There are a number of challenges we face in coming years which are likely to put enormous pressures on the public finances of governments virtually everywhere. Some of these challenges are of a demographic nature and have to do with the aging of populations. The share of the population accounted for by the elderly will rise rapidly in most of the developed countries in the next couple of decades. The dependency ratio, or the total number of persons requiring some form of support divided by the working-age population, will increase to levels not seen before in most of these countries. Indeed, this trend will not be limited to the developed countries—with a lag with respect to the rich countries of North America, Europe and Asia, emerging markets such as China, Russia, Poland, Indonesia, Turkey and Mexico will also see the graying of their populations as a result of increases in life expectancy. The rich countries of the OECD have extensive social safety nets in place and have guaranteed public pensions, health care and other social benefits. These programs are costly to run and the costs are projected to increase rapidly over the next several decades. Indeed, in the absence of corrective measures, virtually all of the industrial countries will face considerably higher expenditure ratios, putting pressures on budget deficits or necessitating increases in taxes and/or potentially large increases in the retirement age. The fiscal implications for some of these countries (e.g., Greece, Italy, Japan) are sufficiently dire as to suggest that extraordinary fiscal effort will be necessary to restore sustainability.
A particularly worrying feature of these demographic trends is that, with few exceptions, governments have typically found it extremely difficult to introduce the reforms that are needed to ensure longer-term financial sustainability. Social programs such as guaranteed pensions were introduced decades ago at a time when life expectancy was much lower and the working-age population was growing. In time, they have come to be accepted as permanent features of the social landscape, entitlements the value of which must be preserved at all costs or, preferably, increased. With a rise in average life expectancy between 1960 and 2007 from 43 to 66 years the long-term fiscal positions of many developed countries have been overwhelmed. Furthermore, the political economy of reforms works in a way that rewards governments that manifest a nearly exclusive concern with the short-term. As noted by Peter Heller (2004) “the temptation is strong to leave tomorrow’s problems for tomorrow’s policymakers to solve, since it is they who will have to answer to tomorrow’s voters.” Or, as was once put by a senior finance official from Sweden: “the future has no lobbyists.”
This, in turn, explains why only a handful of countries frame their budgets in a medium-term perspective, looking at the next 3-5 years, though future budgetary resources are precommitted to an extent likely to severely reduce in the future the room for maneuver for government fiscal policies. It requires a high degree of political maturity and no small amounts of administrative capacity to give adequate attention to problems the full impact of which will not be felt for another decade or two. Indeed, the more serious the short-term challenges faced by governments—let us think of the 2008-2009 global financial crisis and the intimidating series of onerous problems it created for governments virtually everywhere—the less attention given to longer-term issues, such as the fiscal implications of population aging. The increases in public debt which the response to the crisis precipitated have only worsened the nature of the longer-term fiscal challenges we face, because of the additional claims on public resources, many of them in the nature of contingent liabilities arising from various guarantees and central bank support operations. Governments provided guarantees for a broad spectrum of financial sector liabilities, from bank deposits, to interbank loans and bonds; for some countries these are huge: close to 200 percent of GDP in the case of Ireland, 50 percent of GDP in the case of the United Kingdom, to name two of the more serious cases. The aggregate amount comes to close to US$4 trillion.
Indeed, aging populations is not by any means the only challenge which is likely to place an onerous burden on countries’ public finances. Over the past decade there has been a noticeable convergence of views within the scientific community about the expected rise in global average temperatures associated with increases in the concentration of greenhouse gases—climate change will be a feature of the global environment in the decades ahead. In the summer of 2010 we witnessed simultaneously forest fires and the hottest summer on record in Russia, floods in Pakistan which upended the lives of some 20 million people (leaving some 5 million of them homeless) and fatal mudslides in China precipitated by torrential rains. Extreme weather conditions are expected to be more frequent and governments may increasingly find themselves having to deal with the financial consequences. In Russia, the losses of millions of hectares of wheat and thousands of lives and homes will require significant outlays, partly to lend assistance to those affected, but also to invest in infrastructure and equipment and to take other preventive measures to stem future damage. In Pakistan the floods submerged 7 million hectares of cropland, killing more than 200,000 head of livestock and, according to press reports, “washing away huge stores of commodities that would have fed millions.”[1]
The impact of global warming is expected to be felt with particular intensity in the developing world, because these countries tend to be located in the tropics and equatorial regions, their economies are most heavily dependant on agriculture and many of their cities are to be found in coastal areas. Furthermore, being relatively poor, they will have fewer resources for precautionary interventions or be generally less able to respond to climate-related damage. Increases in sea levels could well require heavy investments in infrastructure (e.g. sea barriers) or, as many regions become drier, outlays for irrigation networks and other investments to deal with emerging water scarcity. In some cases it may be necessary to resettle populations no longer able to live in low lying areas; roughly 1.2 billion people live within 100 km of the shore. The impact—particularly the fiscal consequences—of climate change may be subject to a larger margin of uncertainty than the consequences of population aging, the main parameters of which have been fixed for decades and are subject to relatively small margins of error. Few scientists could claim with certainty that the floods in Pakistan or the fires in Russia were caused by global warming, but few would question that, with global average temperatures rising—the incidence of extreme weather conditions has indeed increased.
In addition to the likely pressures on public spending to deal with the consequences of climate change, one would also expect that to the extent that weather-related catastrophes put a dent on economic growth (the losses of the wheat harvest in Russia are thought to have taken at least one percentage point off economic growth in 2010), there will be adverse repercussions for government revenue as well, putting additional pressures on budget deficits. Finally, there may be other effects as well which are difficult to quantify but which could also have fiscal repercussions. One that comes to mind is rising food prices because of reductions in the area of arable land and the depletion of fish stocks, both of which put pressure on governments to sustain or increase food subsidies for vulnerable groups in the population.
In a sense the potential repercussions for the public finances of climate change are more worrying than those associated with population aging because the margins of uncertainty are that much larger. Governments are generally aware that pension and healthcare claims will rise as the baby-boom generation retires and fertility rates remain below replacement levels, and they also have a fairly good sense of what needs to be done to set the public finances on a more sustainable path. The choices may all be unpalatable and there may be little public support at the outset for such things as increasing the retirement age, as governments in Spain, France and Greece, for instance, found in 2010. But at least the contours of a possible solution are identifiable, the scope of the measures necessary has been quantified and some countries (e.g. the Nordics) have shown that a combination of responsible political leadership and a well-informed public which attaches tangible value to notions of sustainability, can make a solution possible.
The uncertainties associated with climate change, however, add a considerable degree of difficulty to public policy. Witness the debacle of the 2009 Copenhagen conference on climate change and the subsequent inability of the U.S. government to persuade Congress to support a comprehensive climate change bill. The risk, obviously, is that markets will not wait until a government is insolvent before significantly increasing the costs of borrowing. In 2010 we saw how systematically destabilizing the prospect of default by an even relatively small country such as Greece could be. Furthermore, we saw how losses of confidence in the debt-carrying capacity of the country can, through an increase in risk premia, dramatically reduce the government’s room for fiscal maneuver. Greece’s travails were eventually “solved” (many analysts still argue that a Greek default is eventually inevitable) through a combination of IMF and EU largesse but, along the way, the EU was forced to introduce a bailout facility to signal massive support to other countries in Europe as well. The point here is that the fiscal consequences of climate change and population aging could at some point interact with financial markets in highly destabilizing ways, which could significantly worsen an already difficult fiscal situation.
Of course, in addition to putting onerous pressures on public resources, climate change could also simultaneously interact with the world economy in other ways. Thomas Homer-Dixon (2010) argues that in some plausible scenarios “climate change would cause some kind of regional or continental disruption, like a major crop failure; this disruption would cascade through the world’s tightly connected economic and political systems to produce a global effect. Severe floods dislocating millions of people in key poor countries—as we’re are seeing right now in Pakistan—could allow radicals to seize power and tip a geopolitically vital region into war. Or drought could cause an economically critical region like the North China plain to exhaust its water reserves, forcing people to leave en masse and precipitating a crisis that reverberates through the world economy.”
The point of these scenarios is less to highlight the likelihood and consequences of mega-catastrophes associated with climate change but rather to make the more fundamental point that we need to be thinking about how we would respond to emerging crises. What would be the options open to us and at what cost? Mega-catastrophes associated to climate change (e.g., large rises in the global sea level, disruptions to ocean circulation, other large-scale ecosystem disruptions) are, by definition, small probability events but it would be infinitely better to face them—should they materialize—from a position of fiscal strength, not one where governments are thinly stretched because of competing claims on dwindling resources. A sharp global economic downturn associated with some climate shock would, of course, through its adverse impact on government revenues, only heighten the fiscal impact of the long-term forces which, by themselves, are already putting heavy pressures on public resources.
The above discussion does not pretend to present a comprehensive listing of the many ways in which various factors are likely to put pressures on public resources over the next 10-20 years and beyond. (No effort is made, for instance, to explore the ramifications of a war in the Middle East, through its impact on oil prices, investor and consumer confidence and what, thus far anyway, remains a fragile economic recovery from the global financial crisis). Indeed, it is not inconceivable that well before the impact of population aging and climate change kick in with all their force, there is some other factor that precipitates a fiscal crisis—even at existing debt levels which are considerably higher than in 2007, before the onset of the global financial crisis. All that would be required is some event which depresses market confidence in the ability of highly indebted governments to sustain current debt levels, leading to a sharp increase in risk premia and, therefore, imposing literally overnight, a much tighter fiscal outlook, with sharply higher long-term interest rates and diminished growth prospects.
Greece stumbled into such a crisis in late 2009; a sudden rise in the cost of new debt precipitated a fiscal crisis, riots in the streets and, within a few weeks, a crisis in Portugal and Spain, though the latter had debt levels that were less than half those of Greece and below that of France, Germany and the United Kingdom. It stretches the powers of one’s imagination to think about what might happen to the global economy if the object of negative market sentiment was not some small, fiscally irresponsible, habitually dishonest (with the budget figures) Southern European country, but the U.S. Treasury and the federal government’s fiscal outlook. A sudden rise in the debt servicing costs of Greece is, in the first instance, highly problematic for the country itself, imposing painful adjustments, usually involving tax increases and expenditure retrenchment and restructuring, to make room for the higher interest bill. Greece’s own brush with default had broader and deeper adverse repercussions for the euro area as well and led to fiscal pressures in other countries, as well as on the exchange rate of the euro. A sudden reassessment by the markets of potential U.S. solvency would be potentially far more destabilizing, given the preeminent position of the U.S. economy globally, the central role of the dollar in international finance and trade and the vast holdings of U.S. dollar denominated assets in the hands of its creditors.
Furthermore, a sudden rise in the cost of debt-service would have unforeseen geopolitical ramifications as well. One cannot help agreeing with Ferguson (2010) when he suggests that if interest payments take up a growing share of tax revenues, what is likely to give is military spending, which, unlike mandatory entitlements, is discretionary spending. For the United States’ enemies—Ferguson adds—“it must be consoling to know that U.S. fiscal policy today is programmed to reduce the resources available for all overseas military operations in the years ahead.” The issue here is not that it would be inconvenient for the United States to be increasingly constrained militarily, but rather that resource constraints more generally might underpin the weakening of the United States globally and, de facto, imply a rise in the relative influence of other countries with questionable commitments to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law or, worse, empower the lunatic fringe, whether in the Islamic Republic of Iran or in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
Thomas Friedman (2010) makes this point convincingly when he says that “the most unique and important feature of U.S. foreign policy over the last century has been the degree to which America’s diplomats and naval, air and ground forces provided global public goods—from open seas to open trade and from containment to counterterrorism—that benefited many others besides us. U.S. power has been the key force maintaining global stability, and providing global governance, for the last 70 years. That role will not disappear, but it will almost certainly shrink.” Mandelbaum (2010), commenting on the nature of U.S. leadership in “a cash-strapped era” observes: “When Britain could no longer provide global governance, the United States stepped in to replace it. No country now stands ready to replace the United States, so the loss of international peace and prosperity has the potential to be greater as America pulls back than when Britain did. Therefore, the world will be a more disorderly and dangerous place.”
[1] “Flooding in Pakistan Threatens Stability,” International Herald Tribune, August 17, 2010.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Friday, December 17, 2010
Chile: Catching up with the top performers
The best innovation capacity in Latin America
With a rank of 29 among the 131 countries included in the ICI, Chile is by far the best performing country in Latin America. Indeed, it has a rank a full 20 places ahead of Uruguay (49), the next best performer. Chile is firmly positioned among 12 members of the European Union, with some slightly ahead (e.g., Belgium, Austria, France, and Spain), and others slightly behind (Italy, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Portugal). Chile has the highest rank among countries with a broadly similar level of income per capita, with only Malaysia (34) exhibiting a similar performance. Chile has a rank of 1 in Latin America in several important indicators including government effectiveness, rule of law, absence of corruption, the fiscal balance (as a proxy indicator for the strength of macroeconomic policies), the number of schools connected to the Internet, the ease of paying taxes, broadband penetration rates, reliability of electricity generation, and a top 5 rank in a much larger set of indicators.
