Hello, welcome to visit Shanghai Forum
Pauline van der Meer Mohr Interviewer: Ding Chun
President, Professor
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Institute of World Economy,
Netherlands Fudan University;
Director,
Centre for European Studies
“I think the secret of the Dutch success is that it doesn’t only look at quantitative determinants of competitiveness but also at qualitative terms. For example, social innovation is just as important as technological innovation.”
Ding Chun: We all know you lead one of the most famous universities in Netherlands. Especially concerning subjects like economics, management, law and medicine your university enjoys a very good reputation in the world. Furthermore the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics attended your school of economics. Could you give us a very brief introduction about the University?
Pauline van der Meer Mohr: Indeed you are very well informed .That is indeed the brief introduction of our University, however, I don’t think that the other Universities in the Netherlands would agree that Erasmus University is the most famous one. But I am very pleased of course that you suggest so. We have 14 Universities in the Netherlands and Erasmus University is one of them. They’re all research universities and all of them are excellent and all of them feature in the top 200 of the world ranking, which is actually quite a phenomenon if you consider that all universities in one country are all excellent. But having said that we are all very proud of Erasmus University. It was started 100 years ago by three businessmen who saw the need for a school of commerce. It then gradually grew into a full fetched university, but with a very strong social profile. So economics, business, law and governance questions on the one hand and health and public health questions on the other hand. Those are the two main areas of the profile of Erasmus University and that’s what it’s most known for. Plus, as you rightly reminded me of Jan Tinbergen, our famous Nobel Laureate, who we are of course very proud of.
Ding Chun: Here in China we discuss about education a lot, could you tell us what your philosophy is on education, especially higher education?
Pauline van der Meer Mohr: First of all what we see in the Netherlands is that the proportion of students that enjoys higher education in the Netherlands nowadays, is almost 50 %. So in the age range of 18-23 years old almost 50% of the Dutch population enjoys tertiary education, so that’s of both vocational and university levels. That is a pretty high proportion. It’s a small country of course but still, it made us think what does it mean if such a high proportion of your population enjoys higher education? Surely not everyone can be as excellent as that, so does it mean that the university begins to differentiate so will accept some people and reject others or do you try to be more inclusive? The Netherlands has a very inclusive policy so it’s different from for example the UK or China which are more selective. In the Netherlands the idea is that, once you completed your secondary education, you have an entry ticket that entitles you to university education in principle. Having said that what happens if 50% of your population goes to university? They cannot all be equally excellent. So over the last 20 years, Dutch Universities have really struggled with success rates. A lot of students were basically not able to complete their bachelor or master education and we lost a lot of students. So what we have done in Erasmus University Rotterdam is that we have completely changed our curriculum to make sure that the students see our first year as the selective year. Whereas we are not very selective at the gate, we are very selective after the gate so the first year you have to earn all the credits or you have to leave. That is quite extraordinary in the Dutch context because no other university is that strict on students having to earn all of their credits in the first year. The result is that students work better, are much more focused and much more disciplined, they make their deadlines and have limited re-sits. As a result they begin to perform much better than in the past, so I think it is an aspect of our educational philosophy that has really made a difference for our students. Funnily enough we were concerned initially that because of that philosophy students didn’t want to come to Rotterdam anymore since they would have to work too hard, but interestingly you see it’s quite the opposite. Actually students are attracted by the challenge of having to perform right from day one. Because that is what they get when they come to other universities. When they come to Fudan, they just have to work from day one there is no way out. It’s not optional. You have to perform. Students enjoy that, they rise to the challenge and they become better students.
