Hüseyin Çelik, during his term as the Minister of Education, once said, "Wait for the next PISA results." I did: Nothing seems to have changed.

The opportunities enjoyed by Chinese monkeys are much better than those we have here in Turkey. Then how can Turkish firms compete with Chinese firms under these circumstances? I personally think that this is the issue of the day. This is the exact issue on the agenda even though we pretend that it is not. The OECD PISA results should have disappointed all of us. Hüseyin Çelik, during his term as the Minister of Education, once said, "Wait for the next PISA results." And that day eventually came.

Last week, Ricardo Hausmann from Harvard University was in Istanbul. Referring to the entrepreneurial energy in Turkey, he said, "You are nice monkeys." Hausmann sees firms that have entrepreneurial energy in themselves as monkeys that take the best advantage of the capabilities offered by the region in which they live. Growth and development stem from the combination of the opportunities offered by the region and the entrepreneurial energy felt in the region. In fact, the key determinant here is capabilities. Actually Hausmann does nothing but emphasize one fact the famous singer İbrahim Tatlıses addressed some years ago: "It is not that we had Oxford in Sanliurfa, but I preferred not to study there."

You might argue that the said capability set also includes the skilled personnel, who do not necessarily have to be within the region. You are right. But in that case you have to provide the environment which assures that the better educated personnel live in that specific region. For instance, you have to build theatres where they can go watch the latest movies together with their families.  This is exactly how TEPAV Economic Policy Analyst Esen Caglar addressed the issue in his commentary "On the Spread of Industry and Movie Theatres across Anatolia." The commentary is can be found on TEPAV's web site; if you have not read it yet, please do so. The set of capabilities is being enhanced, but only too slowly.

The required personnel do not need to be from your country, of course. In that case you might have to import skilled personnel. Then your country needs to have a regular migration policy and work permit mechanism, which is also a part of the set of capabilities in this scenario. I found the framework described by Ricardo Hausmann quite useful. What is the trick, then? The prerequisite of being a successful entrepreneur is living in a pool of capabilities. I call this process "the democratization of entrepreneurship" and think that Turkey lags quite far behind in this race. I stop here due to my decision to temporarily stop "calling Turkish government incapable."

Despite Turkey, the People's Republic of China does not lag behind. The Communist Party of China adapts to the age, as in Lenin's slogan, "Socialism means electrification." We have to congratulate the Communist Party of China for expanding the set of capabilities for China.

In the 2009 OECD PISA test, Shanghai was given the top seat in all of the three categories, namely reading, science and mathematics. China has three states in the top twenty. Now Western capital cities are trying to find out what they are doing wrong. Along with the successful industrialization strategy of the Communist Party, China has established a larger set of capabilities wherein Chinese entrepreneurs can express their entrepreneurial energy. And we monkeys here have no leg to stand on.

In a meeting on PISA tests a couple of years ago, I told H. E. Huseyin Celik, the Minister of Education then, that Turkey could not improve its competitiveness given the PISA results. This is what my notebook says. Huseyin Celik  answered: "We currently are working to change the curricula; wait for the results of the next test." On the TEPAV website there is a note comparing the 2003 and 2009 results. Nothing seems to have changed.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 11.12.2010