Chile’s strong performance in the Innovation Capacity Index is the result of a combination of several factors two of which have played a central role and are, therefore, desirable to highlight: first, the gradual build up of an institutional environment that has been broadly supportive of private sector development; and second, the introduction of a range of policies that have explicitly sought to enhance the role of high technologies in promoting gains in factor productivity. It will be useful to present here a brief overview of both.
Chile ranks 23rd among 180 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2008, tied with France (23) and ahead of Spain (28), Portugal (32), and far ahead of Korea (40), Italy (55), Mexico (72), Brazil (80), and Argentina (109). In fact, the 22 countries with a better score than Chile are all high-income countries, as defined by the World Bank. In the ICI’s own Good Governance subindex—which also includes measures of voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, rule of law, the property rights framework, and transparency and judicial independence—and in the Country Policy Assessment subindex, which captures various measures of the quality of public sector policies, Chile ranks 25 and 14 respectively, out of 131 countries in 2009.
Legitimizing market reforms
Market reforms in Chile have been legitimized in the eyes of the public because they have benefited the population in tangible ways, for instance, by increases in per capita income or, as noted earlier, sustained reductions in poverty levels. This contrasts sharply with other countries in the region, where the motivations for public policy have more often been a mixture of dubious ideology or some confusion about public ends and private benefits among the ruling elites. In addition, on those occasions when flaws in the public administration in Chile have emerged, the authorities’ response has been swift and effective. For example, Chile today has a demanding campaign contributions law that is tougher than those found in the statutes of many high-income democracies. Furthermore, the authorities have generally been very good about generating a broad consensus for their policies, which ensures sustainability in the policy environment. Successive governments over the past 19 years, following the country’s return to democracy, have been fairly successful in setting in motion processes of consultation, to elicit the views of various sectors in society, such as opposition political parties, trade unions, and various organizations of civil society. This has resulted in greater understanding on the part of the population, and elicited their commitment to the often painful measures that accompany the implementation of various economic adjustment measures. This approach has also led to a more equitable distribution of the costs of adjustment and contributed to political stability.
A solid macro environment
Together with the Nordics, Chile is part of a small group of countries in which the political process has resulted in broad-based support for fiscal discipline, where safeguards have been introduced, which effectively insulate the budget from the short-term horizon of politicians, and from the diverse demands placed upon it by economic agents in a pluralistic democracy. The net effect has been a virtuous fiscal policy, which has contributed to a sustained reduction in the levels of public debt, from close to 90 percent of GDP in the mid-1980s, to less than 7 percent of GDP in 2008. We find no example, either among industrialized countries or in the developing world, with as sustained a downward adjustment in debt levels as in Chile. In fact, quite the opposite is the case: the vast majority of OECD members have higher levels of public debt today than 10 years ago. Indeed, according to the IMF, against the background of the global financial crisis and the fiscal stimulus measures that have been taken to address the effects of the crisis, public debt in the advanced economies will rise from 75 percent of GDP in 2008 to 110 percent of GDP in 2014.
Chile’s policies have, in contrast, greatly reduced the debt-servicing burden of the public debt in Chile, contributed to sharply lower interest rates, and to the highest credit ratings in Latin America. Indeed, in 2009 Chile was the only country to have actually seen a rise in its credit ratings, at a time of massive ratings downgrades worldwide, affecting corporations and sovereign debt issuers alike. A lower debt burden has, of course, allowed spending to rise in other areas, including education and public health, and is very much behind the progress made in reducing the incidence of poverty, which fell from 38.6 percent in 1990 to 13 percent in 2006.[1]
Moreover, as noted above, not only has Chile done much to establish a clear, transparent framework for public policies, also involving a solid legal and regulatory framework—it has a ranking of 23 in the third pillar of the ICI, which captures several indicators measuring various obstacles to private sector activity—but the government has also played a leading role in promoting other innovation-friendly policies which have nicely complemented those aimed at improving the institutional climate.
Good innovation policies
The government has shown remarkable commitment to e-government, to increasing efficiency in public management, to diminishing the transaction and coordination costs between public entities, to facilitating innovation and creativity in management, to increasing the public value of services, improving government transparency and, more generally, to enhancing the quality of the services provided by the government to civil society.[2] Three areas in which this has been done in a particularly effective way, providing best practice, are those reforms introduced at the Internal Revenue Service and through the electronic platforms ChileCompra and Trámite Fácil. At the IRS, e-government has boosted direct interactions with tax payers and greatly facilitated tax compliance. Close to 100 percent of Chilean tax-payers now pay income taxes through the Internet and the Chilean IRS is acknowledged to be one of the most modern, efficient, high quality taxation administrations in the world, setting high international standards for tax compliance.
ChileCompra was launched in 2000 and is a public electronic system for purchasing and hiring, based on an Internet platform. It has earned a worldwide reputation for excellence, transparency and efficiency. It serves companies, public organizations, and citizens, and is by far the largest business-to-business site in Chile, involving over 1000 purchasing organizations which invoiced well in excess of US$2 billion in transactions by 2005. It has also been a catalyst for the use of the Internet throughout the country. Trámite Fácil is a government site coordinating the work of over 240 government agencies and bodies, and taking care of a broad range of processes online, including birth certificates, identity documents, pension fund payments, trademarks/patents, housing subsidies, university credits, and so on. The government’s efforts to integrate the Chilean school system with the Internet have been no less successful, and have involved heavy infrastructure investments, the training of over 90,000 teachers in the basics of ICTs, digital literacy campaigns, encouraging the study of English and several novel public-private partnerships aimed at bringing to the classroom the latest technologies and know-how.
Some challenges ahead to boost innovation capacity
The authorities in Chile have shown remarkable leadership, as well, in identifying the key challenges ahead to strengthening the role of ICTs in improving productivity and in boosting the innovation capacities of the public and private sectors and civil society. In this respect, they feel that it is necessary to expand and intensify the integration of digital technologies in the educational curriculum and to improve the education and training of highly qualified workers. It is also necessary, in their view, to enhance connectivity, especially among the lowest four-fifths of the income distribution, by overcoming unequal income distribution, restrictions facing micro- and small companies, and connectivity problems in rural and remote regions. They would also like to encourage the development by the private sector of computer packages for low-income households and micro-companies so that they can access the Internet more cheaply and effectively, and to continue government subsidies for rural and remote areas and low-income communities and microcompanies. Priority is also being given to increasing R&D in the use of ICTs to stimulate competitiveness of the main export sectors, to rectify limitations in the legal system, to provide an appropriate institutional framework to stimulate/encourage e-trade, e-government, and use of ICTs, and to assure public trust in electronic operations and platforms. Finally, priority is also being given to facilitating the takeoff of the ICT industry by improving virtuous cycles of cooperation between institutions of higher education and the business community. This is seen as essential for narrowing the skills gap that exists today between Chile and the average in the OECD, made evident by the results of the PISA tests.
______________________
1. For a discussion of the institutional framework in place for the implementation of fiscal policy in Chile, including the targeting of a surplus in the government balance since 2000, as well as other progress made in the implementation of a sound institutional framework, see: López-Claros, A. 2004. “Chile: The Next Stage of Development”, Global Competitiveness Report 2004-2005. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 111–24.
2. For a comprehensive discussion of these issues, see: Alvarez Voullième, Carlos, Constanza Capdevila de la Cerda, Fernando Flores Labra, Alejandro Foxley Rioseco, and Andrés Navarro Haeussler. 2006. “Information and Communication Technologies in Chile: Past Efforts, Future Challenges.” Global Information Technology Report 2006, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 71–87.
With a rank of 29 among the 131 countries included in the ICI, Chile is by far the best performing country in Latin America. Indeed, it has a rank a full 20 places ahead of Uruguay (49), the next best performer. Chile is firmly positioned among 12 members of the European Union, with some slightly ahead (e.g., Belgium, Austria, France, and Spain), and others slightly behind (Italy, Slovenia, the Czech Republic, and Portugal). Chile has the highest rank among countries with a broadly similar level of income per capita, with only Malaysia (34) exhibiting a similar performance. Chile has a rank of 1 in Latin America in several important indicators including government effectiveness, rule of law, absence of corruption, the fiscal balance (as a proxy indicator for the strength of macroeconomic policies), the number of schools connected to the Internet, the ease of paying taxes, broadband penetration rates, reliability of electricity generation, and a top 5 rank in a much larger set of indicators.
Chile’s strong performance in the Innovation Capacity Index is the result of a combination of several factors two of which have played a central role and are, therefore, desirable to highlight: first, the gradual build up of an institutional environment that has been broadly supportive of private sector development; and second, the introduction of a range of policies that have explicitly sought to enhance the role of high technologies in promoting gains in factor productivity. It will be useful to present here a brief overview of both.
Chile ranks 23rd among 180 countries in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index 2008, tied with France (23) and ahead of Spain (28), Portugal (32), and far ahead of Korea (40), Italy (55), Mexico (72), Brazil (80), and Argentina (109). In fact, the 22 countries with a better score than Chile are all high-income countries, as defined by the World Bank. In the ICI’s own Good Governance subindex—which also includes measures of voice and accountability, political stability, government effectiveness, rule of law, the property rights framework, and transparency and judicial independence—and in the Country Policy Assessment subindex, which captures various measures of the quality of public sector policies, Chile ranks 25 and 14 respectively, out of 131 countries in 2009.
Legitimizing market reforms
Market reforms in Chile have been legitimized in the eyes of the public because they have benefited the population in tangible ways, for instance, by increases in per capita income or, as noted earlier, sustained reductions in poverty levels. This contrasts sharply with other countries in the region, where the motivations for public policy have more often been a mixture of dubious ideology or some confusion about public ends and private benefits among the ruling elites. In addition, on those occasions when flaws in the public administration in Chile have emerged, the authorities’ response has been swift and effective. For example, Chile today has a demanding campaign contributions law that is tougher than those found in the statutes of many high-income democracies. Furthermore, the authorities have generally been very good about generating a broad consensus for their policies, which ensures sustainability in the policy environment. Successive governments over the past 19 years, following the country’s return to democracy, have been fairly successful in setting in motion processes of consultation, to elicit the views of various sectors in society, such as opposition political parties, trade unions, and various organizations of civil society. This has resulted in greater understanding on the part of the population, and elicited their commitment to the often painful measures that accompany the implementation of various economic adjustment measures. This approach has also led to a more equitable distribution of the costs of adjustment and contributed to political stability.
A solid macro environment
Together with the Nordics, Chile is part of a small group of countries in which the political process has resulted in broad-based support for fiscal discipline, where safeguards have been introduced, which effectively insulate the budget from the short-term horizon of politicians, and from the diverse demands placed upon it by economic agents in a pluralistic democracy. The net effect has been a virtuous fiscal policy, which has contributed to a sustained reduction in the levels of public debt, from close to 90 percent of GDP in the mid-1980s, to less than 7 percent of GDP in 2008. We find no example, either among industrialized countries or in the developing world, with as sustained a downward adjustment in debt levels as in Chile. In fact, quite the opposite is the case: the vast majority of OECD members have higher levels of public debt today than 10 years ago. Indeed, according to the IMF, against the background of the global financial crisis and the fiscal stimulus measures that have been taken to address the effects of the crisis, public debt in the advanced economies will rise from 75 percent of GDP in 2008 to 110 percent of GDP in 2014.
Chile’s policies have, in contrast, greatly reduced the debt-servicing burden of the public debt in Chile, contributed to sharply lower interest rates, and to the highest credit ratings in Latin America. Indeed, in 2009 Chile was the only country to have actually seen a rise in its credit ratings, at a time of massive ratings downgrades worldwide, affecting corporations and sovereign debt issuers alike. A lower debt burden has, of course, allowed spending to rise in other areas, including education and public health, and is very much behind the progress made in reducing the incidence of poverty, which fell from 38.6 percent in 1990 to 13 percent in 2006.[1]
Moreover, as noted above, not only has Chile done much to establish a clear, transparent framework for public policies, also involving a solid legal and regulatory framework—it has a ranking of 23 in the third pillar of the ICI, which captures several indicators measuring various obstacles to private sector activity—but the government has also played a leading role in promoting other innovation-friendly policies which have nicely complemented those aimed at improving the institutional climate.
Good innovation policies
The government has shown remarkable commitment to e-government, to increasing efficiency in public management, to diminishing the transaction and coordination costs between public entities, to facilitating innovation and creativity in management, to increasing the public value of services, improving government transparency and, more generally, to enhancing the quality of the services provided by the government to civil society.[2] Three areas in which this has been done in a particularly effective way, providing best practice, are those reforms introduced at the Internal Revenue Service and through the electronic platforms ChileCompra and Trámite Fácil. At the IRS, e-government has boosted direct interactions with tax payers and greatly facilitated tax compliance. Close to 100 percent of Chilean tax-payers now pay income taxes through the Internet and the Chilean IRS is acknowledged to be one of the most modern, efficient, high quality taxation administrations in the world, setting high international standards for tax compliance.
