Applied Podcast

• UN Sustainable Development Goals
• Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen
• Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
• CSU Regional Economic Development Institute (REDI)
• Splash

• Online Bachelor’s in Economics
• Sustainable Community Development Certificate
• Nonprofit Administration Graduate Certificate

Beren Goguen (00:00):
Welcome to Applied. I’m Beren Goguen. I’m here with Niroj Bhattarai, an assistant professor of economics and director of Online Studies and Economics at Colorado State University. He has been teaching for more than 20 years and has a particular interest in economic development and social entrepreneurship. Welcome to the show.

Niroj Bhattarai (00:17):
Thank you for having me, Beren.

Beren Goguen (00:19):
Can you tell us a little about your background in economics and your primary areas of interest?

Niroj Bhattarai (00:23):
Yeah, so my interest in economics, I think it goes back to my background. So I was born and raised in Nepal, which is one of the poorest countries in the world. And living through that kind of a developing country, what we call today, in such an environment, always had this urge in me to find the answer to why are these people poor? Why are we poor? Why are we not like… name a country? So typically it was the US that people looked at, but even when India and China started to grow to the north and to the south, Nepal wasn’t growing as fast. And so that question kind of lingered. And so I actually came to the states for physics and more engineering, but then I found economics. So I took economics for the first time in the states, and then I was… oh, this is it.

(01:19):
And so that’s what kind of started my journey in economics. And within that, my focus has been, especially in my doctoral studies, has been public finance, then development economics. And so now my research interest… as you can imagine, everything kind of revolves around poverty, but then there are various things that intersect, right? And so education might be one. So that’s where I worked a lot in initially because I thought that the only reason I was even here — not the only reason but one of the main reasons — was education and what my parents had done at the time. And then later on I found out it was also partly through NGO interaction — we can talk about it a little later — the NGOs at the time had convinced my parents not to have many kids. I was the only kid until my brother came along about nine years later.

(02:10):
And so I had that conversation with my parents more recently actually, about what led to that. And I think that helped. And so that sparked my interest. So now my research is around education. What are some of the factors that impact education, particularly for girls. So because there was a big push of getting girls into schools in the eighties and nineties by NGOs, but that alone, we found through our own research — my co-authors, Dr. Anita Pena and Dr. Alex Bernasek in the Department of Economics — we’ve published a paper looking at that. And it’s not just enrollment that matters. And so we can get into that a little bit. So that’s basically where my interest… And lately though, my interest has been shifting towards entrepreneurship and using entrepreneurship as a tool, strategic tool, to make development happen. So because a lot of the times one of the issues that I notice while living on that side of the world, and then living on this side of the world and then talking about it in our classes and so on, and reading papers and resource papers and so on, is that we tend to prescribe these solutions and not involve the locals in solving the problem that they are experiencing and living in day in, day out.

(03:31):
So naturally, people on the ground will have better ideas. And so I think once we collaborate, then they’ll tell us things that we may not see, that we may have blind spots. Quick example of that might be a story that my father actually shared where one of the Japanese NGOs had come to Nepal in some rural part and had given Japanese pump, like water pumps, for them to use. And then very quickly after the Japanese had left, the Nepali villagers who received them quickly sold it in the market and bought a couple of Indian ones. And the reason being it was, one, cheap, and then also because there was someone in town who could fix it were it to go wrong, were it to fail or in a break…

Beren Goguen (04:14):
Less complicated.

Niroj Bhattarai (04:15):
Less complicated. And so yeah, the technology may be great with Honda or whoever produced that, but if locals don’t have the skills or someone skilled in that set of work to fix it, then what’s the point? And so I think the locals understood that. So no one was wrong really, but if those two had communicated, maybe the money would’ve been used better to buy more machines that were more useful locally and the locals were knowledgeable about.

Beren Goguen (04:42):
Yeah, I’ve read a similar thing where NGOs will come into more rural areas that are more agriculture focused, and they’ll bring tractors and things and more modern equipment in, but they’ve been using animals to do their work for hundreds of years, and that’s just what they’re used to. And so it’s difficult… It can be a very difficult transition. And sometimes those machines just end up sitting there.

Niroj Bhattarai (05:06):
Right. And also in a lot of cases, even if they’re used… And so what also ends up happening is it tends to disrupt other areas that people hadn’t thought about. So they may want to give a tractor to the farmer and great, [the] farmer’s production goes up, their productivity goes up, all that. But like you said, animals are probably grazing on the weeds. Maybe now they have the pesticide that they’re using. Maybe that was the feed for the animals. So what are they going to do now? So now they have to go to the market and buy grains. And so it has this domino effect that if you do not think about it as a system… I mean these are all smaller parts of a bigger kind of ecosystem, for lack of better term here, or the economic system in that case, then you’ll disrupt things. (Music Break)

(06:01):
Another quick example: Piped water. No one would argue against clean piped water, but that could change in certain contexts like gender roles. So women were going to fetch water, which is… and now you have pipe water, so that means there’s less effort or burden on women to do so, which is great. So that’s a positive. But then maybe that was the only time that women were able to talk with other women to talk about anything, from household issues to any questions that may come up about child care and elderly care and so on that primarily falls in women in these countries. So if you take that away, now all of a sudden the support system is gone. Not to say that you shouldn’t have piped water, but that’s to say that you got to think about these other things. Okay, pipe water is great, but let’s also provide these meetups of some size. So somehow if you address the other things that they’re also gaining from that experience, because these, like you said, they’ve been doing it for years. So you can’t just go in and disrupt one piece and say, oh, that’s great because piped water is awesome. Who disagree with that?

