Marilyn Waring
Associate Professor in Social Policy and Social Work
Massey University, Auckland

Looking Forward

In having this opportunity today of 'looking forward' I want to speak on three issues, each of which I see as imperative for our communities to salvage from the vacuous propagandized spin that masquerades as information in 1999. The first theme is participation. The second is an old theme for me, but one I have been asked to address again here, and that is the question of economic value, and the pathology of growth as the basis for policy analysis.

Finally I will address questions of international law, and the increasing strength I and others around the planet gather from the realms of possibilities it offers. International human rights law in particular, in 2000 and beyond, will be interpreted in ways that the diplomatic cocktail circuit never envisaged. It has the potential to be the wedge that separates any politically toadying bureaucracy from political masters, whether in Jakarta or Wellington, and back to a public service that acts, and is perceived to act, as much in the interests of the community as it currently despondently responds to its political masters. Well placed questions are always the key, to establish and maintain the distance between, and those can be economic or legal. Many possible ideas will shortly follow.

Let me start with an old fashioned approach, one that is steadfastly avoided in the new right hype where words, like resources, are colonized and exploited. Lets look in a dictionary to remind those present the literal definitions of public and servant.

The second edition OED of 1989 tells us that 'public' means pertaining to the people of a country or locality - not pertaining to the market, not pertaining to political masters, not pertaining to the economy, not pertaining to some textbook performance that cerebrally and pedantically particularizes the 'public servant' as something unrelated to the public: "of or pertaining to the people as a whole; that belongs to, affects or concerns the community or nation; common, national, popular"!

'Public service' entries suggest 'service to the community', consideration of the common good', and among the entries for 'service' we find the currently unfashionable 'action of serving, helping or benefiting, conduct tending to the welfare or advantage of another' - that is, particularly unfashionable, if carried out in a paid capacity.

In my younger days there were communities of people. They disappeared long ago to be replaced by individual clients, consumers, and customers.

If you take out a microscope and search long and hard, you can find remnants of the old approach, which will be a key to looking forward. Ironically, the area where I am most familiar with it is when it is imposed on individual New Zealanders in the private sector who become involved in DAF projects. Fortunately the leaders of these projects are generally of an age where they do still remember what it was like to be a member of a participating community. In my training of these men and women in gender analysis and participatory development and rigorous evaluation methods, they consistently remark on how much better our own country might be if the policies and practices imposed by government policy on DAF programs were actively part of our own development.

In his address earlier today Alex Sundakov expressed some curiosity about why the New Zealand public had not appreciated the economic gains the changes of the last 15 years had delivered. My answer would be because they weren't consulted, they didn't set the agenda, they were not involved in establishing monitoring and evaluation indicators, there is no ownership.

Embracing participatory processes and stockholder participation would certainly have helped. Participation should be a process of decision-making, implementation, benefit sharing and evaluation, when we look forward. In my view communities have an active role at all points of the process. Here I'm not talking about the stylized rituals of Select Committee and Planning hearings - though they have their place. In multi million dollar development projects overseas I have spoken of and practiced partnership and negotiation - often with pre literate people - with shared control over decisions and resources as vital ingredients. But in New Zealand 'Wellington knows best' rules the process.

In a participatory democracy, information flows are vital: stakeholders should be fully informed about their rights, responsibilities and options, with open channels for feedback and negotiation. Frankly politicians can't be relied on to provide for that, or to represent it.

Now as an old politician I can say all the things others wish to about them. Parliament is not an institution of highly competent, imaginative, or perspicacious people. One of the problems is that there are currently fewer politicians who are representatives of the community than there were when I entered the institution in 1975. Not only are there only 60 of these, but most of the other 60 were actively rejected by their communities as their desired representatives. In the absence of politicians representing the community the lot must fall on the public service, and especially those not based in the capital.

Participatory communities must contribute to agendas with a balance of respect for the fact that in respect of their land, its history, their culture, their expectations and their needs, communities are the experts. There is some evidence that on some occasions there is some change in this respect toward the tangata whenua. Pakeha men with money, in lobby or pressure groups, in the networks with access, have always claimed, and had space made for their expertise. Of course they have also misclaimed expertise on behalf of the rest of us. In looking forward, I would see an active public service which understood that the actors in the single largest productive sector in the nation's economy, namely the household, have major economic commentary to offer on better and more efficient investment of the public purse.