ChileCompra was launched in 2000 and is a public electronic system for purchasing and hiring, based on an Internet platform. It has earned a worldwide reputation for excellence, transparency and efficiency. It serves companies, public organizations, and citizens, and is by far the largest business-to-business site in Chile, involving over 1000 purchasing organizations which invoiced well in excess of US$2 billion in transactions by 2005. It has also been a catalyst for the use of the Internet throughout the country. Trámite Fácil is a government site coordinating the work of over 240 government agencies and bodies, and taking care of a broad range of processes online, including birth certificates, identity documents, pension fund payments, trademarks/patents, housing subsidies, university credits, and so on. The government’s efforts to integrate the Chilean school system with the Internet have been no less successful, and have involved heavy infrastructure investments, the training of over 90,000 teachers in the basics of ICTs, digital literacy campaigns, encouraging the study of English and several novel public-private partnerships aimed at bringing to the classroom the latest technologies and know-how.
Some challenges ahead to boost innovation capacity
The authorities in Chile have shown remarkable leadership, as well, in identifying the key challenges ahead to strengthening the role of ICTs in improving productivity and in boosting the innovation capacities of the public and private sectors and civil society. In this respect, they feel that it is necessary to expand and intensify the integration of digital technologies in the educational curriculum and to improve the education and training of highly qualified workers. It is also necessary, in their view, to enhance connectivity, especially among the lowest four-fifths of the income distribution, by overcoming unequal income distribution, restrictions facing micro- and small companies, and connectivity problems in rural and remote regions. They would also like to encourage the development by the private sector of computer packages for low-income households and micro-companies so that they can access the Internet more cheaply and effectively, and to continue government subsidies for rural and remote areas and low-income communities and microcompanies. Priority is also being given to increasing R&D in the use of ICTs to stimulate competitiveness of the main export sectors, to rectify limitations in the legal system, to provide an appropriate institutional framework to stimulate/encourage e-trade, e-government, and use of ICTs, and to assure public trust in electronic operations and platforms. Finally, priority is also being given to facilitating the takeoff of the ICT industry by improving virtuous cycles of cooperation between institutions of higher education and the business community. This is seen as essential for narrowing the skills gap that exists today between Chile and the average in the OECD, made evident by the results of the PISA tests.
______________________
1. For a discussion of the institutional framework in place for the implementation of fiscal policy in Chile, including the targeting of a surplus in the government balance since 2000, as well as other progress made in the implementation of a sound institutional framework, see: López-Claros, A. 2004. “Chile: The Next Stage of Development”, Global Competitiveness Report 2004-2005. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 111–24.
2. For a comprehensive discussion of these issues, see: Alvarez Voullième, Carlos, Constanza Capdevila de la Cerda, Fernando Flores Labra, Alejandro Foxley Rioseco, and Andrés Navarro Haeussler. 2006. “Information and Communication Technologies in Chile: Past Efforts, Future Challenges.” Global Information Technology Report 2006, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 71–87.
Friday, December 10, 2010
Korea: Impressive innovation capacity
Korea is ranked 11 in the 2010 edition of the Innovation Capacity Index, because it does extremely well in many of the areas captured by the Index.
Let us begin by highlighting a few facts about Korea’s innovation capacity. First, the information and communications technology industry is a powerful engine of economic growth, contributing over 40 percent to the total expansion of GDP growth in recent years. Second, expenditure on research and development in relation to GDP has risen from under 1 percent in the 1980s to close to 3.5 percent in 2009, well above the OECD average. Third, the share of R&D expenditure carried out by the private sector had risen from 29 percent in 1970 to over 70 percent by 2000. Fourth, the average number of patents granted in the United States to Korean firms rose from about 10 per year during the period 1963–1986 to an average of about 4,800 per year during the period 2002–2007, a close to 500-fold increase. Fifth, the share of ICT in total manufacturing in Korea is 20.2 percent, higher than in any other country in the OECD other than Finland, where it is slightly higher. Indeed, the share of ICT goods in total merchandise exports (close to 35 percent) is higher in Korea than in any other member of the OECD, except for Israel. Finally, Samsung, the company that perhaps best exemplifies Korea’s transformation over the past five decades from an agricultural society into a technology powerhouse now has research centers in Europe, the United States, Japan, Russia, India, and China, 27 manufacturing facilities in 12 countries, and an extensive network of sales organizations in 50 countries across the world.[1]
The role of government policy
What are some of the factors that have contributed to this impressive performance, perhaps matched only by Taiwan over the same period? Without doubt, a primary engine of change has been government policy, which at various times has provided critical support to the development of the ICT sector through a variety of policy instruments and incentives. The Korean economy has opened rapidly over the past 30 years and this has facilitated technology transfer, boosted international competition in the domestic market, and allowed economies of scale. A first step was taken in 1984 when the law regulating FDI was amended to broaden the sectors into which investment was permitted, with restrictions changed from a positive to a negative list, and restrictions on majority ownership relaxed. A second wave of liberalization for FDI came ahead of OECD entry in 1996. This was boosted further after the 1997–98 financial crisis, which had the effect of persuading the Korean authorities of the clear advantages of non-debt capital inflows to finance economic development. The New Foreign Investment Promotion Act (1998) brought about several incentives to promote inward FDI, including corporate income tax concessions, exemptions from customs duties on imported capital goods and various subsidies for firms setting up in specially designated economic zones. In parallel to the creation of an increasingly friendly environment for foreign investment—and thus a strong reliance on foreign technology—the capacity of Korean firms to enter into strategic alliances with companies abroad was significantly enhanced. For instance, over the past decade or so Samsung has signed a number of partnerships: with Nokia (2007) to co-develop technology for handsets; with IBM (2006) to co-develop and market technologies for industrial printers; with Sun Microsystems (2005) to cooperate on next-generation computing systems; with Sony (2004) for collaboration on development of 7th generation LCDs; with Hewlett-Packard (2003) to share technology for ink-jet printers; and with Microsoft (2001), to co-develop digital household electronics, to name just a few.[2] All of these companies, and many others, have established research centers in Korea.
The virtues of an open trade regime
A second dimension of increasing openness has been a fairly ambitious program of trade liberalization. For instance, average most-favored nation (MFN) tariffs for manufactures of electrical industrial machinery were reduced from 19.6 percent in 1988 to 4.6 percent by 2006. Tariffs on manufactures of radio, television, and communications equipment were reduced from 13.1 percent in 1988 to 1.1 percent by 2006. Similar tariff reductions applied to other ICT-related products. A particularly important instrument in this regard has been the WTO’s Information Technology Agreement, a comprehensive framework that came into force in 1997, when 40 nations, including Korea, accounting for over 90 percent of world trade in ICT products, agreed to the elimination of tariffs on a range of ICT products. As a result, the growth of imports of ICT products accelerated sharply, but that of exports grew even faster. Indeed, the trade figures for ICT products are nothing short of spectacular. Imports in 1999 were US$30.3 billion and had risen to US$54 billion by 2005. Exports in 1999 were US$48.5 billion and rose to US$102.3 billion by 2005. As a result, the trade surplus on ICT products rose from US$18.2 billion in 1999 to US$48.4 billion in 2005. The penetration of the Chinese market was particularly swift, with Korean exports rising from US$5.5 billion in 1999 to US$35.6 by 2005.[3] To take a specific example, total exports of mobile handsets rose from under US$600 million in 1995 to well over US$17 billion in 2006, a close to 30-fold increase—impressive by any standards. Indeed, as noted by Onadera and Kim (2008, p. 114), Korea’s “industrialization drive has been strongly led by exports,” with the export-to-GDP ratio rising from some 5 percent in 1962, to 43.6 percent by 2009, notwithstanding a vertiginous rise in GDP, among the highest in the world.
The latest technologies and human capital
Equally impressive has been the extent to which use of the latest technologies has penetrated Korea, both within the business community, government, and civil society. Broadband Internet subscribers per 100 inhabitants rose from 13 in 2000 to 32 in 2008. Internet usage per 100 inhabitants was 45 in 2000 and had risen to 77 by 2008. There were 57 mobile phone users per 100 inhabitants in 2000 and 95 by 2008. Similar increases can be noted in personal computer use, e-commerce, and Internet banking subscribership. These penetration rates often exceed those of other OECD members having much higher levels of income per capita. The UN e-Government Readiness Index ranks Korea as number 1 among 180 countries in its latest edition, reflecting the extent to which the growth of the ICT sector in Korea has affected every dimension of economic life, including the delivery of services by the government.
But trade and investment policies have only been one dimension of Korea’s approach to the rapid development of the ICT sector and the creation of an impressive innovation capacity. The government has also been aggressive in the way it has gone about developing a modern infrastructure for higher education and training. Korea has the highest tertiary enrolment rate in the world: 96.1 percent. The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute was established in 1976, part of ten government-sponsored research institutes created with a mandate to boost Korea’s science and technology capabilities, develop its skilled technological manpower, and promote private sector participation in research and development. The number of fully qualified researchers engaged in R&D in Korea rose from under 6,000 in 1970, to about 224,000 in 2007, a 37-fold increase.
Korea’s rise from a relatively simple agricultural society in the early 1960s to a leading industrial and technological power by the beginning of the new century is worthy of admiration, particularly when set against the background of the relatively pessimistic expectations after the Korean war; a country with such a difficult political geography and modest natural resource endowments might well have raised questions about its long-term viability. That a country could transform itself in so short a period into a high-income industrial giant with a huge footprint on the global economy highlights two important facts: a) the powerful role of sensible economic policies in enabling a country to embark on a path of self-sustaining economic growth, and b) the extent to which governments can, in fact, contribute to rising prosperity for their populations, notwithstanding the many limitations of the free market economy, so painfully evident during the latest global financial crisis.
________________________
1. Onodera, Osamu and Earl Kim Hann. 2008. Case Study 2: Trade and Innovation in the Korean Information and Communications Technology Sector. OECD, Paris.
2. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2008. Handbook on Constructing Composite Indicators: Methodology and User Guide. Paris: OECD.
3. In 1999, the United States was Korea’s most important trade partner. By 2005, by a significant margin, the most important markets for Korean ICT exports were China and the EU, accounting for roughly half of the total.
Let us begin by highlighting a few facts about Korea’s innovation capacity. First, the information and communications technology industry is a powerful engine of economic growth, contributing over 40 percent to the total expansion of GDP growth in recent years. Second, expenditure on research and development in relation to GDP has risen from under 1 percent in the 1980s to close to 3.5 percent in 2009, well above the OECD average. Third, the share of R&D expenditure carried out by the private sector had risen from 29 percent in 1970 to over 70 percent by 2000. Fourth, the average number of patents granted in the United States to Korean firms rose from about 10 per year during the period 1963–1986 to an average of about 4,800 per year during the period 2002–2007, a close to 500-fold increase. Fifth, the share of ICT in total manufacturing in Korea is 20.2 percent, higher than in any other country in the OECD other than Finland, where it is slightly higher. Indeed, the share of ICT goods in total merchandise exports (close to 35 percent) is higher in Korea than in any other member of the OECD, except for Israel. Finally, Samsung, the company that perhaps best exemplifies Korea’s transformation over the past five decades from an agricultural society into a technology powerhouse now has research centers in Europe, the United States, Japan, Russia, India, and China, 27 manufacturing facilities in 12 countries, and an extensive network of sales organizations in 50 countries across the world.[1]
The role of government policy
What are some of the factors that have contributed to this impressive performance, perhaps matched only by Taiwan over the same period? Without doubt, a primary engine of change has been government policy, which at various times has provided critical support to the development of the ICT sector through a variety of policy instruments and incentives. The Korean economy has opened rapidly over the past 30 years and this has facilitated technology transfer, boosted international competition in the domestic market, and allowed economies of scale. A first step was taken in 1984 when the law regulating FDI was amended to broaden the sectors into which investment was permitted, with restrictions changed from a positive to a negative list, and restrictions on majority ownership relaxed. A second wave of liberalization for FDI came ahead of OECD entry in 1996. This was boosted further after the 1997–98 financial crisis, which had the effect of persuading the Korean authorities of the clear advantages of non-debt capital inflows to finance economic development. The New Foreign Investment Promotion Act (1998) brought about several incentives to promote inward FDI, including corporate income tax concessions, exemptions from customs duties on imported capital goods and various subsidies for firms setting up in specially designated economic zones. In parallel to the creation of an increasingly friendly environment for foreign investment—and thus a strong reliance on foreign technology—the capacity of Korean firms to enter into strategic alliances with companies abroad was significantly enhanced. For instance, over the past decade or so Samsung has signed a number of partnerships: with Nokia (2007) to co-develop technology for handsets; with IBM (2006) to co-develop and market technologies for industrial printers; with Sun Microsystems (2005) to cooperate on next-generation computing systems; with Sony (2004) for collaboration on development of 7th generation LCDs; with Hewlett-Packard (2003) to share technology for ink-jet printers; and with Microsoft (2001), to co-develop digital household electronics, to name just a few.[2] All of these companies, and many others, have established research centers in Korea.
