How can Jamaica cross the chasm to rebuild after COVID?
Recently the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) held its annual economic conference in a virtual format under the theme ‘Crossing the Chasm: The Road to Economic Recovery’. There was a very clear effort by the organisers to build on the 134-page report of the COVID -19 Economic Recovery Task Force, itself subtitled ‘Rebuild Jamaica’. Many of the participants had been part of that Economic Recovery Task Force, chaired by Finance Minister Nigel Clarke.
On Thursday evening, as part of its smallbusinessportal.com podcast joint venture, the PSOJ COVIDCastJa Facebook livestream had two journalists, myself and Nationwide’s Kalilah Reynolds, review the conference with their media partner, adtelligent’s Nevada Powe, as moderator.
At the end of the review, PSOJ President Keith Duncan made a passionate, valuable attempt to summarise the event and the way forward.
In his summary, Duncan noted that the conference had attempted to assess where we are now macroeconomically, with presentations from the Inter-American Development Bank’s (IDB) Henry Mooney discussing the region, Bank of Jamaica (BOJ) Governor Richard Byles and Dr Nigel Clarke.
The conference, he said, reviewed specific sectors with representatives from manufacturing and tourism, including the Jamaica Manufacturers and Exporters Association (JMEA) President Richard Pandohie, and the Caribbean Hotel and Tourist Associations (CHTA) Nicola Madden-Greig.
They also looked at how the most vulnerable – small and medium-sized enterprises – were coping with the crisis, including reviewing their needs to reach the new economy, including broadband access, e-commerce and the issues surrounding payment systems, particularly regarding US dollar accounts.
He noted the success of Saffrey Brown, chairman of the Council of Voluntary Social Services in creating a public private social partnership” to mobilise help for the most vulnerable, typically displaced “informal sector” people, during COVID-19, through creating a Private Sector COVID-19 Relief Fund, much of it financed through combining the efforts of the major corporate foundations working along with the police, the army and other government agencies.
His key emphasis, however, was on how the private sector and civil society, working together, can create the necessary focus through “social partnerships” to fix problems and cure Jamaica’s “implementation deficit”.
He emphasised, as an example, the role of Jamaica Chamber of Commerce (JCC) President Lloyd Distant in recently getting a long awaited national consensus on crime between the Government and Opposition over the finish line, with both parties “agreeing on principles to move as one”.
The PSOJ, JCC and JMEA, he said, working with civil society, had achieved this “big win”, which would collectively provide oversight through regular reporting from the police commissioner, Ministry of National Security and the Jamaica Defence Force on crime and corruption.
He was particularly interested, however, in how to finally achieve Jamaica’s long awaited supply side reforms. He noted that Jamaica had had numerous economic plans to move the country forward, of which the COVID-19 Task Force report was only the latest, succeeding the efforts of the Economic Growth Council, which itself had had more than 500 consultations as input for its recommendations in 2016.
He mentioned the Growth Inducement Plan, jointly written, largely, by Stanford economics Professor Emeritus Donald Harris and then Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) head Gladstone Hutchinson in 2010/2011, observing that the book’s contents provided an excellent summary of some of the needed supply side and social reforms on which there has been limited progress outside of the main macroeconomic and financial sector reforms that were driven by Economic Programme Oversight Committee (EPOC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
While observing that our current macroeconomic stability was a very important pre-condition to faster economic growth, Duncan added that in his view Jamaica now needed to take the same “disciplined” approach as had occurred under EPOC in meeting the IMF targets to these other reforms.
Under EPOC, Duncan observed, the responsible agencies had committed to owned deliverables. When the various Ministries and other entities made commitments, they had timetables for delivery, and entities such as the Bank of Jamaica and Ministry of Finance would come and report where they were on a monthly basis. If they were “off track”, they would advise how they planned to get back “on track”, as under the IMF programme Jamaica would either “fail” or need a waiver. The monthly reporting to the public provided the necessary discipline, as the ministries were afraid to say they had failed to deliver.
His key conclusion was that similar monthly EPOC-styled “oversight” committees were needed to drive these supply side economic reforms, for example, land titling, tax simplification, general ease of doing business (government procurement) as well as to address the urgent issues of educational transformation and overall human capital development.
With respect to the newly appointed education committee, he noted that he had been told that the chair, Harvard Professor Orlando Patterson, had already observed that there had been “so many studies” on education, but Jamaica just needed to get on with making our education system fit for purpose for the new economy we are building. His clear implication, according to Duncan, was that the teams set up for the COVID-19 Task Force could provide the nucleus for future oversight committees post-election, to drive a “reform with ambition” agenda.