At all times a participatory process monitors whether or not the project timeframe and outposts are relevant to local expectations. Participation requires an ingredient of capacity building - what abilities to manage the activities at the end of the process must be part of a programme training component when 'devolution to the community' is the principle. This has been reprehensibly absent in the last 15 years.

Certainly participation also unleashes unexpected demands. Programme guidelines should both include some response mechanisms, but also establish clear parameters or boundaries to ensure response is limited to issues of immediate relevance to the particular proposal. But that demarcation should not inhibit the networking of community needs to other agencies. When we are supervising post graduate students, as part of the ethics involved in fieldwork research, we expect them to carry networking or help agency details for a wide range of issues that might arise, not specifically related to their research. We expect them to carry the information, to pass it on and to follow it up. We compel this behaviour, not just for ethical standards, but to mitigate against harm, and to advocate for social justice and equity. Its part of the 'public service' of being a responsible participant in society, whether or not its your paid employment.

Finally, participation takes time and money: it also is the very best investment for efficiency, effectiveness, and for ensuring sustainability.

Now in looking forward one of the key reasons that participation will be needed is because most economic emperors are going to be stark naked for decades. The textbooks will have to be burned to keep them warm, and while they shiver in isolated splendour the community will be embraced as the authority on itself.

No political party officially favours greater insecurity, a degraded environment, or more stress, crime, poverty and inequality. Why then do we see policies that promote those very outcomes?

Simon Kuznets, one of the principal architects of the GNP, warned 40 years ago: 'The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income. Goals for more growth should specify of what and for what'.

Our growth statistics were never meant to be used as a measure of progress, as they are today. Our politicians parade the dynamic American economy and its rapid growth rates before us, as if this is something we should emulate or envy. But we do not often ask, as Kuznets counsels, what is driving that growth.

One of the fastest growing sectors of the American economy is imprisonment, at an annual growth rate of 6.2% per year throughout the 1990s. One in every 150 Americans is now behind bars, the highest rate in the world along with Russia. The O.J. Simpson trial alone added $200 million to the U.S. economy, and the Oklahoma City explosion and Littleton massacre fueled the booming U.S. security industry, which now adds $40 billion a year to the economy, with most sales now going to schools.

Gambling is another rapid growth industry as a $50 billion a year business in the U.S. Divorce adds $20 billion a year to the U.S. economy. Car crashes add another $57 billion. Prozac sales have quadrupled since 1990 to more than $3 billion. Is this a sign of progress?

Then the diet and weight-loss industries add $32 billion a year more to the U.S. economy, and obesity-related health problems another $50 billion.

The centrality of growth is a deeply immoral practice, as well as a complete nonsense in the question of values. An additional $6 billion a year would be needed to achieve universal basic education, about $2 billion less than what is currently spent in the US alone on cosmetics. An additional $9 billion a year would be required to provide clean water and sanitation world-wide, its about half the money currently spent on pet food in Europe and the United States. In 1997 the world spent $435 billion on advertising, mostly in Europe, North America and Japan, that's nearly eight times the amount that was channeled to the developing world in the form of official development assistance. But none of that matters to economics, because cosmetics, pet food and advertising provide good growth statistics - its quantity, not quality that counts. Its time similar comparative statistics were part of the growth rhetoric in this country.

Growth is a truly pathological basis for public policy, and more than anything else I can think of I look forward to its demise as the basis for allocation, investment and redistribution of public revenue. I don't have to rely on the government or the public service for that, as I believe in time the impact of international human rights law on domestic jurisdictions will force the change. A key component of this change will come from time use studies. Initially they will assist the economic debate, and impact from there on debates on equity, equality, and social justice. I have written and spoken about this in a New Zealand context in the past, but time use is not the only ingredient in the change. While there are a number of alternative models for valuing our whole economy, I am attracted to the work being done on Genuine Progress Indicators.

