Research Assessment Exercise: How Thailand's research in social science should be funded

Ever wonder why we lack a number of internationally renowned, highly-cited social scientists in Thailand? Why is it that we cannot compete with those working in the science sctor (especially those in the medical field) with regards to producing high quality, internationally publishable work? Here're some of my thoughts.

It's not that we don't have good quality people. Take Yunyong Thaicharoen of the Bank of Thailand, for example. At the moment, the young economist ranks number one amongst Thai researchers in terms of the number of papers cited (his paper, with Dan Acemoglu of MIT, was published in one of the best macroeconomic journals in the world, the Journal of Monetary Economics). His paper was cited an incredible 89 times in different papers around the world. But unfortunately he has published only two papers since 2003. Why isn't there more of his papers flying around?

In addition to this, in the Research Paper in Economics (RePec) website, where authors are registered in order to have their published papers being posted online, there are only a handful of Thai economists registered (N=17) compared to over 1742 economists registered in the UK (or 82 economists registered in Singapore).

I think it's all to do with the lack of incentives to publish and the kind of research projects that Thai researchers normally received. Whenever I go back to Thailand to deliver my talks at Chula, I usually get the feelings that, with some exceptions, the majority of Thai economists I met don't really care whether you've published your papers in top-tier economic journals like the Economic Journal or the Journal of Public Economics, whereas in the UK, publishing in these journals usually mean guaranteed promotions. And one of the main reasons why I think people don't really care (and subsequently not going to try and publish their research in these journals themselves) is because there are no rewards in doing so. According to a friend of mine at Chula, you get the same B10,000 for publishing your paper in a local journal or in the American Economic Review (arguably the best economics journal in the world).

As a result, most Thai academics have to take in research work from companies or the government themselves, most of which are ad hoc and will therefore not be publishable in the long-run. But we can't blame them though - we have to get our money from somewhere!

In the UK, the universities are required to submit their people's research outputs to a central governing body every 4 years in a process called Research Assessment Exercise (RAE). These research outputs will then be reviewed according to their merits and then each department will receive a mark (from 1 to 5*). The research money will then be distributed to these departments, with the highest amount of money going to the best research department. As a result, each department in a university would require their staffs to produce some kind of research outputs that are both high quality and publishable in peer-review journals. And because there are rewards in the form of money and promotion, the RAE inevitably generates a kind of healthy competition amongst the researchers to produce high quality papers.

If we want to take our social scientists forward then we really need to rethink the way we create incentives for them. RAE is one way, but probably not enough on its own. I think we need to change people's attitudes. Make them take pride in their ability to publish in these high quality journals rather than be indifferent to them. In other words, it is our social norm of it's-ok-not-to-publish that needs to be re-established...