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During a recently invited lecture to a group of government employees from different ministries and public organisations, I suddenly had a sense of what it might be like if countries of the Indian subcontinent got back together again in new ways of collaboration! My lecture's topic was Human Development Index (HDI), which was a product of Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and Bengali-Indian economist Amartya Sen. The Haq-Sen collaboration produced a reliable single number indicator of development achievement that is now seen as less crude than another single number indicator like the gross domestic product (GDP). Their successful venture made me wonder why we do not see more such collaborations to generate wonders like the HDI?
In deconstructing the latest HDI for Bangladesh and the rest of the world, one issue that came out of my lecture is how often we lack data needed to pinpoint the source of a problem. If a ranking of 'stock of data' were available, indisputably Bangladesh would rank in the bottom tier, despite its improved relative position in the HDI. It is rather bewildering that Bangladesh has done better than most developing countries at improving the basic standard of living of its people without adequate reliable data. But the transition to a modern knowledge driven economy may require a far wider supply of tested data, along with material capital and human capital.
At the outset of my lecture, I asked the participants a simple question as to why the GDP data is available annually in Bangladesh, while it is published quarterly in India? The question took a different turn when they were asked why district-level GDP data are not available in Bangladesh, even at the annual frequency. They seem to like both the questions, and some correctly pointed out the huge money factor involved in publishing the national GDP data every quarter. Because the lecture participants were all government employees, I refrained from labeling the government of the inability to publish disaggregated GDP by districts. GDP is an indicator where the whole is obtained by summing its parts, be it by sectors or districts. The fact that sectoral GDP is published, while the district GDP is not, tells us that the government is not yet ready to share the geographic differences in income among its citizens. And there is no pressure for such disaggregated data from academics or civil society. When the Awami League government came into power in 1996, the district GDP data were published for 1996-2000. The data is still available on the website of the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS). We are missing the legacy of the then finance minister Shah AMS Kibria.
A similar plight of data inadequacy also exists for the consumer price index (CPI), another widely tracked economic indicator. Unlike the GDP, the CPI is published monthly, but it is available in a highly aggregated form (at a 2-digit level), whereas the original data is supposed to be available at an 8-digit level. We are currently permitted to know about food inflation, but we do not know whether the high food prices are due to expensive meat or rising dairy prices, and if it is due to meat, is it because of expensive chicken, beef, or lamb meat. For researchers and policymakers these details are astonishingly useful. The way the CPI is constructed, one cannot get value for the whole without knowing its parts. So, again we are deprived of disaggregate price levels that would have allowed us to understand who gains or loses from inflation, among other things.
Here I wish multilateral agencies like World Bank or the United Nations suggest or aspire such disaggregate data from Bangladesh government. Such a level of granularity would help them to offer more sound advice to the government. Thanks to World Bank's open data policy, it is now easy to obtain time series data of Bangladesh since 1960. One can verify this by browsing World Bank's World Development Indicator database. Ironically, Bangladeshi students have to rely on foreign data providers for the historical GDP, because it is not available on BBS's website. Bangladesh Bank has attempted to overcome the poor data accessibility by lumping all economic data in an excel spreadsheet. However, its effort could have been more effective had it used the technology of a professional data provider such as the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. My students struggle when they need historical data like remittance inflows or the current account balance of Bangladesh. Even though Bangladesh is the owner of these data, we have to acquire the data from foreign web portals due to our slow and often clunky government websites.
Unfortunately, our lament for inadequate data collection and data reporting does not stop here. We will never be rich in producing data unless we have sufficient human capital in the area of statistics. Statistics is not the most popular discipline among university students in Bangladesh. After all, how many of our aunts and uncles studied statistics to inspire future generations into statistics, an anachronistic academic discipline rooted in the past. At my university, the statistics department had to be consolidated with the mathematics department due to low enrollment. I am not aware of any other private university offering an undergraduate major in statistics. Every year over 8,000 students go to the United States for higher education. When I show my university students that statistics is among the top five fastest-growing occupations in America, it seems to surprise them greatly, realising that hardly anyone of our own goes to America to study statistics. If we think about it, statistical knowledge is highly transferable like that of computer science. Unlike social science scholars, where solving local problems often require local knowledge, most data and statistical related issues can be addressed from a far away continent. The dearth of well-trained government statisticians is a primary cause of the paucity of accurate data in Bangladesh. We need an industrial-style programme to treat data and statistics as a strategic industry, as data is becoming the fuel of the future.
Let me end the article with some historical anecdotes. During World War II, dozens of statisticians helped Britain and its allies to win the war. As reported in the Economist, British statisticians analysed the distribution of German bombs falling on London each day and found out that the Germans were trying to destroy the docks without much success. They also studied the distribution of stresses on aircrafts so that flights can carry more bombs before wings were about to drop off. After the war, statistics became a prominent discipline in both British and American universities and strong research groups were founded, which helped improve the quality-control method in manufacturing, among other lasting contributions. One important factor behind the creation of Bangladesh was the severe economic maltreatment of the then East Bengal. Here also, data and statistics played an important role in the writings of Bengali writers in disseminating the glaring disparity that Bangladesh was facing in the pre-independence period. The statistics helped our liberation war, and now it is our turn to help statistics to prepare our war against poverty and corruption to ensure the future wellbeing of the citizens. Dr. Mo Ibrahim, a Sudanese-British entrepreneur and philanthropist, puts it quite simply: "Another SDG is required: Serious Data Gathering."
Syed Abul Bashar is a professor of Economics at East West University.