The virtues of an open trade regime
A second dimension of increasing openness has been a fairly ambitious program of trade liberalization. For instance, average most-favored nation (MFN) tariffs for manufactures of electrical industrial machinery were reduced from 19.6 percent in 1988 to 4.6 percent by 2006. Tariffs on manufactures of radio, television, and communications equipment were reduced from 13.1 percent in 1988 to 1.1 percent by 2006. Similar tariff reductions applied to other ICT-related products. A particularly important instrument in this regard has been the WTO’s Information Technology Agreement, a comprehensive framework that came into force in 1997, when 40 nations, including Korea, accounting for over 90 percent of world trade in ICT products, agreed to the elimination of tariffs on a range of ICT products. As a result, the growth of imports of ICT products accelerated sharply, but that of exports grew even faster. Indeed, the trade figures for ICT products are nothing short of spectacular. Imports in 1999 were US$30.3 billion and had risen to US$54 billion by 2005. Exports in 1999 were US$48.5 billion and rose to US$102.3 billion by 2005. As a result, the trade surplus on ICT products rose from US$18.2 billion in 1999 to US$48.4 billion in 2005. The penetration of the Chinese market was particularly swift, with Korean exports rising from US$5.5 billion in 1999 to US$35.6 by 2005.[3] To take a specific example, total exports of mobile handsets rose from under US$600 million in 1995 to well over US$17 billion in 2006, a close to 30-fold increase—impressive by any standards. Indeed, as noted by Onadera and Kim (2008, p. 114), Korea’s “industrialization drive has been strongly led by exports,” with the export-to-GDP ratio rising from some 5 percent in 1962, to 43.6 percent by 2009, notwithstanding a vertiginous rise in GDP, among the highest in the world.
The latest technologies and human capital
Equally impressive has been the extent to which use of the latest technologies has penetrated Korea, both within the business community, government, and civil society. Broadband Internet subscribers per 100 inhabitants rose from 13 in 2000 to 32 in 2008. Internet usage per 100 inhabitants was 45 in 2000 and had risen to 77 by 2008. There were 57 mobile phone users per 100 inhabitants in 2000 and 95 by 2008. Similar increases can be noted in personal computer use, e-commerce, and Internet banking subscribership. These penetration rates often exceed those of other OECD members having much higher levels of income per capita. The UN e-Government Readiness Index ranks Korea as number 1 among 180 countries in its latest edition, reflecting the extent to which the growth of the ICT sector in Korea has affected every dimension of economic life, including the delivery of services by the government.
But trade and investment policies have only been one dimension of Korea’s approach to the rapid development of the ICT sector and the creation of an impressive innovation capacity. The government has also been aggressive in the way it has gone about developing a modern infrastructure for higher education and training. Korea has the highest tertiary enrolment rate in the world: 96.1 percent. The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute was established in 1976, part of ten government-sponsored research institutes created with a mandate to boost Korea’s science and technology capabilities, develop its skilled technological manpower, and promote private sector participation in research and development. The number of fully qualified researchers engaged in R&D in Korea rose from under 6,000 in 1970, to about 224,000 in 2007, a 37-fold increase.
Korea’s rise from a relatively simple agricultural society in the early 1960s to a leading industrial and technological power by the beginning of the new century is worthy of admiration, particularly when set against the background of the relatively pessimistic expectations after the Korean war; a country with such a difficult political geography and modest natural resource endowments might well have raised questions about its long-term viability. That a country could transform itself in so short a period into a high-income industrial giant with a huge footprint on the global economy highlights two important facts: a) the powerful role of sensible economic policies in enabling a country to embark on a path of self-sustaining economic growth, and b) the extent to which governments can, in fact, contribute to rising prosperity for their populations, notwithstanding the many limitations of the free market economy, so painfully evident during the latest global financial crisis.
________________________
1. Onodera, Osamu and Earl Kim Hann. 2008. Case Study 2: Trade and Innovation in the Korean Information and Communications Technology Sector. OECD, Paris.
2. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2008. Handbook on Constructing Composite Indicators: Methodology and User Guide. Paris: OECD.
3. In 1999, the United States was Korea’s most important trade partner. By 2005, by a significant margin, the most important markets for Korean ICT exports were China and the EU, accounting for roughly half of the total.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Spain: Large scope for progress
The Innovation Capacity Index (ICI) gives Spain a rank of 29,1 somewhere between the Baltics and Chile. The rank itself is not bad, and it is not surprising that Spain scores below Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Germany, and Israel, countries with a well established track record of innovation and highly-developed and sophisticated high-tech sectors. What is noteworthy about Spain is that, whereas in 2008, its PPP-adjusted income per capita was US$30,589, that of Chile was less than half (US$14,529) and those of the Baltics ranged from US$17,106 in Latvia to US$20,561 in Estonia. In other words, for its stage of development—a rich industrial country with the world’s 11th largest economy2—Spain’s innovation capacity is lagging behind its true potential. What are the factors that have contributed to this mediocre performance? We focus our attention on three: fiscal management, market regulation (including the dysfunctionalities in Spain’s labor market), and education.
Precarious public finances
The onset of the global financial crisis was met by calls from leading economists to respond to the contraction of demand with fiscal stimulus. It was essential to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Great Depression when the authorities, unwisely, sought instead to balance budgets and did not relax monetary policies to the extent that was necessary to revive domestic demand. The problem with fiscal stimulus in the middle of a crisis is that the authorities need to strike a careful balance between optimizing the benefits of increased expenditure, against the risk that too much stimulus might undermine confidence because the increase in public debt is perceived by investors as potentially unsustainable. This difficult balancing act is particularly important in countries that already have high levels of public debt, and where there is greater vulnerability to shifts in investor sentiment. If investors begin to question the solvency of the government, then what started out as an exercise aimed at softening the adjustment until consumer and investor confidence picked up and improved the economy’s growth prospects, can quickly turn into a vicious circle, in which the increase in the cost of debt becomes rapidly prohibitive, confidence is undermined, and economic revival is put off.
This is what happened in Greece earlier this year and, in the context of a highly integrated region using a common currency, the Greek crisis led to contagion in Portugal and Spain, countries where the authorities were in the midst of implementing their own stimulus packages. In Spain, after having allowed the deficit to widen beyond 11 percent of GDP in 2009—a deficit without recent historical precedent—and having lost the confidence of investors, the government proceeded to introduce an adjustment package consisting of expenditure cuts and increases in taxes. This 180 degree turn in policy created social and political tensions, undermined the credibility of the government, and distracted attention from more urgent reforms, for instance in the labor market. Among the 131 countries ranked in the ICI, Spain’s budget deficit in 2009 was the sixth largest—that is, one of the worst in the world. The ICI, quite correctly, penalizes fiscal indiscipline because of the way it distorts resource allocation, for instance, constraining the ability of the government to spend more on education or on research and development. In Spain, R&D is equivalent to slightly less than 1.3 percent of GDP, well below the OECD average of 2.2 percent of GDP, and close to a quarter of the level in Israel.
Market regulation and a dysfunctional labor market
Of the five pillars used to build the ICI, Spain’s worst performance by a significant margin corresponds to pillar 3, on the regulatory and legal framework. The World Bank’s 2010 Doing Business Report database shows an extremely poor rank (146 out of 183 countries) for the “starting a business” indicators. In Spain it takes ten procedures and a total of 47 days to get a business started, compared to six procedures and six days in Portugal (a rank of 60) and five procedures and seven days in France (a rank of 22), Spain’s two neighbors. Moreover, Spain does not perform well in the indicator measuring protection of investors (a rank of 93). This indicator captures such concepts as disclosure requirements—to assess, for instance, the extent of related-party transactions—extent of liability of directors, and ease of shareholder suits—measuring how easily investors can access the courts when their interests are damaged.
In all of these concepts, Spain’s scores are mediocre at best, particularly considering Spain’s high income per capita and large industrial country status. Consistent with this, Spain’s ranking of 32 (a middling score of 6.1 on a 10-point scale) in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index is also mediocre. The worst ranks, however, concern those indicators that capture aspects of the operations of the labor market, such as the obstacles that businesses might face to hiring workers, the rigidity of hours, the degree of flexibility that employers might have to adjust the payroll to changing market conditions, the costs of separation, and so on. Spain has a rank of 157 in the employing workers DBR indicator, compared to a rank of 1 in Australia and 9 in Denmark.
Spain suffers from a segmented labor market that has served the country poorly over the past couple of decades, a fact eloquently highlighted by an unemployment rate of close to 20 percent in mid-2010, and twice that high for youth and women. One part of the labor market consists of permanent contracts with high levels of job security linked to extremely high severance payments, while the other is made of temporary contracts with much lower firing costs, accounting for some 27 percent of total employment, more than twice the average for the OECD. Not surprisingly, employers have responded to such incentives by hiring an increasing number of workers under temporary contracts, often beyond the legal limits provided by the legislation. In the public sector, workers cannot be sacked and, therefore, absenteeism is high (18 percent) and there is widespread abuse of sick leave. If a publicly owned company is privatized, the workers have to be taken on to the public payroll. Accordingly, demand for public sector vacancies is extremely high; according to The Economist, “300 people apply for each new clerical job advertised by the Madrid government.”3 Since the large severance payments for permanent workers are forfeited if they change employment, turnover is low, contributing to lack of motivation and sclerosis. Better-educated younger workers under temporary contracts are thus the “buffer” during periods of economic distress and end up being overqualified (and underpaid) for the jobs they hold. An economy in which the highest aspiration of university graduates is to secure employment with the government and become a bureaucrat is not one likely to encourage a spirit of entrepreneurship and a culture of innovation. Labor market reform and the gradual elimination of the duality in the market is an essential precondition to putting in place the incentives that will encourage greater entrepreneurship and risk-taking.
Education
There is not a single Spanish university among the best 170 in the world.4 According to this particular set of rankings, the University of Barcelona is the best in Spain, with a rank of 171, and there are no others among the top 200. We have already made reference to the relatively low level of R&D spending in Spain, which, as might be expected, has a counterpart in the inadequate funding provided by the government and the business community to the universities. There is no well-established tradition in Spain of active collaboration between the universities and the business sector, a fertile source of innovations in those countries that have succeeded in nurturing this critical relationship. Consequently, there is little use made of internships as a way of building up relevant skills and familiarizing the student with the demands of the job market. Spanish universities are by and large public entities and suffer from the same perverse incentives as the public sector. Pay is relatively poor, no one can be fired—except those on temporary contracts—and there are few mechanisms in place to encourage excellence in teaching and research. The cost of tuition covers a very small fraction of the expense incurred by the state. One implication of this is that students have no leverage to demand higher standards; since salaries are low, the university is not in a position to hire staff of exceptional quality—a damaging vicious circle. Not surprisingly, the most able emigrate, unable to find a meritocratic working environment that rewards performance and academic achievement.
The teaching of English in secondary schools is deficient, and thus university students are ill-prepared for carrying out research at a sufficiently advanced level, with easy access to the vast library of research materials available in English. Student exchange programs are rare, depriving students of the expansion of intellectual horizons that these can bring. There is insufficient incorporation of the latest technologies into every aspect of the life of the university, whether it be for online course registration, access to bibliographical libraries, e-learning, and so on. Course curricula are not adequately updated, and thus do not reflect the rapidly changing needs of the Spanish labor market and the private sector. The concept of “advanced standing”—namely, that there will be students who because of earlier work experience could enter an academic program midway—is largely an alien concept. There is little effort to better integrate research, teaching, and work early on. Students are not adequately familiarized with various conventions, habits, and norms that govern academic life (academic literacies) and might encourage more in-depth learning. Teacher evaluations—a reliable source of feedback in the modern university—are seldom used. It is additionally worrisome that, given the largely public nature of the better Spanish university, often there is no arm’s-length relationship between government and university in terms of hiring, with the universities sometimes used to park out-of-work politicians. Excessive crowding is another problem, particularly in the early years of undergraduate training. Failure to address some of these glaring deficiencies will condemn Spanish universities to mediocrity and greatly hamper long-term innovation capacity—at all times and everywhere reliant on academic excellence.
______________________________
1. Lopez-Claros, Augusto. The Innovation for Development Report 2010–2011. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 25.
2. Using a PPP-adjusted measure of GDP. At current market exchange rates Spain ranks 9th in the world, with a GDP equal to US$1,602 billion, just below Russia (US$1,677 billion), and ahead of Brazil (US$1,573 billion).
3. The Economist, 2010. The pain in Spain. 3 June.
4. According to: http://www.topuniversities.com/world-university-rankings
Precarious public finances
The onset of the global financial crisis was met by calls from leading economists to respond to the contraction of demand with fiscal stimulus. It was essential to avoid repeating the mistakes of the Great Depression when the authorities, unwisely, sought instead to balance budgets and did not relax monetary policies to the extent that was necessary to revive domestic demand. The problem with fiscal stimulus in the middle of a crisis is that the authorities need to strike a careful balance between optimizing the benefits of increased expenditure, against the risk that too much stimulus might undermine confidence because the increase in public debt is perceived by investors as potentially unsustainable. This difficult balancing act is particularly important in countries that already have high levels of public debt, and where there is greater vulnerability to shifts in investor sentiment. If investors begin to question the solvency of the government, then what started out as an exercise aimed at softening the adjustment until consumer and investor confidence picked up and improved the economy’s growth prospects, can quickly turn into a vicious circle, in which the increase in the cost of debt becomes rapidly prohibitive, confidence is undermined, and economic revival is put off.