Beren Goguen (07:09):
Right. So would you say it helps for organizations to go in and spend time locally and really take in the culture and the system that they’re working with and better understand that, maybe take more time to better understand it before they prescribe something like that?

Niroj Bhattarai (07:24):
Yes. Context matters, right? Context matters. What works in Zimbabwe is not going to work in India. What works in Cambodia is not going to work in Vietnam, even though they’re right next to each other because cultural context, political context, where the populace is in terms of their human capital level, education level, et cetera… Those things matter. Religion matters. You can’t just go in and do certain things just because it may make sense for us here in our kind of context. It may not translate to the other context.

(07:59):
And so that’s one of the biggest mistakes that we’ve made, I think in development, is that something works in Egypt, say irrigation, and they want to take that and put that in Nepal or vice versa, and it may not work. That the community system, the hierarchy, the elderly, the respect to the elderly… I mean, there’s so many things both culturally, religiously, education level wise, infrastructure-wise. So I think getting deep into the context, into the culture, into the environment that people are living in, and then involving the locals. I think that’s… Because we may miss… I’m from Nepal, but I’ve lived in Fort Collins longer than I’ve lived in Nepal. And even though I pick up on a lot of nuances, I probably miss it because 20 years is a long time and things have changed. And I still think time stopped when I left, but it didn’t. And so I think when we go as researchers, I think we need to be really cognizant of the fact that the locals will have better ideas. They just didn’t have the tools or knowledge, so maybe that’s what we bring. But I think that collaborative effort is key in solving. And we can get into some of the… one of the projects that you talked about, how that might demonstrate the need of that.

Beren Goguen (09:23):
It seems like development is a very multidisciplinary field and you need to pull in people from civil engineers to economists to maybe anthropologists even, people who can understand the culture, people who speak the language and make sure that the translators are on… you know, everyone is on the same page.

Niroj Bhattarai (09:44):
Yes. And even folks… I’ve worked on one project where we had to think about… I reached out to a college friend of mine at UT Austin to talk about what’s needed to communicate certain ideas to a certain population. And so you’re absolutely right. It’s a collaborative effort because economies or these issues do not exist in a vacuum. They are political pressures, there are local politics. Like I said earlier, culture, religion, you know? So there are a lot of things. And so it has to be an interdisciplinary approach. So right now, one of the things that we’re working on for eastern Nepal is an ongoing project, well it’s actually in the beginning phases of it, but it’s a collaborative effort between myself, Dr. [unintelligible] from Colorado School of Public Health and his team, and then also Dr. Srijana Baral in the Warner College of Natural Resources and forestry, trying to think about these villages as a unit that is interested in water, is interested in sanitation, animal farming, agriculture, forestry.

(10:57):
So all of these things are important and people are farming, so they’re butting heads with wild animals and, at a certain point, and so that has an impact on their domesticated animals that they either sell products from or sell them to make a living. And so these things are important. So it’s just one person… if I’m interested in, say, household air quality, so they’re burning wood and then all this smoke is causing harm to their health. Okay, that’s interesting. But at the same time, where does the wood come from? And so these connections, and so who goes to fetch the wood? So time use comes in. And so these are the things that need to be looked at, not just by economists, but also, like you said, anthropologists, and in this case, folks in public health, forestry. So everyone has something to add because these communities exist, like I said, not in a vacuum, but amongst all of those things. And not to ignore that the biggest thing: environment, as climate change is causing the frequency of flooding and wildfire and so on. Those things will have an impact on what crops they grow, the crops that they had been growing for years that now no longer are producing, the yield…

(12:19):
that they could sell and then provide for the families. So, how do you address that? So those are complex issues that need, I think, multiple disciplines. (Music Break)

Beren Goguen (12:48):
Could you tell us a little bit about what makes an economy strong and resilient? And then maybe after that we can talk a bit about some things that make economies less stable and prone to poverty?

Niroj Bhattarai (12:59):
Yeah, I guess I go back to the word trust. And so I think that’s important. The reason I go back to the word trust is because for an economy to be vibrant, the economy to, both at the macro level but also at a micro level, for the business transactions to take place and people to produce and want to produce and innovate and sell and buy and so on, we need to have institutions, political, legal institutions, that are strong. And so that provides the stability that’s needed. And then one thing we also focus on is property rights. So property rights have to be well-defined and then enforced. Now, where do we draw the line? And I think there’s a degree to that. Some economies have more public ownership and others have more private ownership and so on. But as long as the things are well defined and then enforced when encroached upon, that’s key for any kind of entrepreneurial activity to take place. So you need to have that so then entrepreneurs know, oh, I can profit from this venture.

