Quotulatiousness

February 8, 2010

Further skepticism warranted

Filed under: China, India, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

If, as I believe, China’s official economic statistics are not to be depended upon, even more skepticism is required whenever the topic of military spending is discussed:

In Asia, China is increasing its lead in defense spending. China does not release accurate data on defense spending (a common trait in all communist nations), but admits that its defense spending has doubled in the last decade. Current Chinese defense spending is believed to be $90 billion a year. That’s nearly ten times the $9.2 billion Taiwan spends. China spends twice what Japan does, and more than three times South Koreas’ $24 billion. Tiny Singapore spends nearly $6 billion a year, and has one of the most effective, man-for-man, forces in the region. India, which is increasingly becoming a military rival of China, spends about $30 billion a year. Australia spends about $24 billion a year. All the other nations in the region spend relatively small amounts, barely enough to keep threadbare forces fed and minimally equipped. China’s only allies in the region; North Korea and Pakistan, together spend less than $5 billion a year on defense.

China increased its defense spending 14.9 percent last year. That’s down from the 17.9 percent jump in 2008. China claims that its defense spending is only 1.4 percent of GDP (compared to 4 percent for the U.S. and 1-2 percent for most other Western nations.) But China keeps a lot of defense spending off the official defense budget, and actual spending is closer to three percent of GDP. Currently, the U.S. has a GDP of $13.8 trillion, Japan $4.4 trillion and China, $3.5 trillion.

December 8, 2009

India grounds their SU-30 fighters (again)

Filed under: India, Military, Russia — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:26

The Indian military has grounded their fleet of Russian SU-30 fighters after a crash involving a more advanced version:

For the second time this year, India has grounded its Su-30 fighters because one of the aircraft crashed. This time, the grounding of the 98 Su-30s in service is expected to last only a few days. Earlier this year, in May, its Su-30 fighters were grounded for a month after one of them appeared to develop engine problems and crashed. One of the pilots survived, but the parachute of the other failed to open. Four days before the Indian Su-30 went down, a Russian Su-35 also crashed because of engine problems. The Su-35 is an advanced version of the Su-30, and uses a similar engine. Earlier this year, Russia grounded all its MiG-29 fighters to check for structural problems, after one of them came apart in flight. All this is particularly upsetting to Indians, who had been assured by the Russians that the Su-30 was a modern (built to Western standards of reliability) aircraft. Such assurances were necessary because of earlier Indian experience with the MiG-21, and Russian aircraft in general. So far this year, India has lost twelve military aircraft, most of them of Russian design.

November 19, 2009

Female fighter pilots in Pakistan, but not in India

Filed under: China, India, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:30

Strategy Page looks at the differing outlooks for female pilots in Indian and Pakistani service:

The Indian Air Force does not plan to train women to be fighter pilots. Neighboring Pakistan is not much better, even though it has seven female fighter pilots. They fly F-7s, a Chinese version of the Russian MiG-21. None have been in combat yet, despite the heavy use of jet fighter-bombers in nearly a year of fighting in the tribal territories. There, the more modern F-16s are doing most of the bombing of Taliban targets. The Indian air force leaders believe that it costs so much (over $2 million) to train a fighter pilot, that they air force needs 10-15 years of active service to get that investment back. But women tend to leave the air force to have children, thus making them much more expensive fighter pilots than their male counterparts. So the Indian leadership is holding off on female fighter pilots.

Women flying Pakistani F-7s are a very recent development, part of a program that only began six years ago. Pakistan is not alone using women as fighter pilots, with China graduating its first 16 female fighter pilots this year. There are already 52 women flying non-combat aircraft, and another 545 in training. India has female military pilots, who only operate helicopters and transports.

[. . .]

All the nations considering female fighter pilots, are having a hard time keeping male pilots in uniform. Too many of the men depart for more lucrative, and less stressful, careers as commercial pilots. Women may not be the solution. Currently, only about half of Indian female officers stay in past their initial five year contract. Indian women, even military pilots, are under tremendous social and family pressure to marry. Those that do may still be pilots, but married women expected to have children. The Indian Air Force provides its female officers with ten months leave for this, six months during pregnancy, and four months after delivery. The air force does all this because pilots are very expensive to train. Fuel costs the same everywhere, as are spare parts. So what India may save in lower salaries, is not enough. A good pilot costs over half a million dollars for training expenses, and requires over five years flying experience to become effective in a first line fighter (the Su-30 for India). It’s all that expensive aviation fuel that pushes the final “cost of a fighter pilot” to over $2 million. Many women are willing to take up the challenge. But they have already heard from their peers in Western air force, that motherhood and piloting can be a very exhausting combination.

November 17, 2009

India to purchase “spare” British carrier?

Filed under: Britain, India, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 18:23

Ah, it must be a nightmare to be in the Royal Navy’s forward planning department these days. First, they gave up half the fleet now in exchange for guarantees that they’d get two new aircraft carriers in the near future. Then it became known that the government was considering equipping only one of the new ships as an aircraft carrier and converting the second to a helicopter carrier. Now, India’s growing navy appears to have a strong interest in taking one of those under-construction vessels off the Royal Navy’s hands. You can almost hear the gleeful cackling from the Brown government’s financial whizzes:

Yet another scheme by the MoD for cutting costs on the Royal Navy’s new aircraft carriers has surfaced in the media, with claims now being aired that one of the two ships might be sold to India.

