Keith Collister, ContributorPRESIDENT OF JAMPRO, Jamaica's promotion agency, Pat Francis, believes its time for Jamaica to make creating a national Agenda for Competitiveness its key economic priority
The Target Growth Competitiveness Committee was launched at the Jamaica Pegasus hotel last week Wednesday, along with the local release of Jamaica's international competitiveness ranking.
The committee is just one of the initiatives coming out of the partnership between the Government and the European Union's Private Sector Development Programme (PSPD).
The committee itself has been allocated 350,000 euro out of the total funding of 28.67 million euros, while over 60 per cent of the funding is to go towards direct financial assistance for micro, small and medium enterprises.
The committee will therefore need to partner closely with the private sector and academia to use its limited resources most effectively.
In a follow-on interview, the JAMPRO president stated that "Other than the critical issue of crime, Jamaica's number one priority is to create a national Agenda for Competitiveness."
COMPETITIVENESS COMMITTEE
She defined the 'Competitveness Committee' as the concrete expression of the strategic alliance of Government, unions and business to make Jamaica win. In her view, Jamaica has no option but to move aggressively to remove bottlenecks to profitability, labour productivity and state efficiency by defining an agenda of what must be changed now. The Competitiveness Committee would then assess the best way to address these bottlenecks, and would provide a powerful lobby group for their implementation. An advisory board would also be set up that will include emerging industries, such as our creative industry.
She said JAMPRO was launching not just a committee, but an agenda, based on Jamaica's need to compete or die, through the strategic stakeholders of business, unions and Government pulling together toward the objective of improved labour productivity and welfare.
Mrs. Francis believes that it is critical that the society debate seriously the issue of competitiveness in the context of the accelerating onward march of the forces of globalization. JAMPRO's launch of the Competitiveness Committee is intended to bring into sharp focus the critical issue of our international competitiveness.
The priority nature of this agenda is reinforced by Jamaica's fall in international competitiveness over the past year. According to the 2005-2006 Global Competitiveness Report of the World Economic Forum, Jamaica slipped five places to number 70 of 117
countries, compared to a 2004 ranking of 65th.
The World Economic Forum measures a country's competitiveness using two main approaches: a Growth Competitiveness Index (GCI) and a Business Competitiveness Index (BCI) which can loosely be characterised as macro and micro approaches.
The GCI has three main three tiers: the macroeconomic environment, the state of the country's public institutions and its level of technological readiness. Comparing the components of the GCI with 2001, Jamaica has fallen to 99th from 71st, 65th form 71st and 45th from 43rd in those respective areas in 2005.
Using the BCI approach, Jamaica has fallen from 31st to 54th in the area of company operations, and from 44th to 54th in terms of the business environment.
Jamaica needs to target the five main areas over which it has most control to achieve improvements in competitiveness by 2007. In particular, she believes we need to move ourselves from 72nd to the 40th percentile for pay and productivity, from 23rd to 10th percentile for the extent of bureaucratic red tape, from 44th to the 30th percentile in terms of the efficiency of the tax system, and from 46th to the 40th percentile in terms of the efficiency of the legal system. She believes improvements in these critical areas would have multiple positive impacts on the way the economy works.
Finally, she thinks Jamaica needs much greater organisation and collaboration in our efforts to achieve competitiveness, particularly in view of our limited resources, as in her view our current efforts are somewhat disorganised.
Taken from Financial Gleaner, November 25, 2005