Beren Goguen (14:18):
So kind of like legal protections essentially.

Niroj Bhattarai (14:20):
Yes, yes. So those things… and they come from… I think they stem from a strong foundational institution in legal eyes. So you have police force to enforce the laws or the legislature to write the law and then the police force to enforce it or I guess to address any violation, and then the legal system to then make adjustment on that. That’s important. And so from that perspective, institutions are very important. And if those institutions, including political… So if we see that the elections are scam or someone’s kind of stuffing the ballot box and things like that, then that starts to weaken the political institution. And so we see that around the world in a lot of developing countries that you don’t know. If the election was fair… Someone is always winning. And even when there’s a pretense of democracy and the activities that one engages in democracy, like voting and so on, the way it’s set up may not be democratic. And so certain… I can think of multi-party democracies where the party’s elders give out the permits to run for election, even though there is an election, which you and I would say, yeah, that’s great, right? Election, people get to vote, but at the same time, who gets to run?

(15:43):
And that is if there’s no primary, so to speak, in our context, that’s how we understand it. If there’s no primary, then the party elders pick someone to give the ticket, as they call it. I’m thinking of Nepal right now in terms of how they hand out their tickets in their party system. It’s always the same leaders you’re going to get over and over and over again. And so it’s not the younger generation really gets to kind of…

Beren Goguen (16:11):
So it’s kind of an exclusive system even though it’s set up to seem like it’s not?

Niroj Bhattarai (16:16):
Right. And so there are different forms. It may work in different countries in different ways. Again, the context matters in a country where now I’m kind of deviating away outside my depth here, but I think the political institutions are key. So if people have faith in it and the financial institutions and the legal institutions, then people have trust in transactions. And when that happens, then that’s almost a precondition for a vibrant economy. If you don’t have that, then there’s a coup or there’s this or that, and then that’s definitely going to have a negative impact on the economy. So then you cannot really quite man as in terms of policy to stir this big ship of the economy.

Beren Goguen (17:05):
So you need stability essentially.

Niroj Bhattarai (17:06):
You need stability. And I think those things are important. Now, what else is needed? You need capital. So tools for workers, you need infrastructure. Back in the day, it used to be roads and still is, I guess, and rail. But nowadays we’re also thinking about it infrastructure. So you need broadband or whatever it might be in terms of fiber optics, a lot of the transactions are happening online and the new economies immersing in that realm, we need those. And then not only have those in scarcity, but actually have them so that your labor can use it so your people workers have access to those. So we used to think of in econ terms, capital per worker is how we kind of phrase it, and that has to be one for one. So think for example, laptops. So does every student have a laptop?

(18:05):
If every student in the classroom has a laptop they can produce and so on. But if there’s only two laptops for 30 students in a classroom, you can imagine the production in that classroom is not going to be that high. Same idea at the macro level to all farmers have tractors, we were talking about tractors earlier or is there only one tractor in a whole village of, I dunno, 15 farmers or something? So those are the things. So tools are needed, infrastructure and human capital, so is the labor, it’s not just manual labor. So now is a lot of the jobs require people to be trained and educated. And so the human capital is important. And so are you providing enough education? Are students learning? And are you providing professional development for workers? Because once you graduate from high school or college or whatever is needed for your job, once you get to that point, you can’t just set idle because things are moving fast.

(19:02):
And so you have to constantly train. And so are they doing that? So those things add to your human capital. So human capital is necessary. Now, natural resources is one thing we kind of think about as it’s good to have us, I mean is blessed with this big country with a lot of natural resources all over, but there are countries like Hong Kong, well I guess not a country, but if you look at Hong Kong, it’s a bunch of rocks. If you’re flying into Hong Kong, it’s a bunch of islands, but with free trade and focus on human capital, one could achieve a higher standard of living. So they’ve shown that. And other countries, some of the countries that come to mind or the countries in the Middle East, where if you have a natural resource that the rest of the world wants, then you can also derive wealth from that and then improve your standard of living. But what happens, it’s an interesting question for these countries, what’s going to happen once the world loses interest in that resource? And so you can see countries like Saudi and others now trying to pivot. They’re trying to pivot away from that and try to diversify their economies. So it is a slow process.

Beren Goguen (20:09):
So diversification is another one. Then

Niroj Bhattarai (20:11):
Yes,

Beren Goguen (20:12):
You can’t be all in on one thing if that market collapses or something, it can undermine the whole economy essentially.

Niroj Bhattarai (20:20):
And that’s primarily a problem for developing countries because developing countries have, over the years, if you go back decades, you’ll see that they’ve always relied on exporting primary goods, what we call primary goods. So think of it as raw materials and so on. So the colonizing powers, so that’s another piece, another angle to this, but the colonizing powers went and got these resources, so they have resources. So then they thought, all right, let’s just export the natural resource to these countries. In economics, we call them more development economics, kind of thinking, the central countries and the peripheries. So these development countries are the ones that are around, and the center countries are the US of the world or more generally the global north and the global south, if you will,

Beren Goguen (21:09):
The countries with the capital.

