In such times of political salience, opinions of experts are
of high demand. Politicians are very welcoming of any information they can use
to support their political interests. The academe consisting of scholars and
experts have a very critical role to play and therefore it is very crucial that
they exercise caution in their writing. I write this post in response to
various articles coming out bearing their assessments of various regimes –
Marcos, Aquino, and even Arroyo. I aim not to refute their claims because that
would take time and to fight numbers, I’d need to present mine. Rather, I
merely want to pose questions to writers and analysts who have written or are
planning to write such articles and this goes not only to the anti-Marcos
academia or anti-GMA academia but to all people wanting to do the compare-and-contrast
piece. I also want to send my message to readers for them not to take things at
face value.
Numbers don’t lie
True enough, numbers don’t lie. And so it is very tempting
to check various numbers like the GDP growth, amount of external debt, debt
ratios, expenditures, balance of payments, credit ratings and the like. So what
many usually do is to pick numbers corresponding to the years covered by a
particular administration and without much thought – attribute these to the
administration during that period. I present several points why such assessment
may be grossly flawed.
The truth is – policies and programs do take time to effect.
Programs or policies implemented within a 4-year or 6-year rule may produce
benefits that can only be felt 10-20 years after initial implementation. Of
course in the 20-year rule by Pres. Marcos, there is a better chance of seeing
the effects within that timeframe. But even then, infrastructures like major
dams, roads, and bridges built by this regime in the 1970s and early 1980s still
benefit many to this day. Likewise, airport terminals built or rehabilitated
during the Arroyo administration may have been instrumental in the arrival of
more tourists or the more efficient air transport today. To attribute these to
the present administration just because we can only feel and see such effects now
is just not fair. So this becomes an issue of calculation. In your cost-benefit
analysis, if you even conduct one, for instance, how do you conduct your
valuation of benefits of major infrastructures where the gains to the people lie
beyond one’s regime? As mentioned earlier, many of the infrastructures that
Marcos or Gloria Arroyo spent on are being utilized to these days. These also
have to be considered before one can say anything about cost-effectiveness of
borrowings.
Establishing
causality
Likewise, and more importantly, the policy process including
implementation does not happen in a void. In writing or reading articles that
attribute effects to a particular factor – in this case a particular regime’s
policy, one needs to be careful about causality. Is the analysis rigorous
enough to establish causality? If you say that a particular regime did so bad,
borrowed too much, that the economy has suffered so much, you are saying that
this regime has ‘caused’ such bad outcome. In school, especially in graduate
school, we are taught to draw our conclusions only after careful and rigorous
analysis, more so if what we are claiming is causality. Some would argue that
we should be strict with the causality requirements only in more critical fields
like medicine. I disagree, all analyses that attempt to make attributions must be
scientifically founded. Otherwise, we should not forget to highlight the caveats.
There are 3 requirements before one can establish causality –
the temporal requirement, correlation, and lastly, the absence or ruling out of
confounding factors. The first two are easier to establish relative to the
third. Temporal requirement merely asks that the cause we claim happens before
the effect. There is a problem if they happen simultaneously. The second one
asks for a correlation – meaning if authoritative regime is equal to chaos or
economic recession, then the opposite must also be true, without authoritative
regime, we get a better economic outcome. We look into the entire history of
the country and if we see such pattern then there is a correlation. Since it is
widely accepted that there is only one authoritative regime so far, this is
quite difficult to establish. What one can do is to look for other countries’
experiences. And believe me, this is yet to be established as it has stirred a
long and continuing debate among economists and political scientists all over
the world.
The last requirement and perhaps the most important in this
discussion is the absence of confounding factors. This has haunted every analyst
because it is very difficult to rule our other possible explanations. In layman’s
term – it means that when we attribute the problems of the economy to the policies
of a particular regime, we must ensure that no other factors – no external
shocks, no natural and man-made calamities, no domestic factors like rebellion
or internal conflict, and no foreign influences or interventions have affected
the outcome we are looking at. Only after we have determined that these factors
did not confound the outcome can we truly say that it is caused by the
policies. So, have we ruled them out?
Look more closely
There is also what we call construct validity. There is a
construct validity problem if the program we’re looking at was not implemented as
it should be, if ever implemented, because of whatever reasons or factors
prevailing during those times. In short, de facto was different from de jure. Blaming
it is of no use. This means that you cannot attribute the outcome to something
that is either incompletely implemented or not implemented at all. An example
is the Bataan Nuclear Power Plant, why blame the Marcos regime for the debt it
incurred to construct the plant, hence our failure to benefit from it, when it
was abandoned by succeeding administrations? The same goes to other projects that
were in the pipeline but were abandoned by administrations that succeeded, and
these are projects that Marcos had started to build with the billions of
dollars he borrowed.
Meanwhile, looking at mere patterns of government expenditures,
debts, among others, fails to account at where the money went to – does it
comprise of big time infrastructures or dole out expenses? If one regime borrowed
and spent $100 million while another had $2 billion, what do we make of this?
Do we look at the needs met? Do we look at the quality of spending? I don’t see
such in the articles I’ve read, only outright attributions with not much deep
analysis.
What to do
So how should we do our assessments then? I’m no expert but
in my humble opinion, I suggest all we can do is to make an account of outputs vis-à-vis
inputs and not attribute broad outcomes to regimes because outcomes are a
function of so many factors not even an authoritative regime can control. It is
so easy to credit or discredit a person depending on where your allegiances are.
Understandably, even scholars and researchers like us have our own political
leanings and principles. Nevertheless, we should not allow ourselves to use our
craft loosely just to arrive at a conclusion that supports a particular
political agenda to the extent that we sacrifice sound analysis and our
reputation as researchers or academics.
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