This is what happened in Greece earlier this year and, in the context of a highly integrated region using a common currency, the Greek crisis led to contagion in Portugal and Spain, countries where the authorities were in the midst of implementing their own stimulus packages. In Spain, after having allowed the deficit to widen beyond 11 percent of GDP in 2009—a deficit without recent historical precedent—and having lost the confidence of investors, the government proceeded to introduce an adjustment package consisting of expenditure cuts and increases in taxes. This 180 degree turn in policy created social and political tensions, undermined the credibility of the government, and distracted attention from more urgent reforms, for instance in the labor market. Among the 131 countries ranked in the ICI, Spain’s budget deficit in 2009 was the sixth largest—that is, one of the worst in the world. The ICI, quite correctly, penalizes fiscal indiscipline because of the way it distorts resource allocation, for instance, constraining the ability of the government to spend more on education or on research and development. In Spain, R&D is equivalent to slightly less than 1.3 percent of GDP, well below the OECD average of 2.2 percent of GDP, and close to a quarter of the level in Israel.
Market regulation and a dysfunctional labor market
Of the five pillars used to build the ICI, Spain’s worst performance by a significant margin corresponds to pillar 3, on the regulatory and legal framework. The World Bank’s 2010 Doing Business Report database shows an extremely poor rank (146 out of 183 countries) for the “starting a business” indicators. In Spain it takes ten procedures and a total of 47 days to get a business started, compared to six procedures and six days in Portugal (a rank of 60) and five procedures and seven days in France (a rank of 22), Spain’s two neighbors. Moreover, Spain does not perform well in the indicator measuring protection of investors (a rank of 93). This indicator captures such concepts as disclosure requirements—to assess, for instance, the extent of related-party transactions—extent of liability of directors, and ease of shareholder suits—measuring how easily investors can access the courts when their interests are damaged.
In all of these concepts, Spain’s scores are mediocre at best, particularly considering Spain’s high income per capita and large industrial country status. Consistent with this, Spain’s ranking of 32 (a middling score of 6.1 on a 10-point scale) in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index is also mediocre. The worst ranks, however, concern those indicators that capture aspects of the operations of the labor market, such as the obstacles that businesses might face to hiring workers, the rigidity of hours, the degree of flexibility that employers might have to adjust the payroll to changing market conditions, the costs of separation, and so on. Spain has a rank of 157 in the employing workers DBR indicator, compared to a rank of 1 in Australia and 9 in Denmark.
Spain suffers from a segmented labor market that has served the country poorly over the past couple of decades, a fact eloquently highlighted by an unemployment rate of close to 20 percent in mid-2010, and twice that high for youth and women. One part of the labor market consists of permanent contracts with high levels of job security linked to extremely high severance payments, while the other is made of temporary contracts with much lower firing costs, accounting for some 27 percent of total employment, more than twice the average for the OECD. Not surprisingly, employers have responded to such incentives by hiring an increasing number of workers under temporary contracts, often beyond the legal limits provided by the legislation. In the public sector, workers cannot be sacked and, therefore, absenteeism is high (18 percent) and there is widespread abuse of sick leave. If a publicly owned company is privatized, the workers have to be taken on to the public payroll. Accordingly, demand for public sector vacancies is extremely high; according to The Economist, “300 people apply for each new clerical job advertised by the Madrid government.”3 Since the large severance payments for permanent workers are forfeited if they change employment, turnover is low, contributing to lack of motivation and sclerosis. Better-educated younger workers under temporary contracts are thus the “buffer” during periods of economic distress and end up being overqualified (and underpaid) for the jobs they hold. An economy in which the highest aspiration of university graduates is to secure employment with the government and become a bureaucrat is not one likely to encourage a spirit of entrepreneurship and a culture of innovation. Labor market reform and the gradual elimination of the duality in the market is an essential precondition to putting in place the incentives that will encourage greater entrepreneurship and risk-taking.
Education
There is not a single Spanish university among the best 170 in the world.4 According to this particular set of rankings, the University of Barcelona is the best in Spain, with a rank of 171, and there are no others among the top 200. We have already made reference to the relatively low level of R&D spending in Spain, which, as might be expected, has a counterpart in the inadequate funding provided by the government and the business community to the universities. There is no well-established tradition in Spain of active collaboration between the universities and the business sector, a fertile source of innovations in those countries that have succeeded in nurturing this critical relationship. Consequently, there is little use made of internships as a way of building up relevant skills and familiarizing the student with the demands of the job market. Spanish universities are by and large public entities and suffer from the same perverse incentives as the public sector. Pay is relatively poor, no one can be fired—except those on temporary contracts—and there are few mechanisms in place to encourage excellence in teaching and research. The cost of tuition covers a very small fraction of the expense incurred by the state. One implication of this is that students have no leverage to demand higher standards; since salaries are low, the university is not in a position to hire staff of exceptional quality—a damaging vicious circle. Not surprisingly, the most able emigrate, unable to find a meritocratic working environment that rewards performance and academic achievement.
The teaching of English in secondary schools is deficient, and thus university students are ill-prepared for carrying out research at a sufficiently advanced level, with easy access to the vast library of research materials available in English. Student exchange programs are rare, depriving students of the expansion of intellectual horizons that these can bring. There is insufficient incorporation of the latest technologies into every aspect of the life of the university, whether it be for online course registration, access to bibliographical libraries, e-learning, and so on. Course curricula are not adequately updated, and thus do not reflect the rapidly changing needs of the Spanish labor market and the private sector. The concept of “advanced standing”—namely, that there will be students who because of earlier work experience could enter an academic program midway—is largely an alien concept. There is little effort to better integrate research, teaching, and work early on. Students are not adequately familiarized with various conventions, habits, and norms that govern academic life (academic literacies) and might encourage more in-depth learning. Teacher evaluations—a reliable source of feedback in the modern university—are seldom used. It is additionally worrisome that, given the largely public nature of the better Spanish university, often there is no arm’s-length relationship between government and university in terms of hiring, with the universities sometimes used to park out-of-work politicians. Excessive crowding is another problem, particularly in the early years of undergraduate training. Failure to address some of these glaring deficiencies will condemn Spanish universities to mediocrity and greatly hamper long-term innovation capacity—at all times and everywhere reliant on academic excellence.
______________________________
1. Lopez-Claros, Augusto. The Innovation for Development Report 2010–2011. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 25.
2. Using a PPP-adjusted measure of GDP. At current market exchange rates Spain ranks 9th in the world, with a GDP equal to US$1,602 billion, just below Russia (US$1,677 billion), and ahead of Brazil (US$1,573 billion).
3. The Economist, 2010. The pain in Spain. 3 June.
4. According to: http://www.topuniversities.com/world-university-rankings
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Brazil: Key innovation challenges
Brazil has taken important steps in recent years to modernize its economy and to lay a stable foundation for sustainable growth. Its ranking of 81 in this year’s ICI,1 however, is extremely low, given its level of per capita income—US$10,466 on a PPP-adjusted basis in 2008. India, for instance, has a broadly similar ICI rank, but a much lower income per capita of US$2,780. What are the factors which appear to be preventing Brazil from boosting its innovation capacity? We focus our attention on four, all of them fairly central when assessing a country’s ability to create an environment conducive to innovation.
Inefficiencies in resource allocation
Over the past decade and a half, successive Brazilian governments have done much to improve management of the public finances, at least when measured by the size of the government deficit and the magnitude of the public debt. Brazil had a long history of fiscal mismanagement, and improvements made in this area in recent years have, therefore, been extremely welcome. Indeed, it is noteworthy that Brazil’s public debt in relation to GDP is now much lower than that of most European countries and of the United States—a remarkable development. However, there are a number of outstanding problems which need to be addressed. Brazil suffers from serious rigidities on the spending side. These take various forms: one is the pervasive earmarking of revenues for assorted purposes, affecting as much as 80 percent of total primary spending (that is, net of interest payments). Another consists of automatic adjustments to expenditures to reflect movements in other variables, of which the most important is the linking of social and pension benefits to the minimum wage. According to the IMF,2 mandatory revenue transfers to local governments and inflexible labor legislation have also prevented a streamlining of the government payroll, which remains unduly large. A recent survey of the Brazilian economy notes that while only 6 percent of Brazilians are of pensionable age, they take the equivalent of 11.3 percent of GDP in pension payments. In sharp contrast, in the United States, the 12 percent of the population who are pensioners receive the equivalent of 6 percent of GDP in pension payments.3 Inevitably, this has led to a situation where Brazil spends far more in providing benefits to its older citizens than it does in educating the young, building a better educational infrastructure, or improving the country’s abysmally poor roads and ports infrastructure. A government that is constrained in terms of how it can allocate its resources will, not surprisingly, end up spending less on research and development and higher education. The data for Brazil bear this out. R&D intensity is about 1 percent of GDP, less than half of the OECD average.
But this is not the whole picture. Distortions in the financial system—where the government maintains a heavy presence—continue to drive a large wedge between borrowing and deposit rates, which, in turn, have prevented a quicker expansion of investment and limited the availability of resources to small- and medium-sized enterprises, often the locus of innovation. The benchmark interest rate is currently in the 11–12 percent range, extremely high by international standards, at a time when interest rates are at record lows everywhere, and when the central bank’s own inflation target is nearer 4–5 percent, implying a very high real interest rate.
A culture of heavy bureaucracy
One of the functions of government involves the issuing of licenses and permits. From cradle to grave, the average citizen in any country has to enter into transactions with some government office or bureaucrat to obtain a birth certificate, get a passport, pay taxes, open up a new business, drive a car, register property, engage in foreign trade, sell a good or service to the government, hire an employee, use a public health service, build a house, etc. Indeed, red tape had become such a bountiful source of corruption in most countries that a few years ago the World Bank began to publish an entire report that systematically looked at the prevalence of regulation in member countries. As noted earlier, the Doing Business Report (DBR) is now the primary reference tool for assessing the burdens of business regulation in a large number of countries. The data from the DBR for Brazil suggests that the business community labors under a heavy burden of an entrenched culture of bureaucracy and red tape. It takes 120 days and 16 procedures to start a new business in Brazil, 411 days and 18 procedures to obtain a construction permit, 42 days to register property, 616 days to enforce a contract, representing 70 more days than was the case in 2005, at a cost of 16.5 percent of the claim. Indeed, among 183 countries ranked in the DBR, Brazil’s ranks are invariably low, sometimes abysmally so.
A number of surveys have shown that businesses allocate considerable time and resources to dealing with the demands of red tape. Often, they may feel that paying a bribe is the surest way to save time and enhance efficiency and, in many countries, possibly the only way to get business done, without undermining the firm’s competitive position vis-à-vis those who pay bribes routinely. Obviously, the more dysfunctional the economic and legal system and the more onerous the regulations, the greater the incentives for individuals and businesses to short-circuit it by paying bribes. Since there is a well-established correlation between the prevalence of red tape and corruption, it is not surprising that in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index Brazil ranked 75th in 2009, thirty places below its rank in 2002.4 Excessive bureaucracy and red tape and the corruption they inevitably engender will greatly discourage entrepreneurship and innovation, and may well be one of the most important factors explaining Brazil’s low ranking in the ICI, given its level of per capita income.
Lagging higher education
According to de Brito and de Mello,5 "Brazil’s poor record in educational attainment is among the key obstacles to the generation and diffusion of innovation" (p. 23). There are several interrelated problems. First, much of the efforts over the past decade have been focused on expanding school enrolment in primary and secondary education—now close to universal—with less emphasis put on the quality of the education actually delivered. As a result, to take one important indicator, Brazil has lagged behind other countries in the region in its scores on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In particular, in science, mathematics, and reading its students’ performance has been behind those of Chile, Uruguay, Mexico, and Argentina and, it goes without saying, much further behind students in other higher-income OECD countries, even Spain and Portugal, themselves well behind the OECD average. Second, the tertiary enrolment rate is extremely low by international standards, given Brazil’s stage of development. At 30 percent, it is well below that of Chile (49.8 percent) and Uruguay (64.3 percent) and well below that of Argentina (68.1 percent). It is also far below that of Korea (96.1 percent), a country with a per capita income lower than that of Brazil as recently as the 1980s. Perhaps more than any other, this is an extremely troubling indicator, given the increasing complexity of the global economy and the proven success in the area of innovation of countries which have invested heavily in education over the past three decades. Of course, the rigidities in government expenditures alluded to above have sharply limited the authorities’ ability to invest more in productivity-enhancing areas, such as the building up of first-class educational institutions. Surveys carried out at Brazilian universities show students complaining about outdated libraries, the structure and content of the curriculum, and the limited availability of computer facilities. Third, spending in education—about 5 percent of GDP on an annual basis—is somewhat above the average for the region, albeit below that of the likes of Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden, where it is closer to 6–8 percent of GDP. Again, the issue here is one of priorities. Brazil manages to spend vast amounts in generous pensions for its public servants and can find the resources to subsidize the consumption of fuels by the population, but has not invested enough in strengthening its scientific infrastructure. According to the OECD study quoted above (p.24), the stock of engineers graduated per thousand population is 0.08 in Brazil, but it is ten times higher (0.80) in Korea. Fourth, there is limited collaboration between the universities and the business community, reflecting legal impediments to the transfer and sharing of financial proceeds associated with intellectual property rights.