Pauline van der Meer Mohr: Well there are lots of aspects of innovation of course but let me just highlight two. One is of course that the staff needs to be more and more internationally engaged. That means that we expect them to go abroad much more than they did in the past. We expect them to learn English so all of them have to be fluent in English which can be a bit of an issue with the older staff but the younger staff it’s not so much of an issue. More importantly we expect that they are innovative when it comes to integrating information and communication technology into their curriculum. So we have really flipped the classroom, whereas in the past we had 900 undergraduate students attending a lecture for 2 hours, now we are taping the lectures and students will listen to them in their own time, even when they are jogging with their iPods, they can listen to the podcasts. When they then come to the actual classroom they don’t just sit and listen but they fully engage around the topic that they have to study, with other students because they learn as much from other students as they learn from the faculty, but also with the faculty. Therefore the whole philosophy is becoming much more engaging, but that means for the faculty also that they have to change their own thinking and become more innovative in the way they are delivering their materials. Gone are the days where they could just recycle their PowerPoint, they now have to become much more engaged with themselves and with their students. They also have to involve actual problems, because we have a problem based learning approach in Rotterdam.
Pauline van der Meer Mohr: They are fantastic, they are wonderful! We have around 500 Chinese students at the moment and a lot of them come from Fudan, and they are so motivated, they are very intelligent, they are incredibly hardworking, they work harder than anyone else and they adept very well to the world in the Netherlands and to Rotterdam. Having said that Rotterdam is a very easy place for the Chinese students to live and work because it is a metropolis which most of them are used to live in. It has a nice urban relaxed atmosphere as well, with a lot of green and everybody cycles, Chinese students are not afraid of cycling so they adapt very well. They perform extremely well. We do find that they are very polite so many of them are used to listening to their teachers and respecting their teachers and elders and seniors. Clearly they have grown up in a culture that values seniority and teachers. We do teach them to speak up and to be proactive, encourage them to think for themselves and be autonomous in their thinking and we try to teach them the first values of skepticism in research. We sometimes fear that when we send them back to China they find it difficult to go back to the old culture but on the other hand we secretly think that they become better researchers as a result. But they do extremely well, we are very happy to have them and we welcome many more.
Ding Chun: You may know that we have a center for Dutch studies here at Fudan. Do you have any recommendations for the activities or staff?
Pauline van der Meer Mohr: First of all you must come to visit Holland. That should be compulsory if you have a center for Dutch Studies. You cannot study Dutch culture or language or business or anything from only being in China so you need to come over and we would welcome you wholeheartedly. So that would be my first recommendation, come and see for yourself. A lot of Dutch Universities do have Chinese study groups and they always encourage students to spend some time in China because how else can you learn? I am always surprised and humbled to learn that there are Chinese students who are interested in studying the Netherlands. Why would you? It’s such a small country! And you have billion people and we have around 16 million! So I am always humbled to learn that there are people interested enough in our country and in our culture to study it so we are grateful to anyone who is interested enough in our country and we welcome you any time!
Ding Chun: After the crisis in Europe there is now also an appeal for the so-called smart growth, meaning more innovation based policies. Could you comment on the recent economic situation in the EU?
Pauline van der Meer Mohr: I am not sure if I am qualified to comment on that but let me give you my personal perspective, I think Europe is still gradually and very slowly coming out of the crisis. I think some politicians will tell you that the worst is over, but I’m not so sure that it is. If I look at the banks, they have slowly recapitalized but there not quite there yet and their buffers are not nearly as strong as they should be. Some very prominent economists claim that a large proportion of European banks are actually zombie banks if you think about it and many of them would not meet the stress test. It depends on how you define a stress test of course. So we’re seeing very slow recovery at the banks and a very slow recovery of industry. Industry suffers a lot from exchange rate problems still. Their profits stay behind industrial expectations. And the worst thing is that consumer trust is not back to the levels were it was precrisis, and I think that will take a long time. Politicians don’t always play a very helpful role there because as long as politicians keep telling their voters that they cannot trust anyone, especially not the bankers. This is also a point Robert Shiller made in the opening ceremony of the Shanghai Forum, everybody hates bankers these days and politicians make it worse by using rhetoric to that fact so that people begin to hate bankers with a deep passion whereas actually the financial industry is incredibly important. It’s the oil for the economy, so unless we start trusting each other again and unless we start trusting financial institutions and large conglomerate businesses, the economy will remain at a grinding hold. So trust is a really difficult issue to tackle because even if all the fundamentals were right it would be hard to mend the broken trust in the European economy. Additionally there is a big issue around the topic of European integration, we just had the European elections, there’s a very strong voice in Europe, saying that the European Union is basically a failure and we should allow it to fall apart. I think that’s a very dangerous voice, it is a very strong voice so we have to deal with it, but there is no way back once you’ve set out to become a European Union, there’s only one way and that is the way forward. So we cannot do without the euro, we cannot do without a fiscal union, we cannot do without a political union really. We’ve completed the economic union but we haven’t completed the political union and I think we do need to move forward there.
