Experts focus on reforms to achieve good governance in Arab countries
IMF ME CEF organizes symposium
Top and above: some photos of the symposium.
By Cinatra Alvares
ny policy is only as good as the data that informs it,’ stated Dr Louis Marc Ducharme, Chief Statistician and Data Officer, and Director of the IMF’s Statistics Department, at a high level symposium organized by the IMF Middle East Center for Economics and Finance (CEF) in Kuwait, jointly with the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development (AFESD), last Wednesday, at the Arab Organizations Headquarters.
The panel discussion, the tenth of its kind, was chaired and moderated by HE Dr Yousef Al-Ebraheem, Economic Advisor at Al-Diwan Al-Amiri and included Dr Louis Marc Ducharme, as the keynote speaker with Dr Salam Fayyad, distinguished scholar and lecturer at Princeton University and former prime minister of Palestine; and Dr Ziad Bahaa-Eldin, founder and managing partner at Thebes Consultancy and former deputy prime minister of Egypt, providing complementary analysis of the reforms needed to achieve good governance in Arab countries.
Dr Al-Ebraheem indicated that the symposium aimed at stimulating an open debate on the evolving economic challenges faced by policymakers in Kuwait and the wider Arab community and affirmed that it would look closely at the importance of good quality data for good evidence-based policy making. “The need to design and develop systems of transparent and high quality data has become more urgent in the Arab world. The oil-based economies in the region are under a lot of pressure to reform their economies by reducing their dependency on oil and to reformulate their subsidy schemes, he said.”
He stressed that high quality transparent data was needed to succeed and added that sharing of this data would enhance dialogue and inclusiveness among society. “Innovation in data management and data collection, and advancement in digitization and computational power has improved the quality of data to become a clear institutional asset, he said.”
Dr Ducharme’s keynote address focused on the importance of transparent, high quality, and timely data for good governance centered around three topics of discussion – why transparent, high quality and timely data are important for good economic governance, how the IMF can help improve the quality and timeliness of data to strengthen economic governance in the region, and why now is the right moment to do it.
Dr Ducharme highlighted the central role of economic data and statistics as a public good, whose quality has enormous bearing on many aspects of social life. Data quality, he added, is the best way to leverage the value of economic data as central public good but creating trust on data is essential and requires transparency, availability, a robust governance framework and track record.
Dr Ducharme noted that the IMF’s capacity development work and dialogue with the authorities has supported notable improvement in statistical quality in the region, with real time beneficial impact on policy making. The IMF can help and has helped through two main channels, diagnosis and capacity development framework.
On the institutional front, the IMF has supported the creation of the Arab-Stat initiative and the GCC-Stat, two initiatives that support the above objectives in the region, and substantial progress has been made in the region towards greater availability of statistics and effective dissemination in the context of the IMF’s data standards initiative.
He pointed out that data transparency is crucial to data quality since transparency is rewarded by investors in international markets, helps create ownership on key policies and facilitates IMF economic surveillance and fulfill their advisory role.
He also suggested that the ongoing data
Dr Al-Ibraheem
Dr Fayyad revolution creates opportunities for policymakers to reap further benefits from transparency. Technological change make our times an exciting moment for statisticians and data specialists. The use of cloud-based dissemination will help countries join the “global data commons,” making countries’ economic data seamlessly and immediately available to all third parties, the public, investors, academics in one global data repository.
He revealed that this is a central objective of the IMF’s new Data and Statistics Strategy. Thanks to the SDMX machine-tomachine data exchange protocol, economic data will not only be published frequently, but also be made available to a global audience permitted by cloud-based dissemination techniques. Concluding his talk, Dr Ducharme reiterated that data is an asset for economic policy making and working on data quality is one way to increase its social return. He pointed out that while high quality alone is not sufficient, it is a necessary component for good policies.
Dr Salam Fayyad pointed out that while the idea of transparency has existed since its origin in the Greek language, its usage in respect to good governance is recent. He stated that good governance encompasses the ways in which governments interact with citizens and communities to design and implement policies. Indicators of good governance include effective delivery of services like education, health and public infrastructure, as well as institutional maturity and competencies, he said.
“Even if we are not in the business of publishing data, good policy preparation requires transparent basic data” he stated, and added that quality data should not be subject to debate. He informed that data allows countries to predict crises and better position themselves to overcome. He shared that oftentimes, politicians are invested deeply in their own world view, and statistics can produce data they don’t like. He shared that it is the job of advisors to help governments to redefine problems and open up new possible solutions.
Dr Ziad Bahaa-Eldin for his part, stated, “Since 2011, the Arab Spring brought drama, hopes, aspirations but unfortunately, on the whole, a lot of disappointments. While democracy has not worked at that time, governance must work now.” He added that the elements needed for good governance are representation and participation in monitoring government behavior, decision making, accountability of government, separation of powers, and power rotation.
He pointed out that resistance to public issuing of data comes from vested interests that do not benefit from a global sharing of information. Keeping, controlling and manipulating information are all tools of control that are not easy to give up and information is power and also a strong tool against the wider diffusion of participation.
He informed that contestability is made difficult in countries by various opponents in the political field. The key element for weak alternatives and no alternatives in the Arab world, is not the classic police state but information which prevents the growth of sustainable alternative voices. “Even when parliaments gets elected, you find often Members of Parliament, not able to challenge government policies, not because of they are afraid or corrupt, but simply because the tools for challenging them are not in place.”
He stressed that transparency requires independence of statistic bodies and urged the necessity of Freedom of Information laws. He stressed the need for greater transparency in corporations as well as competition laws that prevent the abuse of their growth. He also relayed that there has to be a framework for resolving or reducing conflict of interests among various interests in society, greater regulation of public utilities, an active civil society, independent media and most importantly, an independent administrative judiciary.
Dr Ducharme
Dr Bahaa-Eldin