KZBlog

The Economic Costs of Bureaucracy (2)

Posted by KZBlog on 13 January 11 • Categorized as Life in KZ • Tagged as Agency for Statistics, Bureaucracy, economics, TSON

A few days ago, I talked about the ecological costs of bureaucracy in Kazakhstan. Today, just for fun I worked up some extremely rough estimates of the economic costs of bureaucracy.

According to the Agency for Statistics, the total population of the country on 1 Dec 2010 was 16,417,655 people.

Let’s assume that every year, every person is entered into some kind of government database somewhere, whether it be registration of birth, death, registering property, or whatever. Let’s assume rather conservatively that entering that person into one database takes one minute (Those of us who have worked with civil servants here know it usually takes far longer).

So we are talking about 16,417,655 minutes spent on registering the population of Kazakhstan with the central government. That comes to 273,627 minutes or 11,401 days, or 31.24 years of straight typing per calendar year. Again, this is a conservative estimate of one minute per person on data entry.

If we want to look at the costs to the government, we have to look at working days. Now let’s assume the average working day of a civil servant who deals with data entry is 9 hours a day, 6 days a week. So spending only one minute on each citizen of Kazakhstan takes up 30,403 working days or 5,067 working weeks, or 1,267 working months. If we assume that data entry specialists are not well paid, we’re talking about a salary of 30,000 tenge a month OR 38 million tenge spent to pay people per minute they spend on data entry per year. That’s a considerable chunk of change. Note that if we assume government workers spend 10 minutes entering such information, the figure increases by 10 times to 380 million. If we also assume that once the data is entered, supervisors and managers have to approve various decisions and go over that data, the amount of salary and the number of people increases and we are talking about quite large drains on government spending.

Now let’s look at the loss of productivity. Just for TSON, people submitted 62,000,000 documents in ten months which comes to 74,400,00 documents a year. Again, let’s assume conservatively that people spent 5 minutes on each document, whether it be pulling that document out of a drawer, or getting a notarized copy, or filling out a form. We’re not talking about the time it took them to go to TSON or wait in line. We’re just saying that to produce one document for TSON took 5 minutes.

That means people spent 372,000,000 minutes or 6,200,000 hours preparing documents. Now let’s again be generous and assume the average person works a 10 hour day, 6 days a week. Even with those large divisors, people still spend 25,833 working months preparing documents. Now the average income in Kazakhstan from Jan-Oct 2010 (the most recent data), according to the Agency for Statistics was 75,744 tenge per month. So 1,956,720,000 tenge of lost productivity was lost if people spend 5 minutes of work time on preparing documents only for services received at TSONs.

If you think about how much time people really spend on preparing and submitting documents, you will see that quite a bit of economy productivity goes into documents in Kazakhstan, especially if you add up the cost of paying workers to handle the paperwork AND the work time lost by people submitting those documents.

Again, I’m not a statistician. I realize these issues are very complicated. It would be interesting to see what the relation between salary and time spent submitting documents is. For example, I expect that high paid executives and government workers send their lower paid secretaries and assistants to take care of these things for them. I wholeheartedly invite people with better information and better data analysis skills to critique my analyses or give us better information. I just want to draw attention to the fact that bureaucracy costs money.

In a few days, I might look at how bureaucracy can be reduced, since that’s the obvious question to be raised by these posts of mine: what alternative do we have?

The Costs of Bureaucracy (6)

Posted by KZBlog on 9 January 11 • Categorized as Life in KZ • Tagged as Bureaucracy, Center for Services for the Population, e-gov, ecology, Ministry of Justice, trees, TSON

Coincidentally, just as the comment thread on Surveys of Expats about Life in Kazakhstan turned to bureaucracy, I came across a report on the automatization of government services for people and e-gov.

According to research (I believe done by the Center for Services for the Population or TSON), over a period of ten months in 2010, 5,815,991 people went to a TSON center to receive some kind of government service. For those who don’t live in Kazakhstan, I should explain that TSON is a centralized center where citizens can receive a wide variety of services from the Ministry of Justice–registering property, getting a marriage certificate, adoption, registering births and deaths. As far as I know, a number of common services like getting a driver’s license, paying taxes, registering for pensions or disability claims, or opening a business, are not covered by TSON however.

Overall 164 documents were required to receive 71 different kinds of services at TSONs throughout the country.. On average, each service from the government therefore requires 2.3 documents, which may include original documents like a birth certificate or marriage certificate or Social Security Card, or a form, or some kind of letter. Many of these forms and documents are multiple pages long of course.

Of those 164 documents required for services from TSON, half (84) came from government agencies–which means that acquiring those documents doubtless required other documents.So we might safely assume that on average, citizens needing services from TSON must handle on average 4.6 documents (84 documents from government agencies * 2 documents needed to get those 84 documents + 80 documents NOT from government agencies = 332, divided by 71 services).

Overall the study concluded that over ten months, around 62 million documents were handled by TSON. Which divided by 5 815 991 citizens, comes to 10.66 documents per person, far higher than the average I calculated above. Incidentally, that also comes to 200,000 documents a day handled by 316 TSON centers–632 per center per day.

I would like to have calculated this out by how many trees are used up in the service of all this bureaucracy, but unfortunately there is no way to distinguish how many pages these documents are. Nor is it clear how many documents are presented in original and how many in copies. However, if we assume that each document is one page (conservative) and we also assume that each document is copied (to balance it out, since some documents may be shown and not copied), sources seem to indicate that one tree makes around 8,333.3 sheets of paper. So roughly, 24 trees a day (200,000 documents/8333 sheets) die in order to provide documentary services. 62 million documents per 10 months comes to 74 400 000 per year. Or around 8,928 trees a year (by our rather rough estimate). By contrast, Zhasil El planned to plant 51,000 trees in 2010 so 17% of their work is just feeding the bureaucracy of TSON. Note that the rest of the government uses its fair share of paper.

So the environmental costs of bureaucracy are quite high. This analysis is quite amateur of course and I would love to hear from people better versed in statistics (and with better information about the usage of paper in the government).

In a separate post I plan to look at some rough estimates of how much budget money is spent processing these documents and how much worker productivity is lost collecting and submitting these documents.

Summitkhan and Asiada Sitting in a Tree (2)

Posted by KZBlog on 7 January 11 • Categorized as Life in KZ • Tagged as Asiadi, Asian Winter Games, names

You knew it would happen. First we had Sammitkhan. Now we have a baby named Aziada. Which is a much more beautiful name than Sammitkhan. Given the choice, I would vastly prefer to be called Aziada than Samit (although Samit isn’t too bad a name. Better than Bartholomew, for example, or Brooklyn). The father, who used to be a coach decided to honor the Asian Winter Games, which will be hosted in Astana and Almaty from 31 January to 6 February of this year.

The only thing odd about the story is that apparently he sent a message to his wife to name the child Asiada. A message? By text? Isn’t that a bit impersonal for such an event?