Niroj Bhattarai (21:11):
And so the developing countries are sending their primary products, but there are so many different developing countries that the competition is fierce. So there’s a downward pressure on the price of their product all the time. And the manufacturer products that the center countries produce are then sent back to the developing world. And so now you’re going to have to pay higher price for things that produce using the primary product that you shipped out. So think cotton from India to England and then back as textiles, which is kind of interesting because that’s the impact of colonization that you see there with India, right? Because India used to produce and used to be a powerhouse for textiles, and then East India company coming in, colonizing India, and then switching everything. So then India became the export of cotton into England. England started to produce textiles. And so the colonization also leaves a legacy and has left a legacy in a lot of these countries.

(22:11):
So one of the questions as to why these countries fail and are still in poverty, one of the reasons is because of colonization. I mean, India hasn’t been independent for all that long to kind of pick on India, but there are other countries in Latin America. So if you look at Spain and their colonizing efforts in Latin America, they were more of extractive nature. They took everything. They weren’t really interested in setting up institutions or things, even though it kind of worked for the colonizer. So they’re more extractive. They would just take gold or whatever they could. They were after. They would take that and then take it to the home country. In India’s case, they put in railroads and things, and people go, well, India got railroad out of family, but we could still build railroads without killing people. And so I find that argument kind of silly, but yeah, colonization, definitely Lee has a legacy and these countries struggle. And what it also left is this social institutions and also structure, the folks who are close to the colonizers, retain power and wealth, and then the others who are not didn’t. And so that will linger on

Beren Goguen (23:26):
The hierarchy.

Niroj Bhattarai (23:27):
The hierarchy will linger on last generations in some cases. Exactly. And so how do you break that? And so that will lead to other social ills that you’ll see. And then there may be other social construct. So in India’s case, sticking with India, but also applies to Nepal is a caste system. And so the caste system already had these different hierarchies and then so to break that now intersect that with not in Nepal’s case, they were not colonized by the British, but in India’s case, add to that the kind of powerfuls that were left behind by the British who are close to the British royals. So those things linger on and take, like you said, generations for that to break so

Beren Goguen (24:16):
Well, and there’s a lot of incentive among those more elite groups to maintain that and ensure that that stays because it benefits their family and their extended family and their friends. And so you have cronyism and things like that that just continue on and on. And then of course, they have people in government. And so

Niroj Bhattarai (24:36):
Yes, you

Beren Goguen (24:37):
Get into corruption and it’s a very complex

Niroj Bhattarai (24:39):
Problem.

(24:39):
It is, right? And so yeah, you’re absolutely right. So think about it. So these are the well off people. And so if you wanted to start an industry, even if you started that movement, let’s say who are the investors, where are the capitalists is them. And so when they invest and earn the money or the profits, so they keep the profits primarily the labor is very cheap in these countries, and primarily they come from agriculture. And so when they migrate into industrial city centers as most developing countries, including us, actually, you’d see that people migrating from farms or rural areas into urban settings for jobs. And as long as the supply of labor continues on in economics, we call this the Arthur Lewis model, where as long as the labor keeps coming in, the labor is cheap. People used to have a lot of kids in the farms to support that, but the few kids are just hanging out.

(25:36):
They’re not really doing anything in terms of productive impact. And so the household might say, Hey, two of you, go to the city, add to the household income. So as long as that wave of people coming in continues on the capitalists in the cities, and if you attach the colonial powers into that, the folks who benefited from that, they will benefit from that. So they have the profit. Now, if they reinvest in the economy, that’s great, they might create other jobs and other industries and so on. But what also happens from some of these stories, even in the Chinese stories that I heard with some of the Chinese families would go to Europe to buy baby formula, pay a lot of money. So this was a story pre covid, or maybe it was during Covid, I lost my time track on that one. But in any case, they would go buy manufactured goods that we talked about earlier. So the folks who have now all this money would go to Europe or go come to the US and buy these American cars or British cars or Volvos like Swiss cars and so on. So the money’s actually left. And so they’re not supporting

Beren Goguen (26:43):
The local

Niroj Bhattarai (26:43):
Economy instead of putting in the local,

Beren Goguen (26:45):
They’re not reinvesting into

Niroj Bhattarai (26:47):
Their

Beren Goguen (26:47):
Area,

Niroj Bhattarai (26:48):
And then their kids go out overseas and study. So this thing kind of lingers on and in Trump’s a political power that you mentioned, that’s also true. So if you are in the city center or the urban setting, let’s say, and you’re already an industrialist, you have a lot of sway amongst the political class and even from the rural areas, and this is what we call urban bias, where even if I elect someone from my village, which is let’s say hundreds of miles away, and they go to the capitol and they live there, they’re now so far removed from the issues at home in their home kind of villas, they never really think about these issues now, primarily concerned with the issues in the urban setting. So unless they keep going back to their districts or villas or whatever it might be, they’re removed from those issues. And so we call that urban bias. So they’re always thinking about the urban setting, how do we improve the capital, the cities, and so on. And so the rural areas get left behind. So these are some of the things that develop, we talk about in developing economics, which is how do we solve it? So these are some of the issues that come up.