Time Use has figured prominently in the work to establish Genuine Progress Indicators (GPI) in Nova Scotia, Canada. Prepared by Dr Ronald Coleman, the Nova Scotia GPI project has been designated as a pilot Statistics Canada, which is providing ongoing assistance in data collection and analysis, and staff support. In addition to the census, the GPI uses data from the Canadian System of Environmental and Resource Accounts. The index will consist of twenty components with a sectoral approach and an emphasis on policy relevance. I had a letter from Ron last week - he says: "Of course you were absolutely right: Everyone was wildly enthusiastic and supportive at first, but as soon as the real redistribution implications emerged for the policy Neanderthals they all lost interest and began the backlash".

The GPI indices distinguish direct contributions to economic welfare from defensive and intermediate expenditures, and from activities that produce an actual decline in well being. Natural resource accounts include fisheries, soil and agriculture, forestry, wildlife, and greenhouse gas emissions. there is data on the costs of crime, income distribution, and a transportation cost analysis. Monetary values are imputed where possible, but in the GPI it is not necessary that all components be imputed.

The indicators include unpaid work, divided into voluntary and community work, unpaid housework and parenting, and the value of unpaid overtime and underemployment. The monetary valuation method used in this study for calculating the economic value of unpaid work is the replacement cost (specialist) method and reflects the hourly wage rate that would be paid in Nova Scotia to replace existing activities at market prices for the same kind of work. While an imputation is used to demonstrate linkages between the market and non market sectors of the economy, a clear focus of the analysis is on time.

Let me give you some examples of how it is working. In 1997 Nova Scotians contributed an estimated 134 million hours of their time to civic and voluntary work, and more than 940 million hours to unpaid household work. Their unpaid work in these two categories was the equivalent of 571,000 full year full time jobs! The current New Zealand government policy employs people to hunt down these economic parasites to get them to do a decent day's work!

The data also reveals that volunteer services offered through community organizations declined by 7.2% in Nova Scotia and by 4.7% in Canada between 1987 and 1997. The decline is costing Nova Scotians $60 million and Canadians $1.83 billion annually in lost volunteer services.

The decline has occurred despite a substantial increase in the number of volunteers, because volunteers are offering an average of 25% fewer voluntary hours per person in Nova Scotia than they did 10 years ago. University graduates and married women, who both have particularly high rates of volunteer participation, are increasingly time crunched. Highly educated people are putting in more overtime hours in the paid economy, and many working married mothers are highly time stressed trying to juggle family and work responsibilities. These pressures are squeezing out voluntary work.

The volunteer rate among youth, 15-24 years old, almost doubled between 1987 and 1997, accounting for much of the increase in volunteer numbers. However, unlike older volunteers whose primary motivation is "helping others," most young people say they are volunteering to increase their job opportunities, clearly a response to high youth unemployment rates in this period.

The decline in voluntary services has come at the same time as declining real incomes and cuts in government social services and income supports. The combined loss of government and voluntary social services and supports across Canada, excluding cuts to health and education, is estimated at 30% since 1993. Volunteer organizations and community-based agencies have been unable to meet the rising demand for services to the elderly, sick, disabled, youth, poor, and others at risk, partly as a result of significant cuts in public funding.

In the similar experience in New Zealand, who in the public service was raising these vital economic questions, with on going economic costs to be met for decades. If the politicians in government didn't raise them , the community certainly did, but where were these reflected in evaluations and cross cut between economic and social ministries. In the absence of such analysis, policy planning proceeds on the basis of propaganda, which is why I can be confident that this will change, because intelligent people will be too embarrassed to be associated with propaganda based planning.

Our time use data, without the longitudinal comparator, will show the same results. It may also raise the questions - canvassed to some extent recently in the Listener, about the effects of unpaid overtime. I was invited to give a presentation to a community consultation for Waitakere City last month. One of their greatest challenges was to create more employment. I invited them to start at home and to keep a record of all unpaid overtime worked by Council employees, and to see how many jobs could be created. I challenge the State Services Commission today to the same.

Aristotle recognized 2,400 years ago that leisure was a prerequisite for contemplation, informed discussion, participation in political life, and genuine freedom. Today we might learn from some European countries that have created more jobs by reducing and redistributing the existing workload. The Netherlands, for example, has a 3.6% unemployment rate and also the lowest annual work hours of any industrialized country. In that country, part-time work is legally protected, with equal hourly wages and pro-rated benefits. France has introduced a 35-hour work week. Danes have 5 weeks of annual vacation.

