Dear Rob
Thanks for this very helpful note and the web link. I totally agree with you that moving outside extant confidence intervals is an art not a science.
I am therefore all the more troubled at the plethora of doxological assertions about national growth rates and not just India /- the new "China slowdown" or "Brazil is broken" assertions are other examples. - which are unquestioningly picked up by media like the FT and the Economist ( not to mention universities which have little expertise on emerging economies but need to cater to their customer's demands for a " take" ).
They then become part of mainstream discourse about these countries, who have then to face the costs while the unaccountable IMF/ World bank bureaucrat- technocrats suffer no financial or reputational costs for being inaccurate and technically clumsy. As I argue in the article I shared, this is just annoying until you glance at the politics -- the bureaucrats have, in fact, done the job they are paid to do, and inaccuracy and non-transparency is an essential for them to deliver what their managements really want!
This business is not harmless for developing countries . It generates noise in the policy space, particularly in economies classified as "dragons" "tigers" etc. making the task of domestic policy makers all the more difficult. It is therefore very important for countries to call this bluff.
There was a time when this was a role the UN used to perform but that can no longer be expected I am currently in NY and I find the NY based organisations intellectually and politically subordinated to OECD/BWI thought. It's like the 1990s again here.
We are fortunate that outside New York, people like you and Isabel Ortiz, continue to challenge orthodoxy, much as Richard Jolly and Cornea did from within UNICEF twenty five years ago.
Rathin Roy
Director National Institute of Public Finance and Policy New Delhi
rathin.roy@nipfp.org.in
Thanks for this very helpful note and the web link. I totally agree with you that moving outside extant confidence intervals is an art not a science.
I am therefore all the more troubled at the plethora of doxological assertions about national growth rates and not just India /- the new "China slowdown" or "Brazil is broken" assertions are other examples. - which are unquestioningly picked up by media like the FT and the Economist ( not to mention universities which have little expertise on emerging economies but need to cater to their customer's demands for a " take" ).
They then become part of mainstream discourse about these countries, who have then to face the costs while the unaccountable IMF/ World bank bureaucrat- technocrats suffer no financial or reputational costs for being inaccurate and technically clumsy. As I argue in the article I shared, this is just annoying until you glance at the politics -- the bureaucrats have, in fact, done the job they are paid to do, and inaccuracy and non-transparency is an essential for them to deliver what their managements really want!
This business is not harmless for developing countries . It generates noise in the policy space, particularly in economies classified as "dragons" "tigers" etc. making the task of domestic policy makers all the more difficult. It is therefore very important for countries to call this bluff.
There was a time when this was a role the UN used to perform but that can no longer be expected I am currently in NY and I find the NY based organisations intellectually and politically subordinated to OECD/BWI thought. It's like the 1990s again here.
We are fortunate that outside New York, people like you and Isabel Ortiz, continue to challenge orthodoxy, much as Richard Jolly and Cornea did from within UNICEF twenty five years ago.
Rathin Roy
Director National Institute of Public Finance and Policy New Delhi
rathin.roy@nipfp.org.in