Beren Goguen (28:01):
What are some of the solutions that you’re seeing that are getting traction?

Niroj Bhattarai (28:06):
I don’t know if there’s one solution I think always has these various plans. And so used to be the millennial development goals, and now’s the sustainable development goals. By 2030, they’re supposed to hit certain marks and there’s kind of ways to track it. So within that system, NGOs and I, NGOs are collaborating to solve certain issues. So that’s good. What I’m actually excited about are these NGOs not just focused on economic development as they used to be, but also thinking along the lines of politics. How do we reform how the government’s set up? How do we improve bureaucracy? And in a lot of cases, bureaucracies in the public sector employs a lot of people in these countries. So you can’t just lay them off. So there has to be a process like gradual process to make these processes efficient. But as you do that, it’s going to shed some labor just with the tech. And that’s not a new thing. But so how do we observe these individuals into the economy? You don’t want mass unemployment either. And some countries struggle with that. Nepal, for example, again, going back to my own old country, so to speak, struggles and a lot of the young people leave, it’s

Beren Goguen (29:33):
Easier to leave for opportunity

Niroj Bhattarai (29:34):
Than to

Beren Goguen (29:35):
Try to fix the systems there.

Niroj Bhattarai (29:37):
Well, two things of that. So I mean, there’s so many things that intersect, but some people leave because they have better opportunities, like you said, in terms of what they can earn overseas given their education level, their talents and so on, so that you have this brain drain, so to speak. And then there’s other labor that is not skilled labor, and they’re waiting around for jobs. And if there are no jobs around, then they’re going to start looking around as well. And so one thing that has happened is the Middle East has actually, and including Malaysia and also South Korea actually lumped into that, but most of the Middle East has gone into or had gone in and now maybe tapering off a little bit into a construction boom that needed a lot of labor. And so a lot of labor came from South Asia, so Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, and Nepal.

(30:31):
So that area provided a ton of workers. So if you fly through the airport in Doha, in Qatar for example, you’ll see this map planes after planes, the concordes are filled with laborers, and there’s so many flights going in and out of these cities into South Asian countries for labor. Qatar was particularly of interest because of the World Cup, and they were building these workup soccer, and so they were building these stadiums and they brought in a lot of these people. And then there are also some issues with human rights and labor rights, and a lot of Nepali people died, so the death rate was much higher than the same cohort age group in the home country. But that’s understandable. You take someone from, I mean, again, I’m kind outside my depth here, but as a lay person even I could kind of see the problem. You take someone from the Himalayas and you drop ’em in the desert and without proper breaks or water, I don’t know what was going on. But

Beren Goguen (31:31):
You don’t have OSHA there.

Niroj Bhattarai (31:32):
Yeah, we do

Beren Goguen (31:33):
Here.

Niroj Bhattarai (31:34):
And so with some of the exposes of ESPN did one story I think, and then Amnesty International and others, when they point out that the labor status of this labor, where they live, what they eat, the breaks, the water intake, the heat and so on, I can imagine what that does, very

Beren Goguen (31:56):
Difficult conditions,

Niroj Bhattarai (31:56):
Very difficult

Beren Goguen (31:57):
Then. And they pay them very little, and they work very long shifts.

Niroj Bhattarai (32:02):
And they had some system where the password was taken, and I think the Qatari government was changing that is what they said. I don’t know, but there are people who’ve done research on that. So if someone’s interested in that, I think they should take a look into that. But yeah, so that’s one. And then another piece that comes into play is these poor individuals. They think going out to these countries for work is their only way out because there’s nothing at home. And so on the face of it, it looks great, but then they have to take out massive loans from local sharks. And so then they take that a loan, and then they go. And a lot of cases, they’re suicide, like they say. And I can see why. I can understand if there’s such a financial burden, work is not easy and you’re not saving enough to pay what you borrowed for the plane ticket or however much money that they had to pay to do that is massive burden. And then if you’re not bringing anything back, that’s a massive burden on someone. And so I can see the impact of that on mental health

(33:11):
Of individuals. I think that’s a great area for someone to study the mental, because everyone talks about, oh, the immigrant, these workers, they bring money into local economy, and that’s an injection. And which is also true, it gives rise to some businesses when they come back, they’ll maybe build a house or something and maybe they learn some skills, but then we have to employ them.

Beren Goguen (33:35):
So then this could be where the entrepreneurship, like you said, comes in where you allow some of these individuals who maybe have gained new skills to then start their own venture or collaborate with others in their home country, hopefully

Niroj Bhattarai (33:49):
To

Beren Goguen (33:49):
Start a venture and support their economy more.

Niroj Bhattarai (33:54):
Yes, exactly. So if someone learned how to do carpentry, right, they come back, but they don’t know how to get plugged in. But an entrepreneur would know and they will, they’ll say, oh, I want to set up a shop or Windows or something, right? Or doors or some kind of carpentry in the local design, someone might have done glasswork. And so all of that could then translate into much improved labor force for construction, which they didn’t have before.