Ding Chun: As you mentioned there is an increase of European skeptical parties and at the same time there’s crisis of European confidence. I think integration is a good thing not only for Europe but also for China and the world. You are not only a very excellent academic but also a good practitioner so I would like to hear your opinion on the building of banking union.
Pauline van der Meer Mohr: I think the banking union has a lot of complexities. It’s important that we get there, but the way has a lot of complexities. Again I’m not an expert on the banking union at all but I think we need to move quickly to a form of European integration, also when it comes to banking supervision. Ideally you would have a global system of banking supervision but I think that’s probably one step too far but at least at the European level there needs to be a level playing field but that’ll be hard enough in itself to achieve.
Ding Chun: Since 1979, Rotterdam and Shanghai are sister cities. You are here at the Shanghai Forum to talk about the port of city of Rotterdam. So could you please give us a brief introduction about Rotterdam?
Pauline van der Meer Mohr: Rotterdam is indeed a port city as Shanghai is. When I went to school, many years ago, I learned that the port of Rotterdam ranks number one in the world. And now decades later, Rotterdam is, depending on the measures you take, around number 9, 10 or 11 in the world and has been overtaken by at least eight Chinese ports.
Ding Chun: But still number one in Europe!
Pauline van der Meer Mohr: Yes you’re right, still number one in Europe but the interesting thing is that if you measure in purely quantitative terms, so in pure terms of tonnage and so on, all the Chinese ports are bigger. However, the Dutch port still contributes very much to the competitiveness of Holland as a nation. So if you look at the world competitiveness index, Holland ranked number eight. China ranks number 28. So I think China has still a way to go in improving its competitiveness and I think the secret of the Dutch success is that it doesn’t only look at quantitative determinants of competitiveness but also at qualitative terms. For example, social innovation is just as important as technological innovation. Social innovation has got to do with things like the rule of law, trust in authorities, innovative tax and customs regulations, a high level of education in an area, and factors like health and environmental issues also become increasingly more important. All of that taken together make sure that the infrastructure in Holland is very tight, very efficient and very innovative and that leads to a higher place in the world ranking for competitiveness.
Ding Chun: You have discussed the Shanghai Pilot Free Trade Zone (SPFTZ) during the closing ceremony of the Shanghai Forum. Could you give some comments or suggestions to this kind of experiment in Shanghai?
Pauline van der Meer Mohr: I think it’s a very interesting experiment. The reason why Shanghai is so interesting is because in Europe we have been seeing that free trade zones are becoming less and less popular. We used to have them in the past but we’re now abolishing them, for several reasons. One of them is the European Union in and of itself being almost a free trade zone. That is of course only within the EU. When you are a farmer in Africa, you wouldn’t see this as a free trade zone at all, because you have huge trade barriers of course. Within the EU zone, there is some sort of a free trade zone. But also the free trade zone was becoming very strict in terms of regulation, customs and transports of shipping goods. Because of the strict regulations, it was almost easier to abolish the free trade zone and to look at other ways of innovation such as safe and secure trade lanes and to find the entire value chain rather than looking at firm certification or firm taxation and customs duties. So those innovations helped the port of Rotterdam and I would be very interested to see how the Free trade zone in Shanghai is developing. Because I think as we learned at the Shanghai Forum, the SPFTZ is very acutely aware that it is not just about free trade but it is also about connecting Shanghai to the rest of mainland China, it is also about government reform, it is also about regulatory reform, it is also about the rule of law and forms of arbitration, reliable systems and structures of processes, reliable government, and also probably about sustainability. I think sustainability is also becoming more and more of an issue for China as a whole and it will be also for the Shanghai free trade zone.
