discussion on "lessons of experience and future"
TRANSCRIPT
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Discussion by Tom Coup, EERC-Kyiv
The three papers presented here all have been written by, and present the view of , people who
administer the programs that were established to improve economics education and research;
Robert Campbell as president of the international advisory board of EERC, William
Lyakurwa as Executive Director of AERC and Ramona Angelescu and Lyn Squire as
representatives of the Global development network. My discussion is written from the other
side most of my comments are based on my 3 years as assistant professor at EERC Ukraine.
Some of my comments will be based on my experience as a participant in the research
competitions of GDN. I will also refer to what I think we can learn from the African
experience described by Dr. Lyakurwa
Despite the fact that it is now almost 15 years since the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine
became independent, and despite the fact that EERC-Ukraine now exists for almost 10 years,
the state of economics education and research in Ukraine is still far from what it should be.
Every year during the admission exams we see that many students of the so-called economics
departments have no clue about what economics really is. They still confus e economics with
marketing, accounting and management. The few that have had econometrics often studied
some theoretical concepts but never had any practical exercises. And students still think that
cheating on exams is acceptable and that you write a research paper by copy-and-pasting from
what is available on the internet.
The above mentioned problems are structural problems which are unlikely to be solved
quickly. I have two examples to illustrate this: I proctored an exam for undergraduate
economics students at a university that enjoys the reputation of being one of the best
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universities in Ukraine. Despite this, the professor was not intervening when students were
talking or looking at their neighbors sheets. Even more striking, students were allowed to
leave the classroom in groups, to have a smoke in the corridor. Second, a Candidate NAUK
(local version of a PHD) told me that during the defense of her thesis, one of the jury
members had told her that she should not report the standard errors of her regression
estimates. Both examples point at the core of the problem the average professor has neither
the skills nor the attitudes that one would expect and require at a Western university. As a
consequence, the young aspirants have bad role models and old problems linger on.
MA programs like NES and EERC-Kyiv are successful in training their students in modern
economics and in changing, to a large extent, their attitudes towards cheating and
unprofessional behavior. And in that way, these MA programs have some influence on the
business environment where their graduates work. They have been very successful in
influencing the think thank sector in Kyiv, the think thank sector is dominated by EERC
graduates. To what extent the think thanks have been able to influence the policy makers, is
more difficult to determine. Another way their graduates influence policy is through their
jobs at the offices of international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF. Direct
influence through graduates working for the politicians in parliament or in the government is
rather exceptional not in the least because of the low pay in the public sector. But even those
who, because of patriotic reasons, decide to work for the government are unlikely to use the
more advanced methods they study at the MA programs. Ministers dont require regressions;
summary statistics will do as well.
The low pay for public sector workers also affects the success of the MA programs in placing
their graduates as teachers at local universities. Of the students that graduated from EERC-
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Kyiv and decided not to go for a PHD abroad, 5 at most are teaching at a local university. For
those who went for PHD, the only place in Ukraine to go back to is EERC-Kyiv given that all
the other economics departments dont pay more than a couple of hundreds of dollars to their
faculty members.
The low salaries paid by the universities make the existence of grant competitions like GDN
or EERC crucial. One of our alumni told me he would quit his job at a university if he had not
been successful in a grant competition. Grant competitions are thus important for maintaining
capacity. I think however that grant competitions and capacity building should be separated
as much as possible if we have a regional competition, quality should be the only factor to
determine who gets and who does not get a grant it is not a good idea to give a grant to a
mediocre proposal of a citizen of country A, a country which has no capacity when theres a
better proposal written by a citizen of country B, a country which has already some capacity
built up. Such a policy creates anger, discontent and a feeling of unfairness, among the
participants of the grant competition. If one wants to build capacity in country A, its in my
mind better to organize extra training sessions for country As researcher so as to make them
competitive in grant competitions. One specific way to build capacity is through MA
programs: alumni from the MA programs in Kyiv and Moscow typically do very well in the
grant competitions.
Because of the low number of MA graduates choosing for a career in academia, the MA
programs probably have had much more impact on their countries economics education
through their outreach efforts than through their graduates. Student conferences, outreach
conferences, seminar and summer schools have an impact on those who have already self-
selected into the profession of teachers and are likely to continue teaching. MA graduates in
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contrast interested in teaching go to the West for a PHD. Therefore, one should not expect
that creating a local PHD program will lead to a substantial improvement in the level of
economics education in a country. Indeed if the level of such a local PHD program would be
of Western quality, its graduates would compete with Western graduates for Western jobs and
Western pay. Just like the MAs they would not become low paid professors at local
universities.