Low penetration of new technologies
There is a general perception in Brazil that the country has kept pace with the adoption of the latest technologies. As with several indicators of education (e.g., enrolment rates at all levels of the educational ladder), the data on the penetration rates for mobile telephones, broadband Internet subscribership, Internet and personal computer use over the past decade shows two things: Brazil has definitely made improvements with respect to its history, but there is a large gap with respect to the top performers, many of which have moved farther, faster, and deeper. Mobile usage rates have perhaps moved up the fastest, with Brazil having penetration of about 78.5 per 100 inhabitants in 2009 compared to 26.4 in 2003—impressive progress, but still well behind Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela and, of course, OECD countries. Internet use in Brazil stands at 37.5 per 100 inhabitants in 2008, compared to 76.5 in Korea. Personal computer penetration rates are 16.1 in Brazil as opposed to 58.1 in Korea. The data for broadband Internet subscribers shows an even larger gap in 2008, with Brazilian coverage around 5.3 per 100 inhabitants, compared to 32.1 in Korea.
In the 1970s, Brazil tried to develop a domestic computer industry by banning imports; the net effect was less to develop native manufacturing capacity, but more to cut Brazil off from new technologies. The trade regime is now more open, but import tariffs for capital goods and intermediate inputs remain high. Much of the spending on R&D is done by the state. To move Brazil’s business spending in R&D closer to the OECD average, it would have to rise by a factor of four, which highlights the challenges in creating an environment more conducive to innovation.
Like India, Brazil has great potential to move up the ranks of the ICI in coming years and, more generally, to develop local innovation capacity. But the authorities and the business community will have to join forces in addressing the glaring weaknesses identified above.
________________________________________________
1. Lopez-Claros, Augusto. The Innovation for Development Report 2010–2011. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 25.
2. International Monetary Fund. 2005. Stabilization and Reform in Latin America: A Macroeconomic Perspective on the Experience Since the Early 1990s. Occasional Paper 238, Washington, D.C.
3. The Economist. 2010. In Lula's footsteps. 3 July. pp. 45–47.
4. Transparency International. 2009. Corruption Perceptions Index 2009. Annual Report. Berlin. Although this huge drop in rank is partly explained by the incorporation of new countries to the CPI (102 in 2002 vs. 180 in 2009), it must be noted that Brazil’s score in 2002 was 4.0 out of a possible 10, whereas it had dropped to 3.7 by 2009, suggesting a worsening of corruption.
5. de Brito Cruz, Carlos, and Luiz de Mello. 2006. Boosting Innovation Performance in Brazil. OECD Economics Department Working Paper No. 532.
Inefficiencies in resource allocation
Over the past decade and a half, successive Brazilian governments have done much to improve management of the public finances, at least when measured by the size of the government deficit and the magnitude of the public debt. Brazil had a long history of fiscal mismanagement, and improvements made in this area in recent years have, therefore, been extremely welcome. Indeed, it is noteworthy that Brazil’s public debt in relation to GDP is now much lower than that of most European countries and of the United States—a remarkable development. However, there are a number of outstanding problems which need to be addressed. Brazil suffers from serious rigidities on the spending side. These take various forms: one is the pervasive earmarking of revenues for assorted purposes, affecting as much as 80 percent of total primary spending (that is, net of interest payments). Another consists of automatic adjustments to expenditures to reflect movements in other variables, of which the most important is the linking of social and pension benefits to the minimum wage. According to the IMF,2 mandatory revenue transfers to local governments and inflexible labor legislation have also prevented a streamlining of the government payroll, which remains unduly large. A recent survey of the Brazilian economy notes that while only 6 percent of Brazilians are of pensionable age, they take the equivalent of 11.3 percent of GDP in pension payments. In sharp contrast, in the United States, the 12 percent of the population who are pensioners receive the equivalent of 6 percent of GDP in pension payments.3 Inevitably, this has led to a situation where Brazil spends far more in providing benefits to its older citizens than it does in educating the young, building a better educational infrastructure, or improving the country’s abysmally poor roads and ports infrastructure. A government that is constrained in terms of how it can allocate its resources will, not surprisingly, end up spending less on research and development and higher education. The data for Brazil bear this out. R&D intensity is about 1 percent of GDP, less than half of the OECD average.
But this is not the whole picture. Distortions in the financial system—where the government maintains a heavy presence—continue to drive a large wedge between borrowing and deposit rates, which, in turn, have prevented a quicker expansion of investment and limited the availability of resources to small- and medium-sized enterprises, often the locus of innovation. The benchmark interest rate is currently in the 11–12 percent range, extremely high by international standards, at a time when interest rates are at record lows everywhere, and when the central bank’s own inflation target is nearer 4–5 percent, implying a very high real interest rate.
A culture of heavy bureaucracy
One of the functions of government involves the issuing of licenses and permits. From cradle to grave, the average citizen in any country has to enter into transactions with some government office or bureaucrat to obtain a birth certificate, get a passport, pay taxes, open up a new business, drive a car, register property, engage in foreign trade, sell a good or service to the government, hire an employee, use a public health service, build a house, etc. Indeed, red tape had become such a bountiful source of corruption in most countries that a few years ago the World Bank began to publish an entire report that systematically looked at the prevalence of regulation in member countries. As noted earlier, the Doing Business Report (DBR) is now the primary reference tool for assessing the burdens of business regulation in a large number of countries. The data from the DBR for Brazil suggests that the business community labors under a heavy burden of an entrenched culture of bureaucracy and red tape. It takes 120 days and 16 procedures to start a new business in Brazil, 411 days and 18 procedures to obtain a construction permit, 42 days to register property, 616 days to enforce a contract, representing 70 more days than was the case in 2005, at a cost of 16.5 percent of the claim. Indeed, among 183 countries ranked in the DBR, Brazil’s ranks are invariably low, sometimes abysmally so.
A number of surveys have shown that businesses allocate considerable time and resources to dealing with the demands of red tape. Often, they may feel that paying a bribe is the surest way to save time and enhance efficiency and, in many countries, possibly the only way to get business done, without undermining the firm’s competitive position vis-à-vis those who pay bribes routinely. Obviously, the more dysfunctional the economic and legal system and the more onerous the regulations, the greater the incentives for individuals and businesses to short-circuit it by paying bribes. Since there is a well-established correlation between the prevalence of red tape and corruption, it is not surprising that in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index Brazil ranked 75th in 2009, thirty places below its rank in 2002.4 Excessive bureaucracy and red tape and the corruption they inevitably engender will greatly discourage entrepreneurship and innovation, and may well be one of the most important factors explaining Brazil’s low ranking in the ICI, given its level of per capita income.
Lagging higher education
According to de Brito and de Mello,5 "Brazil’s poor record in educational attainment is among the key obstacles to the generation and diffusion of innovation" (p. 23). There are several interrelated problems. First, much of the efforts over the past decade have been focused on expanding school enrolment in primary and secondary education—now close to universal—with less emphasis put on the quality of the education actually delivered. As a result, to take one important indicator, Brazil has lagged behind other countries in the region in its scores on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). In particular, in science, mathematics, and reading its students’ performance has been behind those of Chile, Uruguay, Mexico, and Argentina and, it goes without saying, much further behind students in other higher-income OECD countries, even Spain and Portugal, themselves well behind the OECD average. Second, the tertiary enrolment rate is extremely low by international standards, given Brazil’s stage of development. At 30 percent, it is well below that of Chile (49.8 percent) and Uruguay (64.3 percent) and well below that of Argentina (68.1 percent). It is also far below that of Korea (96.1 percent), a country with a per capita income lower than that of Brazil as recently as the 1980s. Perhaps more than any other, this is an extremely troubling indicator, given the increasing complexity of the global economy and the proven success in the area of innovation of countries which have invested heavily in education over the past three decades. Of course, the rigidities in government expenditures alluded to above have sharply limited the authorities’ ability to invest more in productivity-enhancing areas, such as the building up of first-class educational institutions. Surveys carried out at Brazilian universities show students complaining about outdated libraries, the structure and content of the curriculum, and the limited availability of computer facilities. Third, spending in education—about 5 percent of GDP on an annual basis—is somewhat above the average for the region, albeit below that of the likes of Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden, where it is closer to 6–8 percent of GDP. Again, the issue here is one of priorities. Brazil manages to spend vast amounts in generous pensions for its public servants and can find the resources to subsidize the consumption of fuels by the population, but has not invested enough in strengthening its scientific infrastructure. According to the OECD study quoted above (p.24), the stock of engineers graduated per thousand population is 0.08 in Brazil, but it is ten times higher (0.80) in Korea. Fourth, there is limited collaboration between the universities and the business community, reflecting legal impediments to the transfer and sharing of financial proceeds associated with intellectual property rights.
Low penetration of new technologies
There is a general perception in Brazil that the country has kept pace with the adoption of the latest technologies. As with several indicators of education (e.g., enrolment rates at all levels of the educational ladder), the data on the penetration rates for mobile telephones, broadband Internet subscribership, Internet and personal computer use over the past decade shows two things: Brazil has definitely made improvements with respect to its history, but there is a large gap with respect to the top performers, many of which have moved farther, faster, and deeper. Mobile usage rates have perhaps moved up the fastest, with Brazil having penetration of about 78.5 per 100 inhabitants in 2009 compared to 26.4 in 2003—impressive progress, but still well behind Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Jamaica, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Venezuela and, of course, OECD countries. Internet use in Brazil stands at 37.5 per 100 inhabitants in 2008, compared to 76.5 in Korea. Personal computer penetration rates are 16.1 in Brazil as opposed to 58.1 in Korea. The data for broadband Internet subscribers shows an even larger gap in 2008, with Brazilian coverage around 5.3 per 100 inhabitants, compared to 32.1 in Korea.
In the 1970s, Brazil tried to develop a domestic computer industry by banning imports; the net effect was less to develop native manufacturing capacity, but more to cut Brazil off from new technologies. The trade regime is now more open, but import tariffs for capital goods and intermediate inputs remain high. Much of the spending on R&D is done by the state. To move Brazil’s business spending in R&D closer to the OECD average, it would have to rise by a factor of four, which highlights the challenges in creating an environment more conducive to innovation.
Like India, Brazil has great potential to move up the ranks of the ICI in coming years and, more generally, to develop local innovation capacity. But the authorities and the business community will have to join forces in addressing the glaring weaknesses identified above.
________________________________________________
1. Lopez-Claros, Augusto. The Innovation for Development Report 2010–2011. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 25.
2. International Monetary Fund. 2005. Stabilization and Reform in Latin America: A Macroeconomic Perspective on the Experience Since the Early 1990s. Occasional Paper 238, Washington, D.C.
3. The Economist. 2010. In Lula's footsteps. 3 July. pp. 45–47.
4. Transparency International. 2009. Corruption Perceptions Index 2009. Annual Report. Berlin. Although this huge drop in rank is partly explained by the incorporation of new countries to the CPI (102 in 2002 vs. 180 in 2009), it must be noted that Brazil’s score in 2002 was 4.0 out of a possible 10, whereas it had dropped to 3.7 by 2009, suggesting a worsening of corruption.
5. de Brito Cruz, Carlos, and Luiz de Mello. 2006. Boosting Innovation Performance in Brazil. OECD Economics Department Working Paper No. 532.
Friday, October 29, 2010
China: Enormous potential in years ahead
The last year that China’s growth rate was below 7.5 percent was 1990. On a PPP-adjusted basis, Chinese GDP has already overtaken Japan and Germany, making China the world’s number two economy. This impressive growth performance has turned the Chinese economy into an important contributor to global growth, a major force in commodity markets, the most important destination for foreign direct investment and, hence, an emerging power in international trade. Chinese exports and imports in relation to GDP were less than 15 percent in the mid-1980s, but by 2008 had risen to 33 percent for exports and 26 percent for imports. Whereas Chinese exports were less than 1 percent of total world trade in 1984, this share 20 years later had risen above 5 percent. So, if the intent of the strengthened reform effort seen in China in the last 20 years was to contribute to its integration to the global economy, it has succeeded well beyond anyone’s expectations.
The above trends have all contributed to increasing the relative importance of the Chinese economy which, by 2009, accounted for some 7–10 percent of global GDP (the lower range corresponds to market exchange rates). They have also pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, given them enhanced opportunities, and improved living standards, perhaps the most important achievement of the last 20 years.
While the Chinese authorities are to be praised for effective macroeconomic management—sometimes carried out against the background of a difficult international economic environment—it is useful to review briefly the challenges that remain, particularly those that pertain to improving the country’s innovation capacity. In the medium-term perspective, the sources of Chinese growth will gradually shift to technological progress and innovation; thus, it is important to analyze those factors that might be holding the country back. This year’s ICI ranking for China is 64,1 broadly in the same ballpark as that of Mexico, Turkey, and Greece.