Ding Chun: As you mentioned in this experiment we need quite some structural reforms, especially in the fields of law and regulations. We also have laws about joint ventures or foreign investors. Do you have some suggestions to this field?
Pauline van der Meer Mohr: As a lawyer I would say having a rule of law, a solid arbitration and having a legal system is always a good thing because that inspires trust and confidence in foreign investments. So my suggestion would be to, on the one hand, look for what would be sort of a minimum international standard, to inspire their confidence. On the other hand, stay true to your background, to what made you big in the first place. This is actually one of the things I like so much about China, as opposed to for example the more litigious societies in the world, namely that your trust based society is actually very efficient when it comes to signing agreements and making deals. You don’t have to bring a whole battalion of lawyers to a deal negotiation. You build trust first and then you do business and I think that is very efficient. The more litigious societies who have one lawyer for every twenty people don’t appreciate as much how important it is to be able to do that much business based on trust. So my recommendation would be to keep the trust based in your society. That is very precious and once you lose it, it is very hard to find it back. You can lose it overnight and you can spend ages trying to build it up again. Plus, if you lose it, then you will move to a US system which is highly litigious with lots of lawyers where you cannot move without an ambulance chaser behind you. I think if the US were to design their legal system from scratch today, they would not choose a litigious society as they created over time. I think secretly that they’re actually quite envious of your trust based society. So I would say keep the trust base but build a minimum level of international standards of rule of law that international firms can rely on.
Ding Chun: We all know that you have a very excellent career in the field of academics as well as in business matters. Could you tell us as a very successful female, what’s the secret behind this? People always talk about disadvantages of being a leading female what’s your opinion?
Pauline van der Meer Mohr: Well this could be a very long conversation of course. Actually, there aren’t that many leading business or academic women in the Netherlands either. If I look at the entire European Union, Holland is actually doing not so well at all, so for example in my university only 15 % of the professors are female whereas I would like it to be 50% of course but we are very far away from that particular point in time. The same counts for women in international business in senior management roles. Holland is really lagging behind there and there’s lots of reasons why that is the case. One of them is that there is a part-time work culture in the Netherlands. Women, when having children, choose to work only part-time and spend some time with their children and some time in their profession. As a result, they grow up less fast in their careers than their male competitors and by the time, for example in academia, when they are up for tenure, their male competitors will have done much more, and will have published much more. So we have to begin to make allowances for that fact but that’s a hard sell in academia. Because in the end your age index is what counts when it comes to professorial appointment. So we have quite a way to go. Does it have advantages to be a woman in a men’s world? Sure, it does. I mean everybody sees you so it’s not very hard to get your voice heard. And your style is different, also that has advantages and disadvantages incidentally because sometimes people don’t understand that style. You have to put a little more energy into your work. Is there a recipe for success? No there isn’t, it’s different for everyone. For me the recipe was to work hard and wherever there is an opportunity, be sure to grab it. Don’t be shy. Don’t be afraid to grab the opportunity. Don’t be afraid to take risks. Sometimes the opportunity will be risky and your gut feel will say “ooh am I ready to do this”, maybe not but let’s try it anyway. Be prepared to experiment, take some risks, and find a few people that can support you. Support in the family is very important. Because if your family doesn’t support what you’re doing, then you have big troubles. And also support in the workplace. I’ve always been surrounded by people who were happy to help me if I needed it. That’s what I’m also trying to do that now for the people that work with me. If I see they’re struggling in their career, I’m trying to help them develop to their full potential. There is nothing more satisfying to me, more rewarding, than to see young talent, being male or female talent, growing and developing to their full potential.
