One must be very careful with data. A dramatic error in the number of
doctors in Ethiopia would surely cause significant shortcomings in the
reliability of any projections for Ethiopia. This means that any
multi-national Nash equilibrium involving Ethiopia will also be distorted
or perhaps missed entirely. Worse, we or Ethiopia or Ethiopia's admirers
(and detractors) could easily come to completely wrong conclusions
about whether Ethiopian schools are doing a good job (increased the
count of doctors by several hundred from 2005 to get to 3749) or a
miserable job (maybe the count went from 1849 in 2006 to 1806 in 2007,
so schools did not provide enough replacements to deal with retirements,
deaths and emigration).
Suppose we are in doubt about the number of doctors working reported
for Vietnam. Half a world away from Ethiopia. Nevertheless, we might
wish to compare Vietnam and Ethiopia as both have about 90 million
people and somewhat similar economies. An inaccurate figure for
Ethiopia can easily cause us to believe an errant tally for Vietnam. It
would be at least ironic were we to statistically prefer an imprecise figure
for Ethiopia over what might be a truthful number for Vietnam.
Demographers will observe that finding lots of comparisons for Ethiopia
it tough - the next largest country is the Philippines with over 100 million
people and the beyond that is Mexico. Likewise, the next smaller country
is Egypt with 82 million followed by Germany and Turkey. Confusion over
Eritrean data could influence decisions about a very diverse collection
including Jordan, Laos, Paraguay, Papua New Guinea, El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Kyrgyzstan, Denmark, Slovakia, and Finland. In the case of
the simultaneous miracles in Brazil, Israel and Portugal the trailing
lower case ell was read as a one and merged with the following numbers.
The problem was obscured because Nepal and Senegal have not reported
recently.