By Nadeem Ul Haque
Why is there no policy debate in Pakistan and why are there no teams in various institutions that will define and debate policy in their sectors?
Opinion pages, dinner conversations and official meetings in Pakistan are all full of prescriptions in hurry. They claim Research and inquiry is not necessary, we know it all. We need to act and not think. Alternatively, we know it all! The only problem is that no one will implement what we are suggesting.
Yes, we hate theory and learning!
In this rush to act, we created the FCD problem, created a half-chewed local government scheme, increased electricity with IPPs, protected car monopolies, created hotel monopolies, built up housing scheme scams, and so on and so forth. This simplistic approach has led us into crisis after crisis.
The political activist creed is given a boost by the donor community. Donors who are pre-eminent in policymaking tend to fuel this creed. Donors define the agenda for these activists and the agenda seems to be heavily in favour of activism. Donors argue that prescriptions are easy mimicking the activist creed in the country. The donors know it all. Unfortunately we are not implementing it. According to them, the problem has always been the implementation capacity in the country and not their prescription.
Yet the advanced countries do not agree that prescriptions are easy. They have an enormous infrastructure for generating policy research and discussion. Unlike us, they have deep teams for developing policy thinking. Whatever policy initiative is taken is well researched and frequently debated. Political parties, even in opposition, maintain think tanks for the development of policy initiatives to be used when they come to power.
Why is it that policy in the industrial countries has been following academic thinking and not activism? Keynesianism prevailed for a long time and when it lost the academic debate to the market-based system, policy changed. It seems that research leads policy and that policymakers do not rush into the most easily available prescription.
Why should prescription and implementation be separated? Granted socio-politico-economic systems are extremely difficult to understand. Often for convenience of analysis or improved understanding, we have to look at partial views of the system. But a good analysis will take into account the prescriptive and implementation aspects of the particular situation. All analysts worth their merit will examine the practical aspects of their prescriptions. To separate the two is, at the minimum, naive.
What most critics of thinking and analysis are implicitly expressing is a frustration with the lack of political will for a change. Unfortunately, the impatience and its accompanying disdain for inquiry and informed analysis may itself be the reason for the difficulties with implementation. Perhaps they should examine the two types of inputs that the policymaker is getting:
n The activist input which throws up prescriptions too quickly and cavalierly at the policymaker without backing it up with a clear analysis of the costs and benefits and possible pitfalls. Why should all such quick reactions be implemented? Who can distinguish between these?
n The donor-promoted consultant report approach also does not inspire much confidence: hire a retired bureaucrat for a quick consulting job that presents the donors favourite viewpoint. That is then considered to form the basis of reform and policy. The donors agenda is visible, the skills of the consultant are apparent, and therefore the honesty of the inquiry is in question. The policymaker and domestic groups are divided on the issue if at all they are interested. Where is the ownership of reform?
Imagine that you are sitting there as the policymaker and are willing to follow the maxim of prescription is easy, would you follow all these prescriptions? How do you distinguish between the good and the bad prescriptions?
Given our current state of understanding of socio-politico-economic processes, we should be more humble and inquiring and not claim that prescriptions are easy. On the contrary, the hypothesis can be advanced that the reason change is so slow may be because of our cavalier attitude towards prescriptions and the prescription-making process.
Yet, simplistic schemes are bandied about by our esteemed columnists: fix the deficit, get the macro right, increase development expenditures, get education right! Yes these are all truisms that no one can disagree with. But the issue is doing any of these will require a lot of thinking, research, planning, and manoeuvring. And all these activities will require a large number of very competent people involved in basically research, implementation and evaluation at various levels. Even implementation has to be based on continuous evaluation and revision, which in itself is research.
What should be done? There are no shortcuts. First, we must build up thinking and debate into policy. Second, we must build teams in institutions. Most institutions remain one-man affairs with no coherence or depth to the team. These heads remain totally insular and are not subject to any form of peer review. Why is there no policy debate in Pakistan and why are there no teams in various institutions that will define and debate policy in their sectors?
Finally, our thinking community must write more well-researched and informed critique of policy rather than blame it all on Pervez Musharraf, Shaukat Aziz, Nawaz Sharif or Benazir Bhutto. What happened in the FCD crisis? Who was responsible and why? How did the IPPs happen? Why was such a strange pro-monopoly policy on cars and hotels developed? Why are our urban development laws so archaic? What is wrong with the archaic cooperative law that it continues to plague us in the current housing scams and in the past co-op society frauds?
These and many other such issues need considerable research. These problems will not get fixed even if get the simplistic macroeconomics right. Perhaps we will not even be able to get the macroeconomics right unless we fix these important issues. Certainly we need deeper thinking than our technocrat-mullahs are willing to do!
Nadeem Ul Haque is former Vice Chancellor of PIDE. Email: nhaque_imf@yahoo.com
