Shaw JAMAICA LABOUR Party (JLP) Spokesman on Finance, Audley Shaw, has criticised the Government as being incapable of making a market economy work.
"They neither have an understanding nor a commitment to the principles that make a private sector-led, market driven economy work," the Opposition spokesman told Jaycees members at the Hotel Astra in Mandeville recently.
Mr. Shaw said that unlike in the 1970s, the PNP appeared in the 1990s to embrace the free enterprise system as a vote catching technique. "But, their actions during the decade of the 90s, in which interest rates averaged 50 per cent, while our trading partners had 7-10 per cent, reveal their pitiful lack of understanding of how a market system works," he said.
"A Government's role in a market economy is to set the stage where investor confidence can flourish. This includes low interest rates, in which Government does not crowd out the private sector from credit at globally competitive rates; creative partnerships between Government and private sector, whereby the equity of the public sector can be matched with private sector ingenuity to jump start the economy; a far-reaching and effective strategy to achieve full literacy levels, and a credible management plan to significantly reduce the murder and crime rate."
Mr. Shaw said the People's National Party (PNP) had failed because they wanted to distribute what had not been earned. "This is the failed policy of socialism that they continue to hang on to and have now put forward as their guiding philosophy into the 21st century. They have once again come out of the closet."
He said the JLP, instead, believed, as it had always done, that Government's role is to free the private sector and make it easier for them to do business, "so that jobs can be generated while the people create wealth for themselves by their own initiative and enterprise."
