Robert Buddan
There is still no vision of the kind of society that the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) wishes Jamaica to become, at least none that could be seen from the Throne Speech delivered by the governor general last week. The Throne Speech was not a vision statement, but a summation of the main areas of budget spending couched in terms of the national good, a preface to the estimates of expenditure that followed. Interesting as this was, it still only amounted to a hodge-podge of intentions without an ultimate design and endgame. Hopefully, the remaining presentations from both sides will cohere into an overall vision and purpose.
Financial and economic analysts look at budget numbers largely to see what the prospects for growth are. But we have passed the stage for some time now, where growth is equated with development, which is what the vision for society should provide. Some leading economists and more broadly, developmentalists are more interested in human development, well-being, quality of life, and human happiness than just with economic growth. They want to know how growth will be shared and so, how equitable development will be. This would mean that financial, trade, commercial and governance policies would have to be much more inclusive so, for example, small business and newer Jamaican entrepreneurs would be given the same treatment big business gets.
This is particularly important at this time since we have initialled and are about to sign a European Partnership Agreement that will require 'national treatment' for foreign investors so that they will have the same rights as Jamaican nationals. Yet, we do not have a principle of national treatment that requires that the playing field is level for all Jamaican businesspersons. The World Bank itself recognises the importance of this. This is why it published a report in 2006 saying that countries should aim at equitable development. In fact, the bank was saying that growth was best achieved when the opportunities to participate in it and benefit from it are equitable and shared.
INCLUSIVE ECONOMY
We need to hear, therefore, whether the vision for Jamaica is of equitable development and what new policies will ensure that race, class, gender, politics and other forms of discrimination in law or practice do not continue to be obstacles when trying to get a loan, contract, permit, title, subsidy, tax shelter, job, promotion, quick service, and so on, and that small and medium enterprises and community representatives in the small towns and districts across the island are included in trade delegations, memberships of the chambers of commerce, associations of manufacturers and the private sector, invited to and informed about negotiations of trade agreements, are partners in any partnership for progress or any economic council on which government relies for decisions.
That will then require a vision of transformation because old habits die hard and old ways of doing things among a small class of people will not be given up just so. Government will have to intervene to bring in those excluded. There must be a will, a plan, and a vision to transform Jamaica from being an inequitable society to one of equitable development. This is what we still have not heard. So, we have a lot of numbers that tell each ministry what it will get for its costs, but no idea of whether development will be equitable and inclusive and how the social, economic and political order will be transformed for this. The all-important premise of growth is that if more people are included on a fairer and more equitable basis then they will contribute more.
If people do not believe that they will be given a fair chance to participate in wealth creation and that conditions will be transformed for this to happen, then they will do what they have been doing all along, trying to survive for themselves because they believe the system is set up for some to survive at the expense of others. So, they will evade their taxes, migrate, or take their anger and frustration out on others whom they kill or maim. These alone cost the country immensely. Jamaica is not poor. Enormous amounts of money are lost through tax evasion. Human capital is lost through migration and human lives and economic assets are lost through murder and fraud.
SPENDING ON A VISION
Governor General Sir Kenneth Hall delivering the 2008 Throne Speech. - Rudolph Brown/Chief Photographer
The Government has allocated a pitiful $30 million to an entrepreneurial fund. Building an entrepreneurial culture for the hundreds of thousands of micro, small and medium enterprises, a culture of innovation, competition, risk-taking, research and development, manufacturing, use of indigenous resources, retraining staff and including workers, using technology, providing financing, infrastructure and markets, costs much more. We have provided tax holidays and industrial zones and industrial and agricultural corporations for big foreign and local investors, but we have never thought to do so on anywhere the same scale for our local small people who exist in the shacks and on the street sides condemned to the stigma and policy ignorance that has always left the SME sector behind. The Jamaica Social Investment Fund will get over a billion dollars to reduce poverty. Probably, that amount should have gone to the entrepreneurial fund as the means to get people out of poverty.
The provision for the Constituency Development Fund/SESP is even more per constituency (about $40 million) than is the entrepreneurial fund for the entire island; and this $30 million is a fraction of the roughly two and a half billion dollars provided fort the CDF. But even the CDF, according to many MPs, is a drop in the bucket when you think of $40 million to do all that constituencies need. Just as we want a culture of entrepreneurship, we need a culture of representative democracy in which a meaningful constituency fund can supplement JSIF projects and entrepreneurial funds so that representative politics can build competitive self-reliance rather than dependency on MPs, the State, and international aid.
These are just two examples that reflect a budget that seems to have been constructed more in response to purely financial pressures than from a coherent vision. We still do not know whether there is a vision of a knowledge and information society, an entrepreneurial market society, a representative people-based democracy, or a competitive society, and how the parts all fit together. For instance, health and education are now free in the sense that remaining user fees have been abolished. But even these were driven more by election promises than any clear commitment to social empowerment.
PROMISED PAY INCREASES
For instance, spending on nurses training colleges have even been reduced, teachers want more schools and teachers and nurses are still wondering about their promised pay increases. This kind of contradictory budgeting will not create a socially empowering society. And what is the role of technology in all of this, especially in transforming production? It seems to me that Cabinet needed to headline its budget with a vision and put that vision into the Throne Speech so that we will know what all these numbers mean for the kind of society we are spending $500 billion to construct.
Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm
