(with RL Clarete and GP Concepcion)
Much has been said about our country’s huge infrastructure deficit, particularly in transport, power, and water. And criticisms or suggestions (unsolicited or otherwise) on this vital issue loudly persist which are just kosher till the public sees palpable improvements. By contrast, little is said about our deficient ‘suprastructure’, defined as knowledge capital for innovation capacity resulting from spending on science and technology (S&T) and research and development (R&D). With the Asean Economic Community (AEC) coming into full effect by end-2015, there’s hardly time to waste in addressing these twin deficits.
Research in development and education economics says that technological innovation and economic growth are interactive and mutually reinforcing. This means that economic growth can be sustained by spending for technological innovation that results in new processes, products and markets, and innovation in turn can ensue from R&D made possible by economic growth. Massive investments in ‘suprastructure’, besides infrastructure, are what underlie the sustained rapid growth and inclusive development achieved by our progressive Asian neighbors.
The ultimate aim of countries vis-à-vis globalization – from which there’s no turning back – is typically to maximize the gains while minimizing the unavoidable costs. In this vein, this paper argues that in order to have a fighting chance in AEC competition, the Philippines (PH) needs to substantially and efficiently ramp up investment spending on its ‘suprastructure’. If this is achieved along with the country’s other ongoing policy and institutional reforms, the economy would in time be on a stronger platform to face up to challenges in AEC.
Regional and global competitiveness
The PH economy is known to have skirted the normal progression of growth, as exemplified by the developed and Asian emerging economies, from agriculture to industry, and then to services. Instead, it leapfrogged from an underdeveloped agriculture to services, largely skipping the manufacturing phase. A serious policy-induced mistake as agriculture and manufacturing are arguably key in generating jobs and goods also for export. Of course, it did not help that the country’s politically turbulent 1980s deterred FDIs – particularly from Japan – while its neighbors were going to town riding on the investment and export waves.
PH manufacturing has low technology and scale quality, and is concentrated in low-productivity subsectors, such as food, beverage, tobacco, textile, footwear, clothing, and garments. In stark contrast, in Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea high technology and scale products account for a big chunk of manufacturing. This is partly attributable to our less developed state of S&T and R&D – in turn, due to low general interest in and actual spending for knowledge ‘suprastructure’.
A lethargic and narrow manufacturing subsector (at least up until recently) brought about by scant technological innovation translates to PH’s weak industrial base relative to its regional competitors (Figure 1). According the National Statistics Office 2009 Survey of Innovative Activities (SIA), government support for private innovative activities is limited, and networks for knowledge production are weak. Likewise, university-industry links are scarce, and firms have limited access to technical support from the government and research institutions. In general, the SIA underscores the importance of networking, linkages and technical partnerships between the government, industries, and universities to enable manufacturing to flourish, thereby fostering inclusive economic growth through job creation.
Government-industry-academe partnerships would facilitate skills development needed to support the service sector while moving it up to higher levels, as well as help raise the competitiveness of the manufacturing sector. Over time, skills upgrading will boost the capacity of the country to innovate and implement new technologies.
Institutional and policy reforms initiated by the incumbent government since 2010 appear to be getting traction and paying off in terms improvements in PH’s global competitiveness scores. In the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Global Competitiveness Ranking, 2013-2014, PH jumped six places to 59th from 65th in the previous year. This reflects broad-based improvements particularly in the dimensions of macroeconomic environment, financial market development, business sophistication, and market size. However, among areas that still need upgrading in particular are infrastructure, health and basic education, labour market efficiency, technological readiness, and innovation.
The following cross-country scatter plots relate ex ante R&D expenditures to ex post (or lagged) industrial and university competitiveness (Figures 2-3). Intuitively, the positive relationship between R&D and industrial competitiveness highlights the importance of innovation in manufacturing. And, needless to say, the connection between R&D spending and university competitiveness (in which PH, sadly, along with Thailand and Indonesia don’t show up) seems rather straightforward.
Human resources and intellectual capital
PH’s level of public spending on education as a fraction of GDP has been quite low compared with its Asean and East Asian neighbors. In the 1980, the country spent 1.72 percent of GDP on public education and rising to 2-3 percent in the 2000s, compared with the Asean-5’s average of 5-6 percent over the same periods (Figure 4).
This is worrisome given PH’s subpar education investment level, to begin with, and its larger and younger population. Studies show that increase in factor productivity (in which human capital investment is crucial) is the third largest source of world output growth after growth in employment and in physical capital per worker. Having an elite pool of scientists to generate technological innovation and a workforce with basic skills that can apply new technology in production generates the strongest contribution to economic growth.
