bpTT president: More entrepreneurs needed

Robert Riley, president, bpTT believes  Trinidad and Tobago must begin to act as Trinidad and Tobago plc. “By this I mean that to be globally competitive as a country we must have an integration of the education, health, industrial and public sector, supported by an enabling legislative programme and governance structure.”

He was speaking at the UWI — Institute of Business (UWI-IOB) Ideas Forum entitled “Global Competitiveness and Trinidad and Tobago,” at the Trinidad Hilton last week. Riley said such an holistic approach to industrial development fostered international competitiveness among companies. Education, he said is the key to unleashing the creativity of the people and to driving the industrial process. Riley added that the availability of an educated workforce has consistently been found to provide access to the productivity increases needed for global competitiveness as it builds an economy’s ability to absorb new knowledge and technology. In a survey review of innovation done by the Economist in 1999, a study by Richard Nelson and Nathan Rosenberg noted that countries which sustained a large number of competitive and innovative firms were found to be better at churning out well trained young people with all the skills their industry needed.

bpTT’s president said research and development (R&D) activities are essential for building the capability to innovate and ensure that competitiveness are able to enhance their global competitiveness. He noted that the growth of the East Asian countries was preceded by extraordinary increases in spending in R&D reaching over one percent of GDP by the mid 1990s. In Korea spending on R&D increased from 0.62 percent of GDP in 1981 to 2.09 percent in 1994, approaching levels of industrialised countries and surpassing that of the United Kingdom (UK). Latin America on the other hand continues to lag behind; Chile recorded the highest spending for the same period rising from 0.59 percent to 0.76 percent for the same period. However, he said to complement such initiatives, TT needs to become a nation of entrepreneurs. “We have few examples of persons who have emerged as true successful local entrepreneurs: Arthur Lok Jack, Ken Gordon, Aleem Mohammed come to mind immediately.”

Riley said these three factors, education, technological capability and entrepreneurship are not the only ones that create national competitiveness. He said a glance at the Global Competitiveness Index highlight some of the other variables such as national governance structures, transparency and corruption, in addition to some of the macro-economic indicators. He said the lack of skilled personnel, the limited opportunities for local training in some of the key sectors as well as the limited entrepreneurial drive amongst some of the non-traditional players and  the challenge of funding new businesses are some of the elements needed to build global competitiveness.