Knowledge Economy Index: Why we did so poorly
BANGLADESH'S performance in research and innovations is awfully poor. Asian Development Bank (ADB) has recently published a report: Innovative Asia: Advancing the Knowledge-based Economy. ADB referred to the World Bank's Knowledge Economy Index where Bangladesh ranked 27th out of 28 emerging economies of Asia and the Pacific. Bangladesh fell below India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal in the rankings. Much to our despair, we positioned below even Pakistan in the index of knowledge economy. While we find ourselves 'an emerging tiger' before Pakistan, that tiger has turned into a cat in the race of economic knowledge with Pakistan.
Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea top the list with scores around 8 or above out of 10. Sri Lanka ranks 17th, India 22nd, Pakistan 23rd, and Nepal 26th. Myanmar saved us from being the last in the list. Sri Lanka's score in the index is 3.63, India's 3.06, Pakistan's 2.44, and Bangladesh's as low as 1.49. Any score below 3 would be regarded as 'poor' because the average score was 4.39 for the region.
Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Myanmar, being poor performers, have one thing in common -- they all devote a huge amount of resources in military expenditure. Some rulers find it politically expedient to increase the defense budget, bringing the allocation for Research and Development (R&D) to an irreducible minimum. This trend should not go unchecked in Bangladesh for the sake of our future.
A question may arise: who cares about the knowledge economy when our economy is achieving 6% growth? There is a problem indeed. The quantitative figures of growth and quality of growth are two different things, and the latter is more important to make growth sustainable. Eating fat and carbs or building muscles through exercises are two different tactics to gain weight. The first one is likely to cause health hazards and thus does not give a sustainable health. Similarly, growth without a knowledge base will run out of steam very soon. R&D can create more jobs in our manufacturing, which can give a strong basis of growth in the future. Otherwise, creating jobs for mobile phone recharging stalls or garments factories will not be sustainable given the growth of wage and automation.
Here comes the theory of knowledge and innovations that revitalised growth momentum in developed countries. Economists had thought that rich economies would see no growth when they reached a high level of development. But economists like Lucas and Romer came with the idea of endogenous growth; rich countries can reenergise their growth performance by further investing in education, research, and technology. Now, many developed countries grow no less than their developing counterparts. When thousands of jobs were outsourced from the US to China and India, the US created thousands more in innovations and technology. Herein lie the blessings of a knowledge-based path that constantly infuses new life in the economy to make growth sustainable.
Our ranking and scores in the knowledge economy index warrant urgent attention from the government. It's a wakeup call for the higher education industry where quality is appalling. University research projects take the lead in developed countries to empower a nation with new skills and ideas. While western private donors support many scholarships for research, our super-rich are busy with whitening their black money. Who will fund research which is still unappealing in Bangladesh? Education gets an inadequate amount, and it is more so for higher education. And the amount is ridiculous for research.
Apart from the constraints of funding, public universities have faulty policies for recruitment and promotion that do not require sufficient quality research. Most western universities, except for a few topnotch schools, do not hire their own graduates. Mixing and diversity add synergy to teaching and scholarship. Our public universities recruit their own products, sometimes through nepotism. Political clout, personal links, and academic malpractice reign supreme in many tenure and promotion cases. Then who would engage in the dry atmosphere of research when it is not needed to excel in the profession?
That is why we will see many professors, thanks to numerous talk shows, but we will hardly find their CVs rich in publications. When professors find research uninteresting, businessmen will not come forward to fill the gap. Public universities must change their recruitment and promotion rules to make it fair, competitive, and knowledge augmenting. Otherwise, Bangladesh will 'gloriously' rank 28th out of 28 countries in the knowledge economy index very soon.
The author is Associate Professor of Economics at the State University of New York at Cortland.
Comments