Malawi has just decided who may call themselves an economist, which turns out to be the easy part of a question it has not finished answering. When debt is restructured, when the Reserve Bank weighs the kwacha or interest rates, when a fertiliser subsidy is redesigned, somebody’s analysis lies behind the choices, and those who bear the consequences rarely learn its author’s name. It is fair to ask whether those doing this work are competent and honest. Parliament has answered by passing the Economics Society of Malawi Bill. The answer is partly right, partly unfinished.
It begins well. The Bill replaces the voluntary Economics Association of Malawi with a statutory Economics Society, ESOMA, sole authority for registering, regulating and disciplining economists. Section 36 treats dishonesty, fraud, misuse of confidential information and undisclosed conflicts of interest as misconduct the Bill is right to reach. Panels must observe natural justice, and aggrieved members may go to the High Court. Those provisions deserve a plain welcome. The harder question is whether the powers built around them are as well justified.
The Bill’s memorandum argued that the profession was unregulated and its association could not enforce standards. Both were true: economists lacked a body with legal powers, and concern about impostors and standards may well justify action. Neither shows the scale of harm, or why compulsory licensing is proportionate. Strengthening the body through which economists organise themselves is one thing; giving it statutory authority over who may enter the field and, potentially, who may practise is a larger step with a larger burden of proof. The heavier the restriction, the stronger the justification needed.
At section 37 the difficulty becomes concrete. Alongside offences for falsely claiming registration, it makes it an offence, punishable by a K10 million fine and two years’ imprisonment, to perform any act done “exclusively” by a registered economist. Which acts? The Bill does not say. The penalty is written; the boundary it guards is not. Until they are named, a statistician modelling poverty, a university appointing a lecturer or a bank hiring an analyst cannot know whether they are inside the law. Most claim neither degree nor title, yet their work is economic analysis. A boundary the statute has not drawn should not carry a prison sentence.
The boundary proved hard to draw for a reason. Economics is first a discipline, a body of knowledge and methods practised across universities, government, central banks, business and civil society. Economists practise it professionally, but that does not make it a bounded profession in the regulatory sense. Malawi’s regulated professions have more identifiable reserved practice and clearer public reasons to restrict it: an auditor signs an audit opinion; an engineer certifies work where failure endangers life. Economic analysis has no such act. Protecting the title of economist is comparatively simple; reserving the underlying work is harder, and a degree, the Bill’s definition of an economist, serves the first well and the second poorly. Nor can registration certify judgment, which rests on data, methods, assumptions and scrutiny.
The second question is who holds these powers. ESOMA would regulate entry, set its fees, discipline members, promote the profession, mobilise funding for economists and may earn consultancy income. Each is legitimate alone. Held in one member-controlled body, they pull against each other: a regulator’s first duty is to the public, including against its members; a promoter’s runs to them. This is a question of design, not of the people who will run ESOMA; sound institutions stay trustworthy whoever leads them. Discipline shows it: the Executive Committee opens a case, appoints most of the panel, reviews its decision and hears the appeal. Licensing economists is unusual internationally, and OECD research finds restrictive occupational rules can limit entry, raise prices and favour incumbents, while evidence they improve quality is weak and mixed.
None of this requires the Bill to fail, only to be finished, and much of that work rests with those who wrote it. The regulations can protect titles, set fair fees, create independent discipline and decline to treat ordinary analysis as reserved work, but cannot settle everything. Parliament should remove the undefined offence or redraft it around narrowly defined acts backed by demonstrated public risk, and separate regulation and discipline from promotion, funding and consultancy.
Think, finally, of the people who bear the consequences of economic advice and never learn the author’s name. When next season’s subsidy is redesigned or the kwacha moves, they will not ask who was registered; they will live with the result. They are the reason any profession sets standards for itself. ESOMA has a chance most regulators would envy: to be trusted before it ever needs to be feared. Its measure will not be how many economists it registers, but how many Malawians come to trust the advice they never see.
T. Arthur Chibwana is an agricultural and applied economist with more than 16 years of experience in economic-policy research, public-sector reform and government advisory work across Africa. He writes in his personal capacity.
