Opposition leader bats for SMEs
Leader of Opposition and president of the People’s National Party (PNP) Dr Peter Phillips has proposed the creation of a national strategic plan, involving both private and public sector commitments and targets, to ensure that Jamaica reaps full benefits from digital transformation.
Addressing the annual Mona School of Business and Management Roundtable CEO Breakfast Forum at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel this week, Dr Phillips said for Jamaica to realise these benefits, a new PNP Government would lead this effort by bringing small and medium-sized enterprises into the digital age, through a number of deliberate actions.
Among the action, the Opposition leader proposed were:
– Enhancing access to credit and lowering access costs to SME;
– Offering business advisory services so that more SMEs could embrace digital technology;
– Speeding up Public Sector Transformation as business competitiveness and ease were being hampered by government inefficiency, and;
– Formalising landownership, particularly agricultural lands;
– Embracing the application of digital technological advance in the educational sector, especially in the delivery of new teaching and evaluation methods and techniques.
“We have to catch up with the rest of the world,” said Phillips.
He said these proposals would ensure that small and medium-sized enterprises accept the new environment of the “ecology of digital transformation”.
Dr Phillips said a defining feature of the Jamaican economy over the years was the uneven concentration of wealth, as technology was only available to big corporations. He said it is fundamentally significant that technology is now accessible to large and small companies, and there is no escaping its impact on our daily existence.
He said this could change the landscape as presently of the 130,000 registered companies, only eighty were publicly listed and paid seventy per cent of corporate taxes. He noted, also, that 40 per cent of Jamaica’s productive capacity was in the informal sector, according to International Labour Organization statistics.