Improving quality in, besides merely increasing resources for, education is critical to fully capture the beneficial effects on economic growth. Educational expenditure directed to such activities as R&D, faculty development, and facilitation of linkages with global centers of excellence will greatly impact the level and quality of the human capital of university graduates. There is strong evidence that the cognitive skills of the population—rather than simply school attainment—are robustly related to workers’ earnings, distribution of income, and economic growth.
Spending on R&D covers current and capital expenditures (both public and private) on creative work undertaken systematically to increase knowledge – including of humanity, culture and society – and the use of knowledge for new applications. PH’s R&D spending stuck at around 0.15 percent for years is woefully inadequate for its 21st century requirements. Sadly, this reflects the importance the government and society in general give to investment in ‘suprastructure’ relative to PH’s Asean contemporaries’ R&D spending which hews closer to the UNESCO norm of 1 percent of GDP (Figure 5).
In order for the country to transition to a knowledge-based economy, investments in S&T and R&D are a sine qua non. They not only contribute to increased productivity but, more importantly, lead to innovative products and processes. Government should lead in incentivizing and sponsoring basic and applied research in diverse fields. A 2012 UNESCO study identifies factors that may hamper innovation activity. In the case of the Philippines, 20.9 percent of firms rated the high cost of innovation as the most important economic impediment. Such factors as lack of qualified personnel, information technology, information markets, and difficulty in finding suitable partners also constrain the innovation efforts of the private sector.
The highest levels of R&D spending correspond to countries that are well known for industry, technology and innovation, such as Singapore, Japan and Korea. The number of patents filed suggests a close correlation with the level of R&D expenditure of countries. PH’s number of patent applications has been among the lowest in Asia, namely, 1.8 per million population in 2010 while Thailand had 17.6, Malaysia 43.4, and Vietnam 3.5. Indeed, we reap to the extent that we sow!
Expenditures on R&D and public education particularly at the tertiary level are also reflected in the number of published scientific and technical journal articles. In the 1980s, PH scientists and engineers published an average of 138.8 articles per year. This rose to 156.4 articles in the 1990s and further to 185.5 in 2000s. A far cry from Malaysia’s yearly average of 694.1 articles in 2000s, Singapore’s 3,325, and Thailand’s 1,291.
Higher education Institutions
Higher education institutions (HEIs) are regularly ranked regionally and internationally. In the 2014 Quacquarelli-Symonds (QS) rankings of Asian universities, of the 38 Asean universities in the top 250, the Philippines has only four, viz. UP, ADMU, UST, and DLSU. The main criteria in the rankings are academic reputation, employer reputation, faculty-student ratio, papers per faculty, citations per paper, international faculty and students, and inbound and outbound exchanges.
In the QS-Asean ranking, UP is merely 8th of 10 universities, and has next to the lowest total government funding after the University of Indonesia which ranks 10th (Table 1). Except for three outliers, the data show a fairly close correlation between government funding and the QS ranking.
Even more telling are the disparities in faculty compensation. For instance, the basic monthly salary (in US$) for a full professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS) is $14,051 versus $2,821.4 in the University of Malaya (UM) [both as of 2010] and $1,862 in UP as of 2013. The data also show that UP’s full professor has a basic salary even lower than that of a lecturer ($3,910) in NUS and an associate professor’s ($2,016.3) in UM.
The foregoing evidently points to the need to scale up the standards of our HEIs in general toward parity in AEC. Government resources will no doubt prove puny for even just the main SUCs (state universities and colleges) scattered across the archipelago, let alone the private HEIs. Private resources would have to be mobilized in addition – hence, a case for public-private partnerships in ‘suprastructure’ investment.
Meanwhile, considering the hefty funding required for high-level research and teaching, there appears a need to first focus scarce resources on a select few research and teaching universities that can form the nucleus of the ‘suprastructure’. This would result in wider spread effects (e.g., MS and PhD graduates and research leads) to other HEIs over time. Having been officially ordained the “National University” through R.A. 9500 (29 April 2008), UP is expected to perform the lead role in this endeavor.
Mobilization of both public and private resources to strengthen our ‘suprastructure’ can more likely be achieved if society accords a higher value to quality education, R&D and innovation capacity required for jacking up the economy’s regional and global competitiveness. Media could greatly help in rebalancing society’s cultural values from the glitz and glamour of showbiz and sports to the critical importance of S&T and R&D for the country’s economic modernization and long-run inclusive development.