Market regulations
The OECD has compiled an extremely useful set of market regulation indicators to “assess the extent to which the regulatory environment promotes or inhibits competition in markets where technology and market conditions make competition viable.”2 These indicators include a measure of the extent of price controls, the licensing and permit system, communication and simplification of rules and procedures, administrative burdens for sole proprietor firms, legal and regulatory barriers, discriminatory procedures, tariff policy, the degree of government control over business enterprises, among others. These are aggregated into three broad families which capture state control, barriers to entrepreneurship, and barriers to international trade and investment. Two major conclusions that are derived from a review of these measures are that
Indeed, the OECD data suggests that market regulations are more restrictive in China than anywhere in the OECD countries, including all its transition-economy members. The gaps are large across all three major areas: state control, barriers to international trade and investment, and barriers to entrepreneurship. These results are strongly corroborated by the Doing Business indicators compiled by the World Bank which show poor scores/rankings for starting a business, dealing with licenses, construction permits, employing workers, and paying taxes. The indicators measuring the extent of investor protection are likewise mediocre.
China’s weaknesses in the regulatory and legal framework highlighted by the OECD and World Bank indicators are consistent with members of the business community surveyed in China, who complain of arbitrariness in the application of rules, lack of evenhandedness in the treatment of foreign and domestic investors, and high levels of corruption; the latter is strongly corroborated by a rank of 79 in the Corruption Perceptions Index 2009, which puts China on a par with Burkina Faso and Trinidad and Tobago. A recent report in the Financial Times commenting on the frustrations of doing business in China notes that “the risk-reward calculation between staying quiet and speaking up has shifted towards the latter. With China employing policies including ignoring intellectual property rights, forced technology transfer, and government procurement skewed towards domestic companies, some foreign businesses feel they are being pushed out of the country.”4
Human capital, ICT and R&D
There are a number of other indicators used in the ICI in which China does not score very well, and which thus contribute to dragging its score down. Tertiary enrolment rates of 22 percent are better than in India, but below the majority of countries in Latin America, and below all OECD members, the latter by a significant margin. As might be expected, given China’s stage of development and still relatively low income per capita, the gap is also huge with respect to Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore. Spending in education, at slightly less than 2 percent of GDP, is also low by international standards. Despite rapid urbanization, China has a sizable rural population engaged in agriculture. Though the literacy rate in the country (93 percent) is well above that of India (66 percent), the fact remains that there are hundreds of millions of people in China who need to be educated and trained to increase their productivity. This will surely be one area where the government will have to do more in coming years, a need made more urgent by China’s rapid integration into the global economy, and a gradual shift in the sources of Chinese competitiveness, from low labor costs and an undervalued exchange rate, to technology and innovation.
As with indicators of education, China, likewise, has mediocre scores in a broad range of indicators that capture the extent of penetration of the latest technologies. As in other parts of the world, progress has been made in recent years in boosting Internet penetration, mobile phone coverage, computer use, access to broadband Internet, and so on. But given China’s large rural population, it is perhaps not surprising that the use of these technologies is still in its early stages. For instance, personal computer use per 100 inhabitants is 5.6, higher than in India (2.8) but about ten times lower than in Korea. China’s rapidly rising income per capita should allow it to narrow these gaps fairly rapidly over the next decade. In the meantime, however, there is little doubt that they slow down innovation capacity.
Research and development expenditure in China is about 1.5 percent of GDP, below the average for the OECD of 2.2 percent of GDP. According to the OECD, if one further looks at R&D spending by industry, the gap with respect to the OECD is much higher, particularly for high-tech industries. This is specially the case for high-tech export industries “which lack a large R&D base in China and continue to rely heavily on foreign-sourced technology embodied in FDI and imported inputs”.5
Improving the social infrastructure
One of the more noticeable trends in China in recent years has been the massive shift of rural populations into urban environments. Whereas in 1980, less than 20 percent of China’s total population of close to 1 billion was living in urban areas, by 2000 this share had risen to 33 percent. The urban population during this period expanded from about 190 million to over 420 million, an impressive growth of over 120 percent. Indeed, at least a few percentage points of the high annual GDP growth rates seen during this period is accounted for by these internal migratory flows, since labor productivity in urban areas is much higher. This trend is expected to continue in coming years and will require careful management. There are several aspects to this.
As is well known, and as in other transition economies, there have been transitory increases in unemployment linked to the inevitable—and much needed—restructuring of the enterprise sector. This has necessitated the introduction of unemployment compensation schemes and, more generally, the buildup of safety nets to mitigate the impact of these adjustment costs on the population, particularly its most vulnerable groups. Like other countries in the industrial world, China will also have to make provisions for its aging population, and more attention will have to be given, therefore, to the development of efficient and modern systems of social protection, particularly pensions. This, in turn, will have implications for the budget. The need for further reforms in this area is highlighted by the fact that by 2030, China’s urban population may well have exceeded 1 billion. Well before the country reaches this threshold, the need for a well-functioning and well-funded social infrastructure will have become a political necessity, especially if the current rural-urban income disparities continue to widen, as they have in recent years. Indeed, China’s political stability will hinge critically on the speed with which the government is able to make progress in this area, at a time when rising protectionist sentiment against booming Chinese exports begins to create a more challenging external environment for the country. An additional benefit of an improved framework for social protection will be that the Chinese population will feel less of a compulsion to save (for old age) and this would stimulate domestic consumption, thereby contributing to reduce China’s huge trade surplus, a constant source of tension with trade partners. Better mechanisms of social protection will also encourage entrepreneurship and long-range planning, key ingredients of successful innovation.
Managing the growth process
For some time now there has been a vigorous debate about the risks that rapid growth rates might pose for macroeconomic stability. Sceptics have pointed out that China’s relatively good inflation performance and some slack in the labor markets suggest that growth could be sustained at the 9+ percent range. However, in recent years, credit growth has at times reached extremely high levels, and a consensus has emerged that managing the growth process in a way that preserves and builds upon the important gains of the past is a key priority for policymakers. This view has been buttressed by a growing perception that rapid growth is leading to a sharp deterioration of the environment, with unforeseen future consequences for public health. However, monetary policy measures—interest rate and reserve requirement increases—are not likely to be enough. There may also be a role for fiscal policies aimed at withdrawing stimulus from the economy. Fortunately, with a low revenue-to-GDP ratio, the authorities have considerable room for maneuver and should not hesitate to use it. Beyond this, further structural reforms, particularly those that boost competition in the economy, reduce the sort of barriers faced by entrepreneurs to start new businesses, and increase transparency and the rule of law will all help to make the Chinese economy more flexible, and will enhance the economy’s productivity and boost its innovation capacity.
The process whereby China plays an increasingly important role in shaping the global agenda will be enhanced if the government sets in motion processes of political reform—the 21st century counterpart of the impressive reforms in the economic area implemented during the past two decades, which have done so much to boost the standards of living of the Chinese population. A China that gradually moves in the direction of giving some political voice to its people can only contribute to enhancing its own ability to nourish an environment conducive to greater innovation.
___________________________
1. Lopez-Claros, Augusto. The Innovation for Development Report 2010–2011. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 25.
2. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2010. Economic Survey: China. Paris. p. 103.
3. ———ibid, pp. 105–7. In 1978, state-owned enterprises accounted for 78 percent of total industrial output and employed 60 percent of the non-farm work-force. “Collectively-owned enterprises accounted for the rest, with no other type of business enterprise permitted at the time.” By 2007, the state controlled 31 percent of industrial output and employed 22 percent of the non-farm workforce.
4. Financial Times, 2010. ‘Foreign Friends’ Lose Reluctance to Criticize China. 20 July. The article quotes an official at the US Information Technology Industry Council saying that “We are feeling less and less welcome in China, which is why you are seeing more people speaking out and reconsidering their futures in China.”
5. OECD, op. cit., p. 25.
The above trends have all contributed to increasing the relative importance of the Chinese economy which, by 2009, accounted for some 7–10 percent of global GDP (the lower range corresponds to market exchange rates). They have also pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, given them enhanced opportunities, and improved living standards, perhaps the most important achievement of the last 20 years.
While the Chinese authorities are to be praised for effective macroeconomic management—sometimes carried out against the background of a difficult international economic environment—it is useful to review briefly the challenges that remain, particularly those that pertain to improving the country’s innovation capacity. In the medium-term perspective, the sources of Chinese growth will gradually shift to technological progress and innovation; thus, it is important to analyze those factors that might be holding the country back. This year’s ICI ranking for China is 64,1 broadly in the same ballpark as that of Mexico, Turkey, and Greece.
Market regulations
The OECD has compiled an extremely useful set of market regulation indicators to “assess the extent to which the regulatory environment promotes or inhibits competition in markets where technology and market conditions make competition viable.”2 These indicators include a measure of the extent of price controls, the licensing and permit system, communication and simplification of rules and procedures, administrative burdens for sole proprietor firms, legal and regulatory barriers, discriminatory procedures, tariff policy, the degree of government control over business enterprises, among others. These are aggregated into three broad families which capture state control, barriers to entrepreneurship, and barriers to international trade and investment. Two major conclusions that are derived from a review of these measures are that
- China’s product markets have become increasingly competitive in recent years and market forces are now playing the leading role in the setting of prices and the behaviour of agents in the broader economy;3
- China remains a difficult country to do business in; product market regulation is such as to continue to restrict competition in a major way.
Indeed, the OECD data suggests that market regulations are more restrictive in China than anywhere in the OECD countries, including all its transition-economy members. The gaps are large across all three major areas: state control, barriers to international trade and investment, and barriers to entrepreneurship. These results are strongly corroborated by the Doing Business indicators compiled by the World Bank which show poor scores/rankings for starting a business, dealing with licenses, construction permits, employing workers, and paying taxes. The indicators measuring the extent of investor protection are likewise mediocre.
China’s weaknesses in the regulatory and legal framework highlighted by the OECD and World Bank indicators are consistent with members of the business community surveyed in China, who complain of arbitrariness in the application of rules, lack of evenhandedness in the treatment of foreign and domestic investors, and high levels of corruption; the latter is strongly corroborated by a rank of 79 in the Corruption Perceptions Index 2009, which puts China on a par with Burkina Faso and Trinidad and Tobago. A recent report in the Financial Times commenting on the frustrations of doing business in China notes that “the risk-reward calculation between staying quiet and speaking up has shifted towards the latter. With China employing policies including ignoring intellectual property rights, forced technology transfer, and government procurement skewed towards domestic companies, some foreign businesses feel they are being pushed out of the country.”4
Human capital, ICT and R&D
There are a number of other indicators used in the ICI in which China does not score very well, and which thus contribute to dragging its score down. Tertiary enrolment rates of 22 percent are better than in India, but below the majority of countries in Latin America, and below all OECD members, the latter by a significant margin. As might be expected, given China’s stage of development and still relatively low income per capita, the gap is also huge with respect to Japan, Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore. Spending in education, at slightly less than 2 percent of GDP, is also low by international standards. Despite rapid urbanization, China has a sizable rural population engaged in agriculture. Though the literacy rate in the country (93 percent) is well above that of India (66 percent), the fact remains that there are hundreds of millions of people in China who need to be educated and trained to increase their productivity. This will surely be one area where the government will have to do more in coming years, a need made more urgent by China’s rapid integration into the global economy, and a gradual shift in the sources of Chinese competitiveness, from low labor costs and an undervalued exchange rate, to technology and innovation.
As with indicators of education, China, likewise, has mediocre scores in a broad range of indicators that capture the extent of penetration of the latest technologies. As in other parts of the world, progress has been made in recent years in boosting Internet penetration, mobile phone coverage, computer use, access to broadband Internet, and so on. But given China’s large rural population, it is perhaps not surprising that the use of these technologies is still in its early stages. For instance, personal computer use per 100 inhabitants is 5.6, higher than in India (2.8) but about ten times lower than in Korea. China’s rapidly rising income per capita should allow it to narrow these gaps fairly rapidly over the next decade. In the meantime, however, there is little doubt that they slow down innovation capacity.
Research and development expenditure in China is about 1.5 percent of GDP, below the average for the OECD of 2.2 percent of GDP. According to the OECD, if one further looks at R&D spending by industry, the gap with respect to the OECD is much higher, particularly for high-tech industries. This is specially the case for high-tech export industries “which lack a large R&D base in China and continue to rely heavily on foreign-sourced technology embodied in FDI and imported inputs”.5
Improving the social infrastructure
One of the more noticeable trends in China in recent years has been the massive shift of rural populations into urban environments. Whereas in 1980, less than 20 percent of China’s total population of close to 1 billion was living in urban areas, by 2000 this share had risen to 33 percent. The urban population during this period expanded from about 190 million to over 420 million, an impressive growth of over 120 percent. Indeed, at least a few percentage points of the high annual GDP growth rates seen during this period is accounted for by these internal migratory flows, since labor productivity in urban areas is much higher. This trend is expected to continue in coming years and will require careful management. There are several aspects to this.
