Knowledge as a concept can be defined in various ways. According to Albert Einstein knowledge is action. And it is pure information if not put into action. So, a person doing something would imply that the information that the person has acquired has been organised in her/his brain to drive them into performing a particular action.
There are also other ways of defining knowledge from the point of view of how it is acquired such as in the forms of facts, skills or objects.
But knowledge as capital is another way of defining it. Here knowledge as capital is not being used in any metaphorical sense of the term. It is capital, pure and simple. It is an investible resource in the economy.
Many social and economic indicators have been devised by experts to measure a nation's performance in different fields of human endeavour. Global Knowledge Index (GKI) is one such indicator.
Bangladesh by scoring 35.9 points ranked 112th among 138 nations according to the Global Knowledge Index (GKI) 2020. And in the South Asia, Bangladesh trails behind India, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan. The Global Knowledge Index (GKI) is a way of measuring knowledge performance of countries based on some seven criteria. They are: pre-university education; technical and vocational education and training; higher education; research, development and innovation; information and communication technology; economy and the general enabling environment. UNDP and Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Makhtoum Knowledge Foundation (MBRF) jointly announced this year's GKI results last week at a conference in Dubai. Use of GKI scorecard for ranking countries started in 2017 and it is the fourth consecutive year that such ranking is being given to countries.
As usual, Switzerland, USA and Finland performed best in their use of knowledge in developing their societies and economies. So, one should not be surprised that Switzerland or USA has topped the GKI list. Similarly, other European or North American countries, such as the UK, France, Germany have fared better than most Asian, African and South American countries.
Why couldn't they come to the top? What made the difference? Evidently, unlike their European and North American counterparts, they did not develop their human resources as capital.
A multidisciplinary core team and an advisory board uses 199 indicators to prepare the scorecard. Of the 199 indicators 96 are gathered from international sources, while the rest 103 indicators are developed by the experts behind the entire evaluation exercise.
The objective of the GKI 2020 as its designers view it is to alert policymakers on opportunities and risks across multiple disciplines. The idea is to inspire policymakers of the different nations to adopt strategies to support knowledge and promote it as the main component for establishing a 'knowledge economy.'
In fact, in this kind of approach to knowledge, it is looked upon as an economic input like land, labour and capital are the inputs of an industry. Knowledge was thus given a new perspective by the proponents of such ideas in the second half of the twentieth century. Peter Drucker in 1969 used this term to describe the emerging era of science, information technology, research and innovation as the prime mover of economy and society. Now in the twenty-first century, what half a century ago was conceived as an idea, has now become a full-fledged reality. Humans as the repository of knowledge are the capital in today's science and technology-driven society and economy.
So, the ability to survive and prosper in this new era would depend a lot on how better a nation is able to educate and train its people in the different fields of knowledge and thus turn them into human capital.
The UNDP and MBRF have thus used knowledge from such perspective to measure different nation's preparedness to use it as a capital to develop their societies. According to the CEO of the MBRF, Jamal Bin Huwaireb, GKI is an effective tool "to measure knowledge as a broad concept that intricately relates to all aspects of modern human life".
The 2020's GKI score is a stark reminder for Bangladesh's policymakers. Bangladesh must not lag behind other nations in developing its human capital. For this is the only way to survive and prosper today.