Mistrust between public, private sectors among factors hampering diversification

A panel of experts spent three hours last Wednesday evening discussing this question in a lively and sometimes humorous debate between themselves and an audience of stakeholders at a forum on diversification hosted by the UWI’s Economics Department.

Keynote speaker at the event, Dr Terrence Farrell presented a plan outlining the Economic Development Board’s strategy for getting TT there by 2030.

More important that the plan itself (which will be discussed in a separate article) is the revelation that, in the public’s mind at least, there are many paths to diversification that have the potential to positively affect TT’s economy.

However, panellists, Dr Roger Hosein, Dr Patrick Watson and GML Chief Business Editor, Anthony Wilson seemed to agree that an optimal mix of massive public sector reform, trust building between the private and public sectors, the motivation of political will to initiate change and a shift away from the import distribution model could be the way to a more diversified TT economy.

Long standing whipping boys, the public service and the business community came in for heavy criticism at the event, with Farrell saying that the problem with the public service, was the public service itself.

The chairman of the Economic Advisory Board said service commissions should be done away with and replaced by regular human resource departments. He also said the public service, as it currently stood, was too large for a country of this size, and that the situation was unlikely to change since it kept as large a number of people employed as possible, much to the convenience of successive governments.

“In fact, the politician’s point of view, it is the rational response to leave the situation as it is,” declared Farrell.

The Economic Advisory Board chairman also tackled what he termed the ‘’elephant in the room” of race and ethnicity. According to Farrell, too many important policy decisions continued to be based almost instinctively on race.

Meanwhile, he said mistrust between the public sector and this country’s business class is often fuelled by the fact that the public service is made up largely of people of one race, while the business class is made up of people from another.

Farrell suggested a strengthening of the Tripartite Committee to serve as a bridge between these groups and called for interaction from all the stakeholders involved and not domination of the committee by one group.

The business community was upbraided for continuing to follow an import distribution model and not investing in building this country’s manufacturing and productive capacity.

However, one businessman commented that there was little incentive for them to do so currently.

Investment in staff training, he said, did not pay off as workers were frequently absent or left the job. Moreover, he said, it was easier to import goods of consistent quality that he could get to his customers quickly than to invest in a heavily capital intensive enterprise he was not sure he was going to get a return on.

This was one of the more hotly debated issues of the evening, with no clear solutions emerging from the forum to tackle it. One audience member also complained that the top down approach to problem solving often hampered efforts to make improvements, garnering much agreement from the crowd.

She advocated a community approach to diversification, calling for government to get the grassroots thinking about what they could do to encourage diversification.