What would be the advantages of a local western-style PHD? It would strengthen the research
environment; professors would have an opportunity to teach more advanced courses, the MA
graduates would have an opportunity to get a good PHD degree in their own country. But if
they would want to work in academia after their PHD, going abroad would still be the most
likely option. Rather than starting a Western-style PHD program with PHD courses I am more
in favor of upgrading the existing aspirantura education. The Joint Facility for Electives of
the AERC seems to me an excellent example, bringing aspirants from different regional
universities together and teaching them up-to-date contents and techniques. Combined with
research workshops where thesis proposals are presented, progress is monitored and theses are
defended, again like in the African model, you get a model that will revolutionize the level of
educators. That there is a demand from local educators to increase their knowledge can be
illustrated by the application statistics for 2 summer schools we will organize in July, together
with EERC Moscow and the European Economic Association. For each available place, we
had almost 3 applicants.
Rather than starting up a PHD program some might consider scaling up the efforts to build
capacity in economics education and research by opening more MA programs in other
regions. Here are some thoughts on this.
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First, the existing MA programs have been successful in creating centers of excellence in
economics education and research in Ukraine and Russia. Without doubt similar centers of
excellence can be created in other countries. However, none of the existing centers in the CIS
have reached the stage where they are able to be sustainable without the help of foreign
donors. EERC Ukraine has been successful in obtaining some funds from local oligarchs. The
ironic thing here is that the oligarchs that now support EERC are the oligarchs who were
opposed to the Orange Revolution. The orange government in contrast so far did not show
any interest in funding MA education and research in economics.
The local funds so far, however, are not enough to sustain the program: for the next two years,
about a third of EERC Kyivs budget will come from local donors. If, in order to support the
new centers, the existing donors decide to shift money from existing centers to new centers, I
fear that we will get more economics education and research in say Georgia and Kyrgyzstan
but (much) less in Ukraine and Russia.
Second, if the donors decide to create new centers, they should seriously consider giving
endowments to these centers rather than providing them with yearly, three-yearly or even
five-yearly grants. None of the existing centers in the CIS has been able to grow out of donor
support and it would be very optimistic to hope that new centers would do better. In Europe,
MA programs are mainly financed through government support, in the US mainly through
government support or through endowments. CEU in Hungary has an endowment of Soros;
CERGE gets quite a bit of government support. Nobody however expects much financial
support for MA education from governments in the CIS in the near future and philanthropy is
still scarce and very random, definitely not something one would want to count on1.
1 The support of the Kazakh government for an economics PHD seems to be an exception.
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The only way for donors to be sure to have a long lasting impact is by providing an
endowment to these institutions. Such an endowment would focus life at these centers on
quality and growth, rather than on survival. The annually returning question of do we have
enough money for the next two years so we can enroll a new class rather than start shutting
down the program could then be replaced by the question: how do we improve the quality of
our teaching and our research. Focus on the second question would make it much easier to
attract, retain and motivate faculty and staff.
I wonder why donors are so reluctant to provide endowments they either are convinced that
the problems they help to alleviate are temporary, that the projects they start will solve the
problems quickly or they hope somebody else will take over. I really would like to see some
statistics on the survival changes of donor-funded projects that have been started without an
endowment. Recently, USAID and the Soros Foundation gave $15 million to establish an
endowment for the American University of Central Asia. I hope this is a first sign that donors
understand the importance of endowments for educational programs.
Endowments would make it easier to retain faculty members, which is especially crucial since
the faculty members are the ones that have to build the new institution. People that come for
just one year have little incentives to invest time and effort in the improvement of the program
by the time they know the program and see how it can be improved, they are already
thinking about their next job. And why would they write grant proposals to get additional
funding for teaching, research or outreach? By the time the grants gets approved they will
already have left the program. Longer term stays indeed leads to a feeling of ownership, the
faculty members become residual claimants, hence have interest in strengthening the program.
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If the donors would prefer not too give an endowment, a recommendation I would like to give
to the new centers is to start as cheap as possible, that is combine some Western educated
PhDs with upgraded local teachers. The latter, while not attaining the level of the Western
PhDs, can still provide a reasonable level of quality education. They can be paid a wage that
is high relative to local standards but low relative to international standards which makes long
run sustainability much easier to achieve. Moreover, donors should be flexible in terms of
how fast the money they give should be spent. Now, often money has to be spent within a
given period which is the best excuse to waste money.
To summarize, in my opinion, the efforts of donors to stimulate economics education and
research in the CIS have been successful in Ukraine, for example, there is now a pool of
properly qualified economists available , who can supply government and business with
advice based on sound analysis. What remains to be done is putting more effort on getting
business and government to realize the importance of such advice and to try to increase the
impact we have on education at local universities.