This article is not a comment about Jamaica’s vote on Cuba last week, but is instead a piece on the importance of partnership and encouraging independent thinking if Jamaica is to break itself out of our 1 per cent, low-growth trap, which, if continued, means it will take 70 years to double our real per capita gross domestic product (GDP).

One of the best examples of a Jamaican making an outsized contribution to our national development was Senator Keith Duncan, who last week outlined why he “jumped off the fence” to become a government senator. He was a founding member and subsequently chairman of the Economic Programme Oversight Committee (EPOC), past president of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ), and one who worked closely with former Finance Minister Dr Nigel Clarke on the COVID Recovery Task Force. He observed that he had “always worked constructively in the best interests of Jamaica” and had indeed enjoyed his independence. However, he credited his famous father as telling him, “You need to come off the fence,” and consequently, finally accepted repeated invitations from Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who “wanted a higher level of discourse” in the Senate. He said he saw a “drive within the prime minister to make Jamaica a better place”. In addition to advice from his family, for him the words of Maxine Henry Wilson were decisive: “Honest and dedicated service to the people of Jamaica…” is the final judgement.

His sentiments appear in line with the post-1983 Senate, when Prime Minister Edward Seaga appointed independent senators in place of the Opposition, who hadn’t contested that election. That Senate is widely regarded by our older heads as the best in Jamaica’s history, reflecting the independence of thought and strong characters of the senators appointed.

In his Nationwide interview on Tuesday, current chair of Jamaica Reconstruction and Resilience Oversight Committee (JAMROC) and noted economist Peter Blair Henry appeared to be thinking on similar lines when he observed that “everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts”. To allow Jamaicans to evaluate the National Reconstruction and Resilience Authority (NaRRA) transparently, he advised that he was building a platform with help from the multilaterals and The University of the West Indies (UWI) to track investment performance of projects in terms of their social and economic return.

This approach was foreshadowed in late 2023, when Henry made a speech on Jamaica’s last 60 years of development as part of the Planning Institute of Jamaica’s Dialogue for Development series, titled ‘Productive Public Investment: An Innovative Framework for Aligning Jamaica’s Economic and Social Priorities’.

In the speech, he did an excellent job of demonstrating why emphasising productivity is so important, beginning with the World Bank database world development indicators (these are measured in constant US dollars), and calculated Jamaica’s GDP per person and GDP per worker (more commonly called productivity) between 1962 and 2022.

According to Henry, in 1962 Jamaica’s GDP per person was US$3,479 and GDP per worker was US$8,650. In 2022 Jamaica’s GDP per person was US$5,187, while its GDP per worker was US$8,244. These abysmal statistics mean that over a 60-year period GDP per person has increased by a mere 0.7 per cent per annum, while GDP per worker has actually declined by 0.1 per cent per annum. The situation is even worse if measured from 1972, when Jamaica’s productivity apparently peaked. According to Henry, this means the average member of the Jamaican labour force today is only three–fifths as productive as the average worker was in 1972, and consequently the average Jamaican is less well off than the average Jamaican was in 1972.

In the context of NaRRA, however, it is the focus of his 2023 speech on productive public investment that appears to underlie his Nationwide responses.

The speech argued that Jamaica needs an innovative framework to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations which Jamaica has adopted. He summarises these as eradicate poverty and hunger, attain universal health and sanitation, provide quality education and employment opportunities, maintain environmental sustainability and responsible production and consumption within our cities, communities, and natural spaces.

To achieve the SDGs, he observed the Government of Jamaica has committed to investment in resilient infrastructure — roads, broadband, and port redevelopment as a major goal of its
Vision 2030 – National Development Plan.

Henry argued that while investment in infrastructure has the potential to raise productivity and “promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation”, it is vital that public spending for infrastructure projects use a fact-driven, pragmatic approach to distinguish between those public investment projects that have the potential to drive economic growth from those that do not.

He observed that the Government already has the Public Investment Management System (PIMS) and, under the Financial Administration and Audit Amendment Act of 2014, all projects go through their evaluation process. He proposed, however, the addition of a Dual-Hurdle Framework, which looks at both the economic and social returns of a project, comparing for example, the economic return to investors of a typical private sector investment with the higher social returns of a highway.

In his speech, he also mentions the issue of the rate of return required by foreign capital; for example, the chief investment officer of the New York State Pension Authority, who might require a 15 per cent return on infrastructure projects, but an extra 5 per cent risk premium to invest in Jamaica.

The potential game-changer is the US$6 billion of multilateral financing. Henry’s proposed data-driven approach (for example estimating social returns on areas such as roads using international databases) appears promising, and could be complemented by the strategic framework outlined in the presentation at last Thursday’s High-Level Dialogue on unlocking the Private Sector for Jamaica’s Development’ by Mona School of Business Management’s Judy Muthuri, Suzana Russell, and Lila Rao Graham. Their presentation, ‘Voluntary National Review on the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals, subtitled ‘Enabling Private Sector Engagement in National Development in Jamaica’, outlined the many gaps that a true public-private partnership would need to solve to move Jamaica forward.

Jamaica’s energy future is an even more urgent example of the need for partnership. At the PSOJ energy summit last week on Tuesday, Jamaica Public Service (JPS) CEO Hugh Grant outlined the difficulty of the decisions he had to make in restoring electricity after Hurricane Melissa, and how “the difference between a slow recovery and a faster one is often the quality of partnerships”. Selah!