The Importance of Being Wanted by Quy-Toan Do and Tung Duc Phung - Article Example

A Review of “The Importance of Being Wanted” Overview of Referee Paper This paper is a review of the article “The Importance of Being Wanted” written by Quy-Toan Do and Tung Duc Phung and published in January 2009. Do is a Development Economist with the World Bank and Phung is with the Vietnam Government’s Statistics Office. Together, Do and Phung attempted to prove the hypothesis that children born in auspicious years, i.e., years that are thought as advantageous for a child to be born, are likely to have a better growth environment and showed evidence that these children stay longer in school. Through the use of mathematical and statistical analysis, the authors explored each of three possible explanations – cohort size, child endowment, or birth plannedness channels – and concluded that birth planning accounted for an extra 0.2 years or two to three months of schooling characteristically enjoyed by children born in auspicious years. The paper is well written. The authors described, with the use of a professional writing style that is simple and easy to understand, the topic and explained the purpose of the research clearly. They likewise were sufficiently objective in describing the limitations of the study, balancing the implications of the results and raising issues for further scientific investigation, such as the pervasiveness of superstition in influencing parental decisions for child bearing. Their grasp of Vietnamese culture is, in the absence of this reviewer’s prior knowledge on the subject, quite comprehensive, informational and fascinating. The diagrammatic approach in outlining the Vietnamese zodiac drives home the point that in Eastern cultures, many life-and-death decisions are determined by the stars. This may not sound scientific, but observing the fast economic growth rates and ongoing business successes of the developing Asian economies, it is easy to fall into the trap of questioning the wisdom of human decisions backed by millennia of experience. Do and Phung attempted to explain in a rational manner what seems like a sophisticated decision-making model based on Vietnamese culture’s reliance on the zodiac and linked this with the finding that large birth cohorts coincided with the auspicious years. They observed that, over the twenty-one years of the sample study, “auspicious” cohorts were schooled for 0.2 years more than the “non-auspicious” cohorts. Discussion of Relevant Issues Many economic research studies are based on statistics that researchers hope are reliable. The problem is that in most totalitarian governments, such as Vietnam’s, statistics are “meant” to support the government’s over-all objective of total control over the population. Whilst this is not a political economics peer review but one made by an amateur economist, it would be fair to question the objectivity of public statistics, notwithstanding the co-authorship of the article under review by an official in the subject government’s statistical office. In China, for example, the government used birth-planning studies to evaluate the effectiveness of the Communist Party’s one child policy. It may be safe to stay that the government used objective scientific studies on topics related to birth planning in its efforts to rid the population of superstitions, such as the Chinese zodiac. As Wohlschlagl (1991) argued, public policy to limit population growth rates in the third world were extensively backed up by scientific studies promoted by the World Bank or United Nations Organisation. Assuming, therefore, that the statistics used by Do and Phung in the study are reliable, it is interesting to question next their finding that “auspicious” cohorts stay 0.2 years longer in school than “non-auspicious” ones. Whilst their figures of 2 months and 0.06 standard deviations show the reliability of data findings, the 2 extra months of schooling may not necessarily have a significant meaning that could be qualitatively explained. One possible explanation stems from the definition of a cohort’s zodiac year that runs from one Lunar New Year to the next. In comparison with the West where the calendar year starts and ends on a fixed date, the Lunar New Year as in Vietnam and China does not because the date varies depending on the date of the New Moon. The date of the Lunar New Year can vary by as much as four weeks, a fact that was not addressed in the study, which then brings up another problem with the congruence of data: the school year in Vietnam is fixed and is not determined by the lunar new year. The article’s authors, by not pointing out the yearly differences in the date of the Lunar New Year, may have contributed to possible inaccuracies in measuring the relative sizes of birth cohorts and determining with greater precision the duration of the cohort’s schooling. This may either explain why the figure of two months does not seem to be much of a difference or that their minor neglect in the accuracy of dating may have led to statistical errors. Besides, not all members of a cohort may enter school in the same year for the simple reason that babies born in the few months or weeks before the end of the zodiac year, no matter how auspicious the year may be, would postpone their schooling and enter in the following year. This may result in some statistical errors too because it introduces some externalities in the decision-making process of the child’s parents or educators. We can illustrate this with a series of examples. The parents of a child born late into an auspicious year have two options as regards the child’s schooling. First, enrol the child with the rest of the cohort by the time the