Privatize Pag-Asa or Open Weather Forecasting To Competition

Weather forecasting personnel from the government institution are reportedly in mass exodus.

According to the Inquirer,

The Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) has lost 24 key personnel, most of them experienced weather forecasters, in the past 10 years to lucrative offers from abroad, the Inquirer has learned.

Brain drain is not the only disturbance beclouding the state agency, on whose forecasts depend the lives of countless Filipinos. The problem of outdated equipment has battered it for years.

According to PAGASA personnel who talked on condition of anonymity, most of the weather forecasters have accepted offers from the state weather agency in Dubai, which is strengthening its forecasting system in its bid to attract investors and tourists.”

This is to be anticipated for the following reasons:

One, PAGASA is just one of the many tentacles of government agencies and thus becomes the object of concern only when political expediency calls for it.

Two, because PAGASA’s priority is based on political whims, thus, her financing is also subject to political priorities.

[I’d like to add that “brain drain” is a non-sequitur here, brain drain is the result of government or bureaucratic failure.]

Evidence from the same article,

After 1998, PAGASA decided to chuck the master plan.

But Nilo said the Arroyo administration was more supportive of PAGASA’s plan calling for much-needed equipment improvement.

In 2005, Nilo and PAGASA embarked on a new plan that included the upgrading of PAGASA’s existing Doppler radars.

Unfortunately, the Arroyo administration toward the end of its term slashed PAGASA’s budget for 2010.

The agency had submitted a P1.7-billion budget covering personnel and maintenance expenses and including capital outlay for the purchase of new equipment. But it was told by the Palace to stay within the ceiling of P614 million.

For 2009, PAGASA got a P757-million budget that included some amount for capital outlay.

Three, because government bureaus are likewise subject to public opinion, PAGASA serves as a favorite whipping boy or “passing the hot potato” (blame) for political leaders. In politics, which essentially is a zero sum game, someone has to take blame, hence if it is not greedy entrepreneurs it is the small fry (bureaucrats). Never will the blame fall on themselves or the bureaucracy or the legal system that supports it.

From the same article,

PAGASA has been under a microscope after failing to accurately track Typhoon “Basyang” (international codename: Conson) and its officials were publicly reprimanded by no less than President Benigno Aquino III.

The agency has upgraded the capability of two of its Doppler radars to improve storm tracking. Aside from that, the new radars can now provide information on wind speed, wind direction and rainfall amount.

The agency is set to upgrade five more radars in the coming months.

As shown above, government always are almost always reactive in approaching social problems, and that’s because the primary concern of politicos have been to generate favorable public opinion, since the essence of the preservation of their politically privileged status is in the substance of a popularity contest . Hence, since social issues are fungible or concerns which varies on a fleeting day to day affair, so goes with the political priorities.

Finally what people don’t see is that weather forecasting services could be better offered by the private sector.

In the US private companies are reportedly much better or more accurate in weather forecasting.

This from the Fox,

Private companies with a lot at stake would often rather pay for private forecasts than rely on the “free” forecasts from the government. Hugh Connett, the president of Bridgeline, a gas pipeline company in Louisiana, claims that the government’s hurricane forecasts are too imprecise. He says that private companies such as AccuWeather do it better, because they give more accurate predictions and provide hour-by-hour forecasts of a storm’s path.

His position is not ideological – Connett’s firm monitors the past accuracy of hurricane forecasters to make sure paying extra for the private service is worth it.

It is not just for hurricanes that private forecasting comes out on top. A new study by Forecast Watch, a company that keeps track of past forecasts, found that from Oct. 1, 2006, through June 30, 2007, the government’s National Weather Service did very poorly in predicting the probability of rain or snow. Comparing the National Weather Service to The Weather Channel, CustomWeather, and DTN Meteorlogix, Forecast Watch found that the government’s next-day forecast had a 21 percent greater error rate between predicted probability of precipitation and the rate that precipitation actually occurred.

In looking at predicting snow fall from December 2006 through February 2007, the National Weather Service’s average error was 24 percent greater.

“All private forecasting companies did much better than the National Weather Service,” the report concludes.

The government doesn’t do any better with forecasting temperature. For the largest 50 cities in the U.S. over the last year, ForecastAdvisor.com ranks the National Weather Service’s overall predictions for high and low temperatures as well as precipitation as dead last among the six weather forecasting services they examined.

It has only been in the last several years that comparisons between government and private weather companies have been possible, as the National Weather Service has made its data more readily available. But none of this should be very surprising. Incentives matter. If the private companies don’t do a good job, they go out of business. Government agencies never even shrink.

The key difference? Private sector is subject to profit or losses, thereby are incented to produce accurate or precise forecasting or risk losing capital, whereas the public sector’s performance goes only on the spotlight, when problems emerges.

Thus, from motivational issues, the lack of incentive to serve consumers, scant funding to shifting public priorities by political leaders, the mass personnel exodus from the government agency should be expected. The alternate solution isn't for government to spend more but to open weather forecasting to competing private enterprises.

Ludwig von Mises laid out the premise why governments are no better in providing "public services" needed by the people (bold emphasis mine).

In public administration there is no connection between revenue and expenditure. The public services are spending money only; the insignificant income derived from special sources (for example, the sale of printed matter by the Government Printing Office) is more or less accidental. The revenue derived from customs and taxes is not “produced” by the administrative apparatus. Its source is the law, not the activities of customs officers and tax collectors. It is not the merit of a collector of internal revenue that the residents of his district are richer and pay higher taxes than those of another district. The time and effort required for the administrative handling of an income tax return are not in proportion to the amount of the taxable income it concerns.

In public administration there is no market price for achievements. This makes it indispensable to operate public offices according to principles entirely different from those applied under the profit motive.