If you want to learn karate, learn it from a black belt

Imagine for a second you were in the business school. Would you spend your summer internship in a company about to go bankrupt? Would you study only cases of companies which failed? Probably not.

Now let’s say you are in medical school. Would you focus on case studies of very fit decathlon athletes? Would you study only healthy people? Unlikely.

Now is running a country more like running a business or is it more like treating a patient?

At least in the MPA/ID we use a lot of medical analogies: “diagnostics”, “pathologies”, “shock therapy”. We also only study sick countries. Our “success stories” are for the most part very poor countries. China has grown but its still pretty poor, let alone India. Even South Korea and Taiwan are not about to join the G7 anytime soon. Shouldn’t we look more at the developed world?

One thing that strikes me about developing countries that are doing well is that they do study what the rich countries have done – they study it a lot. I remember when I was working with the Chinese government. They were always looking for the international benchmarks and trying to emulate them (they are the kings of piracy after all!). Of course they adapted their strategy to a Chinese reality, but that was often more a question of circumstances on the ground rather than their original intent. The same can be said of the Gulf. Dubai for example has essentially copied financial regulation straight from the UK to form a booming financial centre. Even Chile, who pioneered pension fund reform, still looked at how successful funds are managed in the developed world.

Of course, if you were paying attention in Dani’s class you may now say “Developing countries have their own realities, they are just different. We don’t need another Washington Consensus/best practices manual”. But maybe you slept during his class… you may still go with Lant’s approach and simply say that “You can’t jump straight to a post-modern paradigm!”

I am not saying that we should ignore developing country realities, but shouldn’t we look a bit more at things that do work? A mechanic who has never seen a car working is not likely to fix your car…

This whole long-winded story is to say that Malaysia – a country known for shunning the IMF during the Asian crisis and for being successfully heterodox in its policies – is looking for best-practices just like anyone else. Luckily my summer internship is in a sector in which I have seen the best practices in action. I can be useful. But I wonder sometimes… what if was working on, say, education here in Malaysia? I have studied all about cameras in schools in rural India, but I have no clue on how to run schools that don’t need a camera in the first place.

The MPA/ID is about “tools” (as it should be) and not about cases, so no fault on the program. But the lesson from my experience here so far is still valid: In practice you really want to learn from those who know what they are doing.