Susan Smith, Staff reporter
Dr. Wesley Hughes Director-General, Planning Institute of Jamaica. - NORMAN GRINDLEY/DEPUTY CHIEF PHOTOGRAPHER
DIRECTOR- GENERAL of the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) Dr. Wesley Hughes, has direct responsibility for providing policy and technical advice to the Government of Jamaica on matter regarding national development.
He says the PIOJ's role is managing the present while putting in place recommendations to secure the future in coordination with the Ministry of Finance and Planning,
Born in St. Catherine, the economist is married with three children. He is a trained economist with a Ph. D. in Economics from University of Sussex, in the United Kingdom and joined the Planning Institute in 1977 as a regular economist.
Knowledgeable about the topography of Jamaica, he not only spent a lot of time studying Geography but lived it in his childhood.
He lived in St. Ann, went to school in Westmoreland, moved to live in St. Mary where he commuted to Calabar High School in Kingston.
ECONOMIC LOVE
It was while at Calabar that his love for economics developed. It was his economics teacher who really inspired him and he felt he wanted to become as dynamic and well read as this professional.
"Economics allows me to project into the future."
And speaking of the future, Dr. Hughes believes that Jamaica's position in the next ten years has already been decided. "In terms of structure, social group class, we are not going to be significantly different then from now," he said. "The way we order our social lives will determine our state of affairs."
By describing the present economy as 'very normalised' he also suggested that the future would continue on this trend.
"The Planning Institute is shifting the focus away from dealing with short term, five years reactive types of policies," he told the Financial Gleaner.
"We still have to do those things because crisis and problems are going to emerge. Outbreak of terrorism or oil prices will occur and we will still have to treat these. However, I believe our economy is more normalised," he said.
Nonetheless he said that planning does not necessarily determine success. He places more importance on the level of diligence, building and infrastructures that last, investment levels and a good work ethic. Preserving an idea or a vision over a long period of time is also key.
"The basic things matter," he said.
Dr. Hughes often considers the position of the poor and indigent. He said the nation must focus on the 16 per cent of the 2.5 million living in diverse poverty.
"We need to design a social welfare safety net to take care of this. You don't get a lot of rich people seeking social welfare but the rich will take advantage of the subsidies," he said. "When we were subsidising cornmeal saying it was for the poor, richer people's dogs benefited from that subsidy than the poor," he added.
Dr. Hughes said the metaphor of there being two Jamaica's is a somewhat simplistic approach in analysing a society which is quite complex.
"We don't have two Jamaicas but multiple Jamaicas," he outlined. "We have a very low level of social capital and trust between groups dating to days of slavery. We have a very nuanced complex."
Part of his vision for the PIOJ is to builds a society on solidarity which will benefit all the groups.
PIOJ'S METHOD
Dr. Hughes explained that the PIOJ would prefer to use income levels as a more stable and effective measure for poverty but that people are usually very reluctant to give you information on their income level, bank accounts.
"We tried it once and met upon obstacles so we used another approach," he said. In fact, he identified it as one of the challenges
That the organisation faces. "PIOJ relies somewhat on the business sector for information to make better business decision. Cognisant that it is a market economy, in terms of pricing and policies, it has to transit information to the market for decision making," explained Dr. Hughes.
The PIOJ now uses consumption levels to as a proxy to measure poverty. So whenever consumption goes down it says poverty has increased and when consumption goes up poverty is said to have decreased. This method is based on the assumption that the more people earn the more they want to consume.
"It's a method which is a reasonably good proxy although it is volatile. It's better to look at the economic trend over a period of time and not worry about the year to year changes which tend to be very noisy," noted the economist.
He believes at this point in our history, "brain power' is the most important thing for the country.
Dr. Hughes considers it important for Jamaica to plan from a worse case scenario as it relates to the European Union and sugar. "The EU offering us money may not have been compensation. Going off the historic precedent from slavery, we should never make the assumption that the European will deliver on their promise," he said. "I pay a lot of attention to history institutions, culture. I don't let it blind me. The EU is not about race class or colour. If it is in their interest to help, they will."
