CHIEF technical director of the Jamaica Productivity Centre (JPC) Tamar Nelson is discouraging “picking winners” as a means of improving national productivity and increasing economic growth, and instead has batted for increased focus on innovation and greater adoption of technology.

She was addressing a hybrid gathering for the World Productivity Day Forum hosted by the JPC on Tuesday at the Terra Nova All-Suite Hotel in St Andrew.

“Empirical research has shown that in the last five years… economic complexity is positively related to productivity improvement. So this is particularly true when the emphasis is less on picking winners and more on developing low-knowledge-based areas into high-knowledge areas, and this suggests focusing on areas such as STEM [science, technology, engineering and math],” Nelson said.

She defined economic complexity as the creation of high-value goods and services through the implementation of innovation — new ideas.

“Picking winners”, on the other hand, refers to the process in which governments select particular projects or industries for financial and technical support in order to promote economic development.

Nelson’s view on picking winners is not too far from that of Dr Damien King, executive director of the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CaPRI), who just two weeks ago at the same venue, during the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica President’s Forum, questioned the effectiveness of the process.

“You know, I always find it to be curious when people in the private sector support picking winners…So when I hear from you that, ‘I would rather the Government tax my resources so a government bureaucrat can decide where investment should go and where those resources should go,’ I think it’s paradoxical,” the economist said then.

Making a case for innovation yesterday, Nelson said the JPC has used a proven model approach called IMPACT that focuses on innovation, measuring the effectiveness of innovation implementation, process review, awareness creation, and teamwork.

“This, of course, leads nicely into technology — and technological advancement is the only way to have those sustained improvement in productivity. In the Caribbean we are always left behind the curb in adopting new technologies, [which] stems from a combination of factors [such as] training, infrastructure, costs,” Nelson further shared.

Additionally, she noted that achieving productivity in the Caribbean, and Jamaica in particular, was due to global shocks such as the Great Recession in 2007, the US-China trade war, and the novel coronavirus pandemic.

“Our most recent estimates indicate that productivity is expected to have risen by 0.4 per cent globally,” the JPC chief technical director said, adding: “Since the end of COVID-19 and the pandemic restrictions we have seen, slowly, labour productivity recovered with marked differences across industries.”

To combat the impact of global shocks on productivity, Nelson made the case for innovation to build even more resilient institutions. Continuing in the vein of the impact approach, she contended that a number of measures would be needed:

1) Implement measuring mechanisms to ensure the application of innovation and the use of technology is increasing output

2) Continually evaluate processes and assess when and how improvements in process will be made

3) Develop awareness of productivity-related issues

4) Improve dialogue, collaboration and knowledge exchange between academia, government, private sector and trade unions.