TRADE policy consultant in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Rosalea Hamilton, yesterday called for a ‘concerted effort’ among decision-makers for a policy to monitor the competitiveness of local firms in the global market.

“I think [there] must be a very deliberate and concerted effort to look at this business of competitiveness and deliberate on a policy that ultimately we can monitor, measure and put some specific programme and activity in place,” she said. “So that over a period of time we can say we have moved in terms of our ability to compete.”

Hamilton, who was addressing a group of decision-makers at the Management Institute of National Development (MIND) Friday Policy forum yesterday, said while the existing ‘competition law’ provides a level playing-field for competing firms, it does not address fundamental issues.

“Issues which I think we must be concerned with in Jamaica are the things we must do to compete, what are the supplies side constraints that have been in the past and still are limiting our capacity to take advantage of the increasingly open global market,” she said.

Hamilton is at present spearheading a pilot study on Jamaica’s capacity to compete in a globalised economy, using approximately 300 indicators similar to those used by the World Economic Forum. These indicators are comparative across countries in the world and use 11 sub-groups of measures to compute an index of competitiveness.

Yesterday Hamilton pointed out that there is no one policy “that pulls the almost 300 indicators together.

“[We’re talking] about to comprise a measure into some coherent place that says we have to monitor and track and pay attention to these different policy areas in order to ensure competitiveness,” she stressed.

“We have to put a policy in place so that we can say we have moved in terms of our ability to compete from one point to the other,” she added.

MIND’s Friday Policy Forum is a monthly discussion designed to facilitate the dissemination of information on matters of national importance among senior management officials in the private and public sectors, according to the institution’s chief executive officer, Maria Jones.