The Guardian reports that India “has recently lodged a firm expression of interest to buy one of the two state-of-the-art 65,000 tonne carriers” and that an unnamed “defence source” has told the paper’s Tim Webb that “selling a carrier is one very serious option”.

As Webb is the Graun’s industrial editor, and glovepuppeting of biz correspondents by big companies is the most common way for such stories to appear, we can probably take it that the tale emanates from someone in the industrial consortium building the ships, led by BAE Systems. This is the more so as the article repeatedly states that contract penalties would make it impossibly expensive for the government to cancel one or both of the ships, which is probably the main message that Webb’s industry informant was trying to push.

October 5, 2009

Tension in the Himalayas?

Filed under: China, India, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:20

Strategy Page has a short primer on the potentially volatile issue of where the borders are in the Himalayas:

China is causing considerable consternation in India by reviving old claims to border areas. In northeast India, the state of Arunachal Pradesh has long been claimed as part of Tibet (although when Tibet was an independent nation a century ago, it agreed that Arunachal Pradesh was part of India.) Arunachal Pradesh has a population of about a million people, spread among 84,000 square kilometers of mountains and valleys. The Himalayan mountains, the tallest in the world, are the northern border of Arunachal Pradesh, and serve as the border, even if currently disputed, with China. This is a really remote part of the world, and neither China nor India want to go to war over the place. But the two countries did fight a short war, up in these mountains, in 1962. The Indians lost, and are determined not to lose if there is a rematch.

September 30, 2009

Testing whether incentive pay for teachers improves student outcomes

Filed under: Economics, Education, India — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:13

A post up at Marginal Revolution summarizes a new paper by Karthik Muralidharan and Venkatesh Sundararaman, examining whether incentive pay for teachers (PDF) improves student performance:

1) Evidence comes from a very large sample, 500 schools covering approximately 55,000 students, and treatment regimes and controls are randomly assigned to schools in a careful, stratified design.

2) An individual-incentive plan and a group-incentive plan are compared to a control group and to two types of unconditional extra-spending treatments (a block grant and hiring an extra teacher). Thus the authors can test not only whether an incentive plan works relative to no plan but also whether an incentive plan works relative to spending a similar amount of money on “improving schools.”

3) The authors understand incentive design and they test for whether their incentive plan reduces learning on non-performance pay margins.

In the west, with most students being taught in publicly funded schools with strong teaching unions, these results will not be welcomed by the majority of school systems or unions. From the abstract:

Performance pay for teachers is frequently suggested as a way of improving education outcomes in schools, but the theoretical predictions regarding its effectiveness are ambiguous and the empirical evidence to date is limited and mixed. We present results from a randomized evaluation of a teacher incentive program implemented across a large representative sample of government-run rural primary schools in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The program provided bonus payments to teachers based on the average improvement of their students’ test scores in independently administered learning assessments (with a mean bonus of 3% of annual pay). At the end of two years of the program, students in incentive schools performed significantly better than those in control schools by 0.28 and 0.16 standard deviations in math and language tests respectively. They scored significantly higher on “conceptual” as well as “mechanical” components of the tests, suggesting that the gains in test scores represented an actual increase in learning outcomes. Incentive schools also performed better on subjects for which there were no incentives, suggesting positive spillovers. Group and individual incentive schools performed equally well in the first year of the program, but the individual incentive schools outperformed in the second year. Incentive schools performed significantly better than other randomly chosen schools that received additional schooling inputs of a similar value.

I’m surprised that the results were so positive for relatively minor incentive bonus amounts.

September 16, 2009

An appreciation of the life and work of Norman Borlaug

Filed under: Environment, India, Science — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:00

Gregg Easterbrook looks at the accomplishments of Norman Borlaug, who died on Saturday:

Paul Ehrlich gained celebrity for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, in which he claimed that global starvation was inevitable for the 1970s and it was “a fantasy” that India would “ever” feed itself. Instead, within three years of Borlaug’s arrival, Pakistan was self-sufficient in wheat production; within six years, India was self-sufficient in the production of all cereals.

After his triumph in India and Pakistan and his Nobel Peace Prize, Borlaug turned to raising crop yields in other poor nations especially in Africa, the one place in the world where population is rising faster than farm production and the last outpost of subsistence agriculture. At that point, Borlaug became the target of critics who denounced him because Green Revolution farming requires some pesticide and lots of fertilizer. Trendy environmentalism was catching on, and affluent environmentalists began to say it was “inappropriate” for Africans to have tractors or use modern farming techniques. Borlaug told me a decade ago that most Western environmentalists “have never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for 50 years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists in wealthy nations were trying to deny them these things.”

Environmentalist criticism of Borlaug and his work was puzzling on two fronts. First, absent high-yield agriculture, the world would by now be deforested. The 1950 global grain output of 692 million tons and the 2006 output of 2.3 billion tons came from about the same number of acres three times as much food using little additional land.

“Without high-yield agriculture,” Borlaug said, “increases in food output would have been realized through drastic expansion of acres under cultivation, losses of pristine land a hundred times greater than all losses to urban and suburban expansion.” Environmentalist criticism was doubly puzzling because in almost every developing nation where high-yield agriculture has been introduced, population growth has slowed as education becomes more important to family success than muscle power.

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