
If one accepts that critical thinking cannot happen in isolation from the broader environment, the need is to perhaps extend the space for intellectual disagreement and preserve spaces that already allow that. How much of that applies to the field of Economics should be a no-brainer. Economics, after all, is about human behaviour and interaction summing up to various aggregates. Too bad, modern economics lost sight of that and instead focused on an efficiency-driven approach for rent enhancement.
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