(34:24):
But so entrepreneur or someone might just want to start a hotel or a shop or this and that, but they need funding. And so one thing with social entrepreneurship that I’ve seen, and we may discuss social entrepreneurship, but we don’t want to just produce something and give something and then once as soon as we pull out or if funding runs out, because a lot of these things that are supported through donor funding of some sort, either through the government of these donor countries or in NGOs, so Gates Foundation and the others like that. So how do you make it sustainable? And so I think entrepreneurs will figure that out. So I’m not saying one is better than the other. I would not say that. I think it depends again on the context and also the product itself, where it could be a combination of the two. You need some funding, but at the same time, at some point in time you would want to exit because

Beren Goguen (35:14):
And then hopefully it continues.

Niroj Bhattarai (35:15):
Exactly. And so I really like this organization out of Seattle called Splash, and I dunno if you’ve heard of it, but I came across them in one of my travels in Nepal. But the guy, Eric who founded it, his vision, I think he thought about it in Cambodia if I’m not mistaken, where he saw a bunch of kids, there’s urban poor, but all these kids are going to school, but they don’t have clean drinking water. So his solution was, okay, I’m going to provide clean drinking water to kids in urban settings in developing countries. And so I went to a few schools through some of my research work on the ground in Nepal where they were present, and their plan was, we’re going to put in the filtration system, we’re going to send our tech to go in and change filters and clean the system and maintain it. But we’re going to in the process, teach the school officials, whoever their staff is who would be kind of in a head of facility or whatever form they existed. And then after a certain number of years, we are out. You have the machine, you run it now. So that was their kind of approach. And I like that approach. If I’m doing a good job, I want to be out of this business in terms of solving a issue in the developing world,

(36:26):
If you’re still there like 20 years from now, you’re just kind of putting bandaid, so to speak, right?

Beren Goguen (36:34):
Bandaid after bandaid,

Niroj Bhattarai (36:35):
Right? And so how do you teach ’em how to solve it? And again, the locals have ideas, they live there and they know what the constraints are. And so if we can collaborate with them to solve these problems, so

Beren Goguen (36:48):
Bringing in the education and the training as well as the technology, the infrastructure, you need both.

Niroj Bhattarai (36:56):
And then certain times you can kind of nudge which way things might move. When we built that restroom for the school in southern Nepal, in collaboration with the Rotary, one of the things that was of top of mind for everyone and so often is corruption. Like, okay, what’s going to happen? We’re going to send you money. We’re going to give you money. All this money is going to go, will that really be handled well? And so what we ended up doing was bringing the villas elders to a ceremony where the check was handed out so that everyone in the villas knew that this money was now given to the school to do X, Y, and Z. So there’s a social kind of pressure. And so any kind of embezzlement that may have happened is now, I’m not saying it’s not going to happen at all, but definitely will be minimized.

Beren Goguen (37:50):
There’s accountability, now

Niroj Bhattarai (37:51):
Accountability, and there’s a social pressure, there’s social accountability, and it’s big because vested now in this, and it’s a communal good that we’re trying to do. And then how I nz the process a little bit from an economist perspective was I said, everything you buy for this construction must be bought from local vendors. They could have shifted in from another town, be probably a little cheaper, but I said, no, we got to buy from local vendor, let them work with their contractors to bring the products in, because that way then I get, yes, it’s going to be a little more expensive. But I then start that multiplier process, right?

Beren Goguen (38:32):
Support the local economy.

Niroj Bhattarai (38:34):
And so that multiplier process of demand and just business, so it kind of slushes through there in that local economy. So that was important, and that’s exactly how that went. It was great. And then the question then becomes, how do you keep it sustainable? When we build a restroom, you can just build a restroom and not have water. But lucky for us, I think it was the UN DP or someone years ago who knows when, had built this water collection tank that I accidentally saw on my walk around the premises, and it had weeds growing. And so I said, what is this water collection tank? It was the water. There’s no water it was being used. No, it was just, you wouldn’t even know. It was just like a little cement hole.

(39:17):
So I said, well, let’s clean this up. Let’s find water. So they found that the head teacher there was an entrepreneurial himself, had that energy, and he figured out with some locals that there was an aquifer up the mountain. And we tapped that aquifer and then brought the water down into the collection tank, which worked amazingly. We plastered it, and that water was then siphoned off to the restrooms we built for girls and for boys. And so girls, the main problem was the girls were not coming to school. That’s what they said, right? Yeah.

Beren Goguen (39:49):
They don’t have a place to have sanitary bathroom.

Niroj Bhattarai (39:52):
There was nothing, right,

Beren Goguen (39:53):
Which is crucial.

Niroj Bhattarai (39:54):
And so the girls wouldn’t come in, so they’re coming off age where they needed some privacy and then they needed a safe place to go. And so even the boys were actually going into the fields is what the head teacher was saying, right? Because it was just not sanitary because there’s no water. So we brought that, and then the head teacher then decided, well, I have the water. The villa needs the water. So he started selling water. He ran a tap out to the Villa Street and started selling water, not to make a profit, but just to make enough income, I guess, draw enough funding to hire someone to walk the line to the aquifer and to fix any broken parts because maintenance, maintenance. And that was very entrepreneurial. So it’s still going on. And so after that, the rotary sent one of my students and Emily Thomas, you got a full scholarship to go with me to the site and to collect data and so on.