Sweden has generous parental and educational leave provisions that create job openings for new workers. Phased retirement options gradually reduce the work hours of older workers, who can pass on their skills and expertise to younger workers taking their place. One creative experiment gave parents the option of taking the summer months off to be with their children, with guaranteed re-entry to the work force in September, thus providing much needed summer jobs for university students and cost savings to employers.

Reducing and redistributing work hours can also improve the quality of life by creating more free time. I would stake revenue on the fact that we would lower health costs, levels of domestic stress and violence, have better parenting, less alcoholism, fewer prozac prescriptions and smaller egos if unpaid overtime was replaced by other workers. Too many people would just have to learn that the world could get along just nicely without them if they just went home after 38 or 40 hours of paid work, and taxpayers would save millions on annual bonuses where the odds are good that better results would be achieved if you had a healthier workforce.

GPI accounting also provides for alternative perspectives on natural resources. The forestry account, for example, counts not only timber production, but also the value of forests in protecting watersheds, habitat and biodiversity, guarding against soil erosion, regulating climate and sequestering carbon, and providing for recreation and spiritual enjoyment. Healthy soils and the maintenance of multi-species, multi-aged forests in turn provide multiple economic benefits by enhancing timber productivity, increasing the economic value of forest products, protecting against fire, disease and insects, and supporting the burgeoning eco-tourism industry. If you still want to decimate the beech forests of Westland you will, but the accounts will register the extent of the total loss.

Unlike the GDP, the GPI distinguishes economic activities that produce benefit from those that cause harm. For example, more crime makes the economy grow as more money is spent on prisons, burglar alarms, security guards, lawyers, police and court costs. Having a more peaceful society actually shows up as a disadvantage in the GDP and growth statistics. By contrast, the GPI regards a peaceful and secure society as a profound social asset, with higher crime rates a sign of depreciation in the value of that asset. Unlike the GDP, lower crime rates make the GPI go up, and crime costs are subtracted rather than added in assessments of prosperity.

In the area of transport, the Nova Scotian study recently found that a 10% shift from truck to rail freight would save Nova Scotian taxpayers $11 million a year when the costs of greenhouse gas emissions, road accidents and road maintenance costs are included. Telecommuting two days per week would save $2,200 annually per employee when travel time, fuel, parking, accident, air pollution and other environmental and social costs are included.

Full cost-benefit accounting methods would lend more support to taxation policies and subsidy incentives that support mass transit alternatives and other more sustainable practices. But if you are just a fundamentalist no thinker believing that empty slogans serve the community you'll just parrot 'user pays' and 'free trade' and the 'client customer consumer' alienation enducing rhetoric, which to the observant and attentive, are patent, cynical hogwash.

It strikes me as a feminist that I should believe that the institutional opening to forge community participation and a fundamental change in how anything is 'valued', might be the law - one of the oldest and most oppressive of patriarchal institutions. I do not think that the authors of the texts I look to as tools for the activist were intended to be used in such a way, but they seem to be beckoning temptingly, and so we must try.

As our Law Commission has reported, about one quarter of NZ's public Acts appear to raise questions connected with international law. N Z has been a party to more than 1500 treaties, (including some inherited from the UK). About 70 of these have concerned fundamental human rights. Article 27 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties states that States cannot excuse non compliance by reference to inadequate national law.

The Cabinet Office Manual requires ministers proposing new legislation to report on the proposal's compliance with NZ's international Treaty obligations. I certainly sense that the interpretations conveyed to Ministers as part of these reports are ideologically governed by the government's position, (far right on both commerce and human rights - at least that's consistent) and not by the leading edge of international jurisprudence.

There are 2 key Covenants to bear in mind. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) covers the right to work and to reasonable conditions of employment, the right to form and join trade unions, social security rights, protection and assistance to the family, with special protection for children, adequate standards of living, the right to health, access to education and the right to take part in scientific and cultural life.

ICESCR has no enforcement mechanism. While there are internationally agreed guidelines for compliance and reporting for countries that have signed the ICESCR, countries are obliged only to fulfil it `progressively' according to their `maximum available resources'. There are no UN mechanisms for individuals or groups to complain if a country that's signed this Covenant has not delivered. As of 1995, one hundred and fifteen countries have signed this Covenant.