Concluding thoughts
It is time that our country seriously recognized and resolutely dealt with its scientific and technological shortcomings as there is no turning back from economic openness and globalization. Indeed, the urgency is further underscored with the AEC integration knocking at the door. Goods, capital and labor – including high-level human resources (both actual and potential) – can then move freely across national borders, thereby sharply heightening competition.
In the near term, given PH’s considerable lag in industrial progress, the effort should be for a massive investment in quality Master-of-Science (MS) programs, to speedily produce able MS graduates to address the human capital needs in the various economic sectors, especially for R&D in technology-based manufacturing industries and knowledge-based BPOs. Likewise, Bachelor-of-Science (BS) programs should be strengthened especially in terms of their technical components, such that graduates could also be readily employed in industry, prior perhaps to pursuing higher degrees. Likewise, institutions like TESDA should be geared to providing solid vocational-technical training of workers in large numbers who are especially needed in small- and medium-size enterprises that constitute the predominant majority of the industrial sector.
In the longer term, the goal should be to develop Filipino scientists and engineers with PhDs (besides MSs and MAs) in quantity and quality adequate to support the economy’s growth that will be inclusive and self-sustaining. This, in turn, would enable our ‘suprastructure’ to move to a higher plane as will be required by an increasingly sophisticated knowledge-based economy.
*The authors are professor emeritus of economics (EMP), UP Diliman; professor and dean, School of Economics, UP Diliman (RLC); and vice president for academic affairs of the UP System and professor of The Marine Science Institute, UP Diliman (GPC). The article derives from a research paper, UP School of Economics Discussion Paper No. 2014-07, available on the UPSE website.
1 comment
LUIS R. VILLAFUERTE says:
Sep 29, 2014
— From LUIS R. VILLAFUERTE SR., Alternative Policy Development Group, former governor and congressman (third district), Camarines Sur
Knowledge-building and poverty reduction
The article “Investing in suprastructure,” authored by E. M. Pernia, R. L. Clarete and G. P. Padilla Concepcion (Talk of the Town, 9/3/14), was timely and appropriate. It highlighted our country’s deficit in “suprastructure,” which the authors defined as “knowledge capital for innovation capacity.” The deficit has been the result of inadequate spending on science and technology (S&T) and research and development (R&D), the development of which is imperative if we must advance knowledge and technology capital that’s required for our country’s competitiveness and sustained economic growth.
The article made clear right at the outset that investing in “suprastructure” is not the be-all-and-end-all of our country’s development strategy as we also have a huge physical infrastructure deficit (e.g., in transport, power and water). Moreover, there are other areas that need much attention, such as basic education and healthcare, labor market efficiency, disaster risk management and environment. In short, the focus of the article on knowledge capital for innovation cannot and should not be misconstrued as ignoring or not taking cognizance of these and other areas of concern.
Our country’s leaders and policymakers should be made aware of the critical importance of strengthening our knowledge capital to enable us to technologically innovate toward introducing and adopting new processes, products and markets for economic progress and inclusive development. To this end, there is also a need to foster government-university-industry partnerships. On these scores, it is a fact that we have fallen well behind our Asean neighbors. We have a lot of catching up to do, and developing knowledge capital takes a long time.
The urgency of investing in “suprastructure” is not necessarily tied to the AEC’s (Asean Economic Community’s) end-2015 date. Of course, everyone knows that the AEC’s goal or “dream” of integration will not be blown in by the wind on Jan. 1, 2016 morning following the New Year’s Eve revelry. Integration will be a long slog. But the end-2015 date must serve as a spur to make the necessary preparations so that our country can optimize whatever gains could be obtained from Asean integration, in particular, and globalization in general, while effectively minimizing, to the extent practicable, the associated costs.
The article, “Can ‘elite scientists’ save PH?” by Eduardo C. Tadem, Ramon G. Guillermo, Maria Victoria R. Raquiza and Nicolo del Castillo (Talk of the Town, 9/7/14), seemed to miss the main point and key messages of “Investing in suprastructure.” Tadem and company’s piece seemed to suggest that “Investing” was insensitive to the issues of basic needs, poverty and inclusive growth, and that it was too concerned about the AEC becoming full-blown by end-2015. Building knowledge capital and reducing poverty can be mutually beneficial. They need not exclude each other!
Sans the misunderstanding by their critics, both articles can and should be reconciled in the national interest.