As is well known, and as in other transition economies, there have been transitory increases in unemployment linked to the inevitable—and much needed—restructuring of the enterprise sector. This has necessitated the introduction of unemployment compensation schemes and, more generally, the buildup of safety nets to mitigate the impact of these adjustment costs on the population, particularly its most vulnerable groups. Like other countries in the industrial world, China will also have to make provisions for its aging population, and more attention will have to be given, therefore, to the development of efficient and modern systems of social protection, particularly pensions. This, in turn, will have implications for the budget. The need for further reforms in this area is highlighted by the fact that by 2030, China’s urban population may well have exceeded 1 billion. Well before the country reaches this threshold, the need for a well-functioning and well-funded social infrastructure will have become a political necessity, especially if the current rural-urban income disparities continue to widen, as they have in recent years. Indeed, China’s political stability will hinge critically on the speed with which the government is able to make progress in this area, at a time when rising protectionist sentiment against booming Chinese exports begins to create a more challenging external environment for the country. An additional benefit of an improved framework for social protection will be that the Chinese population will feel less of a compulsion to save (for old age) and this would stimulate domestic consumption, thereby contributing to reduce China’s huge trade surplus, a constant source of tension with trade partners. Better mechanisms of social protection will also encourage entrepreneurship and long-range planning, key ingredients of successful innovation.
Managing the growth process
For some time now there has been a vigorous debate about the risks that rapid growth rates might pose for macroeconomic stability. Sceptics have pointed out that China’s relatively good inflation performance and some slack in the labor markets suggest that growth could be sustained at the 9+ percent range. However, in recent years, credit growth has at times reached extremely high levels, and a consensus has emerged that managing the growth process in a way that preserves and builds upon the important gains of the past is a key priority for policymakers. This view has been buttressed by a growing perception that rapid growth is leading to a sharp deterioration of the environment, with unforeseen future consequences for public health. However, monetary policy measures—interest rate and reserve requirement increases—are not likely to be enough. There may also be a role for fiscal policies aimed at withdrawing stimulus from the economy. Fortunately, with a low revenue-to-GDP ratio, the authorities have considerable room for maneuver and should not hesitate to use it. Beyond this, further structural reforms, particularly those that boost competition in the economy, reduce the sort of barriers faced by entrepreneurs to start new businesses, and increase transparency and the rule of law will all help to make the Chinese economy more flexible, and will enhance the economy’s productivity and boost its innovation capacity.
The process whereby China plays an increasingly important role in shaping the global agenda will be enhanced if the government sets in motion processes of political reform—the 21st century counterpart of the impressive reforms in the economic area implemented during the past two decades, which have done so much to boost the standards of living of the Chinese population. A China that gradually moves in the direction of giving some political voice to its people can only contribute to enhancing its own ability to nourish an environment conducive to greater innovation.
___________________________
1. Lopez-Claros, Augusto. The Innovation for Development Report 2010–2011. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 25.
2. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2010. Economic Survey: China. Paris. p. 103.
3. ———ibid, pp. 105–7. In 1978, state-owned enterprises accounted for 78 percent of total industrial output and employed 60 percent of the non-farm work-force. “Collectively-owned enterprises accounted for the rest, with no other type of business enterprise permitted at the time.” By 2007, the state controlled 31 percent of industrial output and employed 22 percent of the non-farm workforce.
4. Financial Times, 2010. ‘Foreign Friends’ Lose Reluctance to Criticize China. 20 July. The article quotes an official at the US Information Technology Industry Council saying that “We are feeling less and less welcome in China, which is why you are seeing more people speaking out and reconsidering their futures in China.”
5. OECD, op. cit., p. 25.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Sweden: Why is its innovation outlook so bright?
An impressive performance
Sweden was the top-ranked country in the 2009—and now just recently in the 2010—edition of the Innovation Capacity Index,1 because it does exceptionally well in all the areas captured by the Index. Sweden is an exceptionally good performer, very often placing in the top ranks in those areas identified as being particularly important to assessing innovation capacity. Indeed, Sweden has a rank of number one among 131 countries in transparency and judicial independence, corruption perceptions, gender equity, e-government readiness, personal computer penetration rates, receipts of royalties and license fees, as well as the “doing business” indicators for the time and number of procedures required to register property. It has a rank of 2 in scientific and technical journal articles per capita, environmental sustainability, and research and development expenditure in relation to GDP, where it is second only to Israel. There are 12 other indicators in which Sweden has a top 8 rank, including the quality of its public administration, the effectiveness of its government, rule of law, the more egalitarian distribution of national income, Internet penetration rates, as well as other indicators of good governance.
Sweden’s rank is richly deserved. It is a country that has had an extremely virtuous fiscal policy for the past decade, running budget surpluses with the aim of saving resources to deal with the long-term effects of population aging, but also generating, in the short term, substantial resources to invest heavily in knowledge and training, to earn a top position in terms of labor productivity growth among high income countries. On a per capita basis, Sweden has the largest university system in the world. According to the OECD, “Swedish research is, in relation to the size of its population, leading in the world in terms of scientific output, measured by the number of publications in internationally acknowledged scientific journals.” Sweden is also a leader in terms of patent registration.
Openness and transparency
Sweden has in impressive record of openness and transparency in government. It has put in place comprehensive safety nets which provide security to vulnerable groups in the population. It has thus been able, during periods of economic stress—such as in the context of the 2008–09 world financial crisis—to shelter its population from the effects of the global economic slowdown. Since it also has levels of public debt that are well below those prevailing among competitor countries, Sweden has greater flexibility when it is time to provide fiscal stimulus.
Women in Sweden have access to a wider spectrum of educational, political, and work opportunities and enjoy a higher standard of living than women in other parts of the world. They also have achieved the highest echelons of political power and have an important presence in the business world. Sweden is also an egalitarian society with a more even income distribution than most countries in the OECD and, thus, a strong sense of solidarity and stable labor relations. The country has also achieved an enviable record in terms of caring for the environment; it ranks second in the world in the Environmental Sustainability Index.
Sweden’s public sector is highly qualified and enjoys unusually high degrees of credibility with the business community and civil society. Although the country has high tax rates, there is no evidence that this has discouraged entrepreneurship and innovation. More likely than not, this reflects the fact that the relatively high levels of revenue collection are then reinvested in the economy at large in education, infrastructure development and modernization, public health, and other components of the safety net, as well as training and other productivity-enhancing initiatives, all of which are directly beneficial to the private sector. Having an honest public administration—as demonstrated by Sweden’s privileged and consistently high rankings in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index—suggest that what matters is not whether tax rates are high or not, but rather whether the government uses the taxes collected in ways that will be productive and that will boost its credibility with economic agents.
A leader in ICT
The government has also played an important catalytic role in encouraging the use of the entire spectrum of information and communication technologies, as made clear by the very high penetration rates of mobile phones, computers, broadband, and the Internet. Not only does the government spend generously in research and development (particularly through institutions of higher education), but the Swedish business sector has also been a driving force in R&D spending, particularly in the telecommunications and pharmaceutical sectors. Sweden has benefited from an economy that, according to the OECD, is dominated by public-private partnerships between manufacturing groups that allocate considerable resources to R&D on the one hand, and public agencies and companies, on the other. This has led, in turn, to the emergence of a manufacturing sector that spans “all of the high-technology and medium high-technology industries”.2
A virtuous cycle of development
Sweden is likely to retain a privileged position in future editions of the Innovation Capacity Index. A combination of solid institutions, good policies and a public administration strongly committed to the idea of building upon past achievements has pushed the country into what one might call a virtuous cycle of development. Successive governments have implemented policies whose primary motivation has been the public good. This in turn has transformed the business community and civil society into active, well informed participants in the shaping of public policies. Just as citizens and corporations pay their taxes because the benefits of doing so are tangible and transparent, governments have been empowered to focus their energies and talents in devising innovative ways to improve the quality of governance. Sweden and its Nordic neighbors provide a useful template for other countries to examine, and, where feasible, to emulate. There is much in their approach to development—combining key elements of modern capitalism without some of its excesses, with a strong commitment to social policies that are fundamentally egalitarian in nature—that is worthy of close examination and study.
________________________
1. Lopez-Claros, Augusto. 2010. The Innovation for Development Report 2010–2011. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 25.
2. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and European Communities. 2005. Oslo Manual: Guidelines for Collecting and Interpreting Innovation data, Joint Publication of the OECD and the Statistical Office of the European Communities. p. 190.
Sweden was the top-ranked country in the 2009—and now just recently in the 2010—edition of the Innovation Capacity Index,1 because it does exceptionally well in all the areas captured by the Index. Sweden is an exceptionally good performer, very often placing in the top ranks in those areas identified as being particularly important to assessing innovation capacity. Indeed, Sweden has a rank of number one among 131 countries in transparency and judicial independence, corruption perceptions, gender equity, e-government readiness, personal computer penetration rates, receipts of royalties and license fees, as well as the “doing business” indicators for the time and number of procedures required to register property. It has a rank of 2 in scientific and technical journal articles per capita, environmental sustainability, and research and development expenditure in relation to GDP, where it is second only to Israel. There are 12 other indicators in which Sweden has a top 8 rank, including the quality of its public administration, the effectiveness of its government, rule of law, the more egalitarian distribution of national income, Internet penetration rates, as well as other indicators of good governance.
Sweden’s rank is richly deserved. It is a country that has had an extremely virtuous fiscal policy for the past decade, running budget surpluses with the aim of saving resources to deal with the long-term effects of population aging, but also generating, in the short term, substantial resources to invest heavily in knowledge and training, to earn a top position in terms of labor productivity growth among high income countries. On a per capita basis, Sweden has the largest university system in the world. According to the OECD, “Swedish research is, in relation to the size of its population, leading in the world in terms of scientific output, measured by the number of publications in internationally acknowledged scientific journals.” Sweden is also a leader in terms of patent registration.
Openness and transparency
Sweden has in impressive record of openness and transparency in government. It has put in place comprehensive safety nets which provide security to vulnerable groups in the population. It has thus been able, during periods of economic stress—such as in the context of the 2008–09 world financial crisis—to shelter its population from the effects of the global economic slowdown. Since it also has levels of public debt that are well below those prevailing among competitor countries, Sweden has greater flexibility when it is time to provide fiscal stimulus.
Women in Sweden have access to a wider spectrum of educational, political, and work opportunities and enjoy a higher standard of living than women in other parts of the world. They also have achieved the highest echelons of political power and have an important presence in the business world. Sweden is also an egalitarian society with a more even income distribution than most countries in the OECD and, thus, a strong sense of solidarity and stable labor relations. The country has also achieved an enviable record in terms of caring for the environment; it ranks second in the world in the Environmental Sustainability Index.
Sweden’s public sector is highly qualified and enjoys unusually high degrees of credibility with the business community and civil society. Although the country has high tax rates, there is no evidence that this has discouraged entrepreneurship and innovation. More likely than not, this reflects the fact that the relatively high levels of revenue collection are then reinvested in the economy at large in education, infrastructure development and modernization, public health, and other components of the safety net, as well as training and other productivity-enhancing initiatives, all of which are directly beneficial to the private sector. Having an honest public administration—as demonstrated by Sweden’s privileged and consistently high rankings in Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index—suggest that what matters is not whether tax rates are high or not, but rather whether the government uses the taxes collected in ways that will be productive and that will boost its credibility with economic agents.
A leader in ICT
The government has also played an important catalytic role in encouraging the use of the entire spectrum of information and communication technologies, as made clear by the very high penetration rates of mobile phones, computers, broadband, and the Internet. Not only does the government spend generously in research and development (particularly through institutions of higher education), but the Swedish business sector has also been a driving force in R&D spending, particularly in the telecommunications and pharmaceutical sectors. Sweden has benefited from an economy that, according to the OECD, is dominated by public-private partnerships between manufacturing groups that allocate considerable resources to R&D on the one hand, and public agencies and companies, on the other. This has led, in turn, to the emergence of a manufacturing sector that spans “all of the high-technology and medium high-technology industries”.2
A virtuous cycle of development
Sweden is likely to retain a privileged position in future editions of the Innovation Capacity Index. A combination of solid institutions, good policies and a public administration strongly committed to the idea of building upon past achievements has pushed the country into what one might call a virtuous cycle of development. Successive governments have implemented policies whose primary motivation has been the public good. This in turn has transformed the business community and civil society into active, well informed participants in the shaping of public policies. Just as citizens and corporations pay their taxes because the benefits of doing so are tangible and transparent, governments have been empowered to focus their energies and talents in devising innovative ways to improve the quality of governance. Sweden and its Nordic neighbors provide a useful template for other countries to examine, and, where feasible, to emulate. There is much in their approach to development—combining key elements of modern capitalism without some of its excesses, with a strong commitment to social policies that are fundamentally egalitarian in nature—that is worthy of close examination and study.
________________________
1. Lopez-Claros, Augusto. 2010. The Innovation for Development Report 2010–2011. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 25.
2. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and European Communities. 2005. Oslo Manual: Guidelines for Collecting and Interpreting Innovation data, Joint Publication of the OECD and the Statistical Office of the European Communities. p. 190.
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