The Limburg Principles on the Implementation of the ICESCR were agreed to in 1987 by the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations to assist States who signed the ICESCR in their preparation and presentation of reports.

Part 1 A observed that 'human rights and fundamental freedoms are indivisible and interdependent. Equal attention should be given to the implementation, promotion and protection of both civil and political, and economic, social and cultural rights'. It continued: 'There is no single road to their full realization . . . States Parties must at all times act in good faith'.

In Part 1 B specific attention is applied to the 'Interpretative principles specifically relating to the Covenant'. In respect of Article 2(1); 'to take steps . . . by all appropriate means, including particularly the adoption of legislation' the Principles state: 'At the national level States parties shall use all appropriate means, including legislative, administrative, judicial, economic, social and educational measures . . . Legislative measures alone are not sufficient to fulfill the obligations of the Covenant . . . States Parties shall provide for effective remedies'.

In commenting on the wording 'to achieve progressively the full realization of the rights' the Principles require 'States parties to move as expeditiously as possible towards the realization of the rights. Under no circumstances shall this be interpreted as implying for States the right to defer indefinitely efforts to ensure full realization . . . The obligation of progressive achievement exists independently of the increase in resources; it requires effective use of resources available'.

It all sounds wonderful. There's just a large gap between the lofty rhetoric of the Limburg Principles, and individual access to any machinery to guarantee these rights.

In theory, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) is the stronger of the two Covenants. When a country signs this Covenant, it guarantees that these rights are 'immediately enforceable' in their domestic jurisdiction.

Article 2 requires 'State Parties . . . to take the necessary steps . . . to adopt such legislative or other measures as may be necessary to give effect to the rights recognized in the present Covenant'.

The list of rights is extensive. Specifically protected are the right to equality and nondiscrimination, the right to effective judicial and other remedies, the right to life including the restriction of the death penalty to the most serious crimes, the prohibition of the imposition of that penalty on persons who are younger than eighteen or on pregnant women, and the gradual abolition of that penalty, protection of the individual from torture or other inhuman treatment or punishment, protection from servitude or forced labour, the right to liberty and security of the person, protection from imprisonment for inability to fulfill a contractual obligation, freedom of movement, protection of the alien from arbitrary expulsion, fair and public hearings, presumptions of innocence, procedural guarantees in due process, protection from double jeopardy, non-retroactivity of offenses and punishments. Freedom of thought, conscience and religion, freedom of opinion and expression, of seeking, receiving and imparting information, freedom of war propaganda and protection from religious and racial hatred, freedom of assembly, freedom of association of forming and joining trade unions, the right to marry, the equality of rights of spouses, protection of the family and the right of the child to special measures of protection are all covenanted. The right to take part in the conduct of public affairs directly and through freely chosen representatives, the right to have access on general terms of equality to the public service, the right of ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities in the community with other members of their group to the enjoyment of their culture, language or religion, and strict limitations on the kinds of rights from which derogations are permissible in times of emergency completes the subject list. One hundred and twelve countries have ratified this Covenant since 1976.

If signatories to the ICCPR want to go further they can sign the Optional Protocol to this Covenant. The UN Human Rights Committee (UNHRC), established in Part IV of the Covenant can receive and consider "communications" from individuals who claim to be victims of violations of the ICCPR in their own country. The protocol means that individuals who have exhausted the domestic legal remedies in pursuit of their claim can have access to the UNHRC. Because this Committee does not have jurisdiction inside a nation state, we can't call it a tribunal, we can't say that it handles cases, we can't say that it delivers judgments. We "communicate" with them, and they "communicate" with us. Their findings do have judicial force in the different regional Human Rights Commissions. Sixty-seven countries have signed the Optional Protocol, effectively saying they guarantee to their citizens the right to take cases to this international arena. The UNHRC has particular functions in respect of the use of the Optional Protocol.

Rules of procedure are established to provide protection to Governments against investigations into allegations that are vexatious or without substance. The communication must come from an individual who is a victim of an alleged violation of the Covenant or her or his authorized representative. The Protocol 'is not designed for wide attacks on state legislation or government policy without identification of particular individuals who are prepared to pursue the claim' . Wide attacks can be made, but identified individuals have to take the case to Geneva. The process does not allow for any group claim or class action. Whatever the particular patriarchal reasons for this prohibition, and however many groups it impacts upon, it certainly disadvantages women.