(40:49):
We did that and we found that the enrollment had gone up at the school school of girls too. Now, as families felt comfortable enrolling their girls in that school, rather than sending them to the town across our a town that’s like, I forgot how many miles, but maybe 20 some miles, which is a lot in an area where they don’t have their own vehicle and you have to rely on public buses and so on. So that was great. And then the head teacher anecdotally said, girls are coming to school more. And so that that’s an example of an entrepreneurial intervention that was used to solve a social issue of poverty in that case tied to education.

(41:32):
And the benefits are great for these kids. And so that’s what made me think of what are the factors impact school attendance. I said earlier there was a big push of sending girls to school and everyone did it. They followed it. So if you look at the enrollment rates in South Asia, and probably across the world, but especially in South Asia, it’s high. It’s in the high nineties. It’s very high. People really listen to that campaign. But then what we found through our research, Dr. Pina Berna and myself, is that it’s not just enrollment. Enrollment is a one time decision. Do you enroll your girl into school or not? But it’s the attendance day in, day out. That’s what matters, right?

(42:16):
We know that as teachers, we’re in the classroom, we know each student shows up and who doesn’t and does well. So there’s a correlation. We know we’re aware of that. But here it was the same thing. And then why are the girls not coming to school? Well, grandma’s sick, who’s going to stay home and take care of grandma, not the son. So again, the context matters. So in that local context, it was the girl who was being called upon to take care of siblings, take care of elderly parents or grandparents, anything that came up, fell on the girl, and then to add to her burden. Then you have lack of restrooms. And when someone’s girls later on in our research and focus groups said, because they didn’t have any safe toilets in private places when they were on their periods, they would not go to school. So that’s four days that you miss school every month. So that compounds over time. So these are some of the things that you need to think about and talk with the locals and how do you solve it? And one size, one approach does not work for everyone,

(43:22):
Every country, every context. And then what an opportunity for someone like my student, Emily and others. So I’m a big believer in engaged scholarship. So if you involve your students in these projects, if we move forward with this new project that I was telling you about with Drta and Dr. Baral, we plan to, I think we have been, I think there are a few students built in into that whole project. And so they’ll be going out there meeting with the villagers and elderly, the village elders, and also the political leaders of the communities and trying to think about household air pollution, water. That’s my interest as well, is water sanitation and hygiene is what we call wash in developing context, but involving students and that engage scholarship is eye open. I hear from students who have been part of that over the years, that changes their life, tells them what they want to do in life or what they don’t want to do and what area they want to focus on.

Beren Goguen (44:30):
Spending time in other countries and seeing how other people live can have a huge impact on young people getting out of there, a little bit of echo chamber, and we’re so immersed in United States. Culture here is very different. So we have a mindset that’s not always open to understanding other cultures as much, but if you go and you spend time there, immerse yourself a bit. From what I’ve heard, it’s a big eyeopening experience.

Niroj Bhattarai (45:02):
And our students do that. I’ve had in last year or two, I have a few students who had gone on Peace Corps trips and one right now that I’m thinking of, she’s in Columbia. There’s amazing students. And when you go out there and see issues upfront, they’ve read about it. We read articles and research papers, what to do about it, what are different ideas and theories that are put forward for development, but to actually go and see and live in that context matters. Otherwise you forget. Just look at this example. I never, ever reading through all this and going through development ever, ever thought about restrooms until the head teacher said, Hey, girls are not coming to school.

Beren Goguen (45:48):
We take for advantage here. Restrooms are everywhere

Niroj Bhattarai (45:51):
In

Beren Goguen (45:52):
The US and most of the US not so in some places.

Niroj Bhattarai (45:56):
And so you need to see that to then spark your interest and hopefully come up with solutions.

Beren Goguen (46:30):
If someone really wants to dive in and learn more about this stuff, where should they go?

Niroj Bhattarai (46:34):
If someone is brand new and they would like to learn a little about economic development, especially as it relates to developing world, I would start with the UN’s sustainable development goals, just to go read all the goals and what they’re trying to do. And so on. One article or book, definitely, this is the first chapter of Dr. Sends development as Freedom is a really good book I highly recommend because it talks about agency for development. So you need to have freedom to make your choices, whatever they may be, and only in terms of maximizing utility we talked about earlier. So they need to have that agency, so they need to make those choices. If you’re not making those choices, that means you don’t have agency and you’re not empowered, right? There’s a lot of literature in women’s empowerment in the developing world, and one of the things that they focus on, including the DHS data from U-S-A-I-D, people ask, do you make the decision or do you make that in collaboration with your husband?