child’s cohort age reaches 6. Second, enrol the child with the class of the following year’s cohort. In the first case, the child would only be, in reality, 5 years of age whilst a majority of the cohort – those born between the Lunar New Year in February and the start of the school year in September – would by then be age 6. Since the article does not consider pedagogical theories and cohort educational performance, and it is possible that younger students do not perform better and therefore may have to stay longer in schooling, it is not sufficiently objective and conclusive that the auspicious cohort, all of it, spent an additional 2 months in school because it is possible that these extra two months were spent by under-aged members of an auspicious cohort taking remedial education to compensate for premature inclusion in an auspicious cohort. The second issue may affect the findings because of the possibility that a parent whose child was born shortly before the auspicious year would include the child in the auspicious year’s schooling cohort. This is in line with one aspect of human nature that the next best thing to being born lucky is to be the friend, in this case the schoolmate, of a lucky person. These factors may be ruled out in future iterations of the study by improving the accuracy of statistical data such as weeding out, using a process similar to what the article authors did in ruling out cohort-size as a research variable (Do & Phung 2009, 18), the inclusion of children born outside the auspicious year and bring in the excluded “auspicious” children who enter the educational system in the following “non-auspicious” year. Another issue is the state of the nation’s political economy that the authors addressed but in a way that this reviewer deems to be in an insufficient a manner. Whilst they hypothesised that parents balance different factors such as superstition, peace and economics in determining their decision to have a child, they indicated the presence of suggestive evidence linking a family’s economic prospects and the decision to have a child but did not explore this further (Do & Phung 2009, 21-23). It seems, therefore, that the authors used the available statistics to zero in on superstition, instead of political and macroeconomic factors, as determinants of birth planning decisions as Jayachandran & Kuzienko (n.d.) and Qian (2008) argued. Whilst Do and Phung (p. 15) acknowledged the possible influence of Doi Moi in the late 1980s and its positive economic effects, there must be a way to check, without resorting to self-reporting via surveys and questionnaires, whether childbirth decisions are more closely linked, i.e. exhibiting higher regression coefficients, to Vietnam’s political economy aside from the access to credit markets specifically identified (p. 23). With the use of statistical data – moreover presumed as reliable – on purchasing power of families, national incomes, purchases of child-rearing paraphernalia, decrease in utilisation of family planning medications that may signify the population’s general interest in child conception (or its inverse in non-auspicious years), attendance or visits (whilst factoring out the influx of tourists) to the shrines of Vietnamese deities and temples and such other variables, it would be possible to determine with improved statistical accuracy and scientific objectivity the link between birth planning, superstition and the social behaviour and educational performance of auspicious cohorts, which could have been a better indicator of the effects of birth planning. Papers by Putterman et al. (2008), Heston (n.d.) and Saccone et al. (2009) provide a sampling of economic development indicators linked to cultural mores. Conclusion The article is an example of how the cultural beliefs of a people may have an impact on the economic performance of a country. Whilst the reviewer finds the article’s conclusion to be somewhat weak in accounting for the effects of birth planning, the article nevertheless provides good research material in the use of statistical analysis to subject a scientific hypothesis to necessary rigor. Potential biases are addressed with the use of mathematical analysis and possible explanations for the measured data are sought. Whilst it may not be part of the study to find an acceptable answer to the pervasiveness of beliefs in affecting economic decisions, the article at least proves that beliefs may play an important role that economic policy-makers must take into account in mapping the path to development. Reference List Heston, A. 2009. “What Can Be Learned About the Economies of China and India from Purchasing Power Comparisons?” Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, New Delhi Working Papers 229, Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations, New Delhi, India. Jayachandran, S. and Kuzienko, I. 2009. “Why do mothers breastfeed daughters less than sons? Evidence and implications for child health in India,” NBER Working Paper No. 15041, National Bureau of Economic Research. Putterman, L. and Weill, D. 2008. “Post-1500 population flows and the long run determinants of economic growth and inequity.” Working Papers 2008-15, Brown University, Department of Economics. Qian, N. 2008. “Missing women and the price of tea in China: The effect of sex-specific earnings on sex imbalance.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 123 (3): 1251-1285. Saccone D. and Vittorio, V. 2009. “Structural Change and Economic Development in China and India.” Department of Economics Working Paper 200907, University of Turin. Wohlschlagl H. 1991. “Family planning programs and birth control in the third world.” Demographische Informationen, 153:17-34. Read More