It is not possible for the UNHRC to make abstract rulings on potential consequences of some government policy or legislation. An individual cannot allege that some government policy might affect her or him at some future date.

Two elements are closely connected here. General claims on behalf of groups cannot be made due to lack of personal standing. This means the only entity that has personal standing before the Human Rights Committee is an individual. But an alleged victim can authorize another person including a non-government organization, to act on his/her behalf.

Particular groups like indigenous peoples, prisoners, homosexuals, migrant women cannot take a general case to test government policy. Christine Chinkin cites the rejection of the communication from a non-government organization which had formed a group of associations for the defense of the rights of disabled and handicapped persons in Italy, and of representatives of associations who claimed they were themselves disabled, handicapped or parents of such people. The UNHRC found the petition inadmissible on the grounds of a lack of personal standing. The claims made by representatives on their own behalf were admissible with respect to standing, but were rejected because they did not present substantiated claims of having been victims in violation of the Covenant.

The UNHRC has however accepted communications on the same issue from a number of individuals provided each one can substantiate a claim as an individual victim. Using this method, class actions are a possibility.

Where communications are submitted on behalf of a victim the authority of the author to make the claim must be justified. This can be legally established by appointment of a legal representative, through power of attorney, or created by close family ties.

Applicants must have sought legal remedies in their own country. That is the basic test. The Protocol says that the application of local remedies must not be unnecessarily prolonged and that it must be effective and available for particular situations. The Committee has frequently repeated their view that the availability of remedies which are not reasonably evident cannot be invoked by the government to the detriment of the author and proceedings under the Optional Protocol.

Public servants are of course in the front line. They are the States agents in human rights challenges. In my experience they frequently offer the excuse that says the state isn't the active agent in the majority of abuses. But the state doesn't have to be an active agent. Rebecca Cook writes: "If a state facilitates, conditions, accommodates, tolerates, justifies, or excuses private denials of rights, the state will bear responsibility. The state will be responsible not directly for the private acts, but for its own lack of diligence to prevent, control, correct, or discipline such private acts through its own executive, legislative, or judicial organs."

States are legally accountable for breaches of international instruments that are attributable or imputable to the States. There are three distinct theories of government accountability : government agency, government complicity by failure to act, and government responsibility for the unequal application of the law.

In the New Zealand Courts it has been increasingly recognized that 'even though Treaty obligations not implemented by legislation are not part of our domestic law, the Courts in interpreting legislation, will do their best to conform with the subject matter in the policy of the legislation to see that their decisions are consistent with our international obligations'.

The case of Tavita v. The Minister of Immigration in May 1994 did not concern the interpretation of a domestic statute. The appeal focused on New Zealand's obligations to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The signatory state's obligations to Mr. Tavita's child as a New Zealand citizen meant that the deportation of an overstaying father, who had a child born in New Zealand, would be in breach of international human rights laws.

The government's main line of argument was that the Minister and the Department were entitled to ignore the international instruments. The judgment said: 'That is an unattractive argument, apparently implying that New Zealand's adherence to the international instruments has been at least partly window dressing . . . The law as to the bearing on domestic law of international human rights and instruments is undergoing evolution . . . The Balliol Statement of 1992 ( has a ) reference to the judiciary to interpret and apply national constitutions, ordinary legislation and the common law in the light of the universality of human rights . . . New Zealand's accession to the Optional Protocol . . . is in a sense part of this country's judicial structure, in that individuals subject to New Zealand jurisdiction have direct rights of recourse to it . . . Legitimate criticism could extend to the New Zealand Courts if they were to accept the argument that, because a domestic statute giving discretionary powers in general terms does not mention international human rights norms or obligations, the executive is necessarily free to ignore them'.

Nor is the public service free to ignore them. As the Pinochet case represents all too clearly, there is access to and use of international human rights law that the authors never dreamed of. I believe that this will be the focus of one of the people's movements of the twenty first century, where participation at community level in the name of equity will unite with international law on issues of economics and social justice.

I look forward to a public service highly literate in alternative economic indicators and human rights law and serving the community, as a key ingredient in the restoration of a highly mobilized and participatory democracy. Without this, no economic model can be deemed effective or efficient.