(47:37):
And so on. So leads to agency. But anyway, so this article, this book, but definitely the first chapter by it, Dr. Marcus San, and if someone’s interested in other ways of solving issues and how to measure it, I use this in my class called Poor Economics. So Poor Economics by Dr. Esther Duflo and her husband Abid Banerjee. They’re both at MIT and they’re run the Poverty Action Lab at MIT. And they recently won the Nobel Prize a number of years ago, five years ago now, in this approach of our city, which is borrowed from medicines as randomized control trials. And so they try certain policy in multiple villages, let’s say if they want to get kids vaccinated, and in one villa they give out lentils, one kilo of lentils to people who bring their kids and another villas, they do nothing. So they have control and a treatment, and they see whether certain policy is effective or not. So they have multiple stories there that are quite interesting if someone wants to get into that. Not to say that it doesn’t come with any criticism. It does, and people criticize whether that’s a fair use of the dollar that it costs to run these massive experiments on people. And if you already know, giving kids with poor eyesight glasses is good, why run an experiment? So there are all these ethical issues,

(49:00):
And then there’s some questions about external validity, and that is to say, what worked in India? Does it necessarily work in Kenya? And so those types of things. But nevertheless, it’s an interesting book and gives people an idea of what’s been happening in the developing world,

(49:22):
And then what would also start if they’re interested in local as well as what’s happening in the local economy in Colorado, if someone’s based in Fort Collins or in Colorado and some of the work we’re doing overseas as well, they can read on our ready reports are more palatable for folks. So it’s not like an academic paper, it’s more of a report and it’s produced in a way that the general public can digest and follow along. So Ready is Regional Economic Development Institute at CSU, and through that, if one were to go to their website and click on Ready Reports, faculty and graduate students and others constantly work on different projects and whatever projects they may be working on, they put out short reports. And most recently, for example, I put out one on PPP loans in Fort Collins. So during the pandemic. So anyway, so one could read that, and there are different other faculty members who’ve worked on different things. Otherwise, take our class, absolutely

Beren Goguen (50:27):
Jump into an

Niroj Bhattarai (50:28):
Economics class. Yeah, economics class. I mean, these classes, especially in the development economics, requires you to have a lot of pre-reqs, obviously, because you need to be aware of a lot of different economic growth theories and so on. But just taking econ 1 0 1, even economics are social issues. We’ve brought that now to online, and it’s quite popular. It didn’t use to be there. I added that I think four years or so ago, three years, four years ago. And it’s picked up and it’s quite popular. And if someone just wants to see what all do economists talk about, because people have this idea that economists are bankers and they wear these suits and go to work in Washington, dc, which is true. That’s not untrue, but that’s not the entire picture. So I shared, hopefully it came across today that they economists like me who are building toilets, and there are other economists who are working with farm workers and issues that they run into. Their economists are working with forest fires and their economists who are working with impact on housing because of wildfires and

Beren Goguen (51:37):
Healthcare.

Niroj Bhattarai (51:37):
Healthcare, and who gets the healthcare? Does your ability to advocate for yourself matter in terms of getting access to healthcare and how quickly you get it, who is maybe very important if you’re dealing with something with time constraint like cancer or something like that? So anyway, so economists work everywhere, and the field is very broad, and I know there are economists that I can think of right now that I know who are working in the field. So developing countries in healthcare, so providing vitamin A for kids, they’re doing irrigation, mosquito control, I mean, you name it. And so

Beren Goguen (52:17):
Helping to inform policy makers very important with good data.

Niroj Bhattarai (52:22):
And that’s particularly important if someone is really thinking about, I need to advocate for my group of people, whatever that might be. I think being an economist, I think economics will, for better or for worse, we seem to have the year of policymakers. And if you don’t have a seat at that table, then your concerns are not heard. And so it’s important, and I shared this with my students, and if women’s rights are important for you, or if a certain demographic group that you belong to seems to be always as an afterthought, or their issues are not picked up by policymakers, then I think going into economics is going to be impactful because then you can advocate for those groups and you have a seat at the table, and then you can highlight these issues and concerns. So yeah, I actually recommend people go and take economic, obviously I’m biased, but I think I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the power that economists wield, right?

(53:27):
So I highly recommend econ and all the analytics and this and that, the math and so on in terms of data analytics and things like that will be fairly quickly be done by ai. So what we really need are people who have critical thinking abilities and problem solving abilities, and we’re agile and think across disciplines that can collaborate with different disciplines. And economics is such a discipline, especially at the undergraduate level. And before you start to specialize in a certain area that you’re very agile, it makes you very, very agile because you get a broad understanding. You get thinking about how individuals think, how firms think, how policy makers are thinking. You learn a lot about strategies of game theory and so on. So yeah, I highly recommend economics.

Beren Goguen (54:17):
Absolutely. Yeah. I certainly would love to learn more and really appreciate talking with you. Thanks again.

Niroj Bhattarai (54:22):
Yeah,

Beren Goguen (54:22):
Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Applied Podcast. If you’d like to learn more about economics, sustainable economic development, or social entrepreneurship, including any of the resources mentioned in this episode, you can find links in the show notes. The Applied podcast is produced by the Colorado State University Office of Engagement and Extension, which works to empower individuals and communities across Colorado and beyond. You can find out more by visiting Learn dot colo state.edu.