THE COUNTRY is facing severe fiscal problems. There are difficulties in meeting day to day payment obligations. The Government has already frozen employment in the public service and is now proposing a salary freeze or a reduction of staffing as one response to the need to rein in expenditure and narrow the budget deficit. An IMF team was in the island recently and some are touting a return to borrowing from the Fund as an almost inevitable way out of the prevailing fiscal crunch.
In response to the fiscal difficulties faced by the country, the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) has spearheaded "Partnership for Progress", an alliance of the private sector, Government, the Opposition, trade unions, academia, and civil society. Already, proposals have been made by the partnership for debt management. The main proposition is for Government to significantly lower its interest costs on the predominantly domestic national debt by converting high-cost Government paper into low-cost US dollar indexed bonds.
Within the financial sector itself there is not total consensus on the proposal and we do not propose to analyse its merits here. What we want to do is to commend the partnership initiative. The country absolutely needs the informed collaboration of its various sectors around its biggest problems in order to move forward. This is the way of democracy and the most successful countries have cultivated these consultative mechanisms for problem-solving. Our own contentious ways with little capacity for compromise through mutually respectful negotiation have been a huge stumbling block to development.
There has been some collaboration between private sector and Government on that other serious problem of crime. There is room for much more as with the private security industry and the state security forces forging an alliance. We want to recommend that Partnership for Progress go well beyond the fiscal problem to build collaboration among sectors on several others of the nation's most difficult problems. What we absolutely don't need at this stage is another fractious and transient talk shop.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
