EDITORIAL - Is Dalley worth a flutter?

We have little confidence in his promises. Yet, this is one case that we hope that we could have a flutter at the word of Horace Dalley, the minister in the finance ministry with responsibility for the public sector.

He told this newspaper that the Government is about to get cracking on public-sector reform. Our problem is that Mr Dalley's timetable is vague: "Later on this year."

"We are searching for some good personnel to drive the reform," said Mr Dalley. "That is the problem we have."

All of which is, of course, very surprising.

First, public-sector reform, as a national policy imperative, is not a new issue. It has been on the agenda for well over a decade and has gained greater currency over the past four years.

Indeed, it was a key plank of the former administration's collapsed economic support agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as it is in the current Government's programme with the Fund. Which makes sense, in terms of fiscal management and as an impetus for economic growth.

Central Government's wage bill

The central Government's wage bill for the current fiscal year is projected at J$157.25 billion, or more than 30 per cent of its Budget. That figure is separate from the more than J$70 billion in unfunded pension obligations and, therefore, has to be paid from the Consolidated Fund.

Further, the wage bill is nearly 44 per cent of all the taxes the Government projected to collect this fiscal year, which, for the first quarter, at the end of June, was J$830 million, or approximately one per cent below target. Further, the Government would have to find nearly 20 per cent more revenue than it expects to collect to pay its workers and service its debt.

It makes sense, therefore, for the Government to take a good, hard, but not-too-long look at the public sector to determine if it has the right number of staff most efficiently deployed and what ministries and agencies ought to be right-sized.

That was the task given by the former administration to Patrica Sinclair McCalla, who has since retired. The Simpson Miller administration has been in office for 19 months, has negotiated an agreement with the IMF in which it undertook to reduce the wage bill from 11 per cent to nine per cent of GDP, but has been unable, according to Mr Dalley, to identify a successor to Mrs Sinclair McCalla.

Critical factor

But it is not only for the IMF that public-sector reform, or the effects therefrom, is a critical factor. The matter figures significantly in the Partnership for Jamaica agreement signed last week between the Government and a raft of national stakeholders.

We especially refer to the matter of this country's ranking (90th of 185 countries) in the global Ease of Doing Business index, which Jamaica aims to significantly improve over the next three years.

Among the commitments under this initiative is "an all-out assault on red tape ... (and) initiatives aimed at reducing unnecessary bureaucracy as a critical component of the national job-creation strategy".

Against this backdrop, we, like the private-sector caucus on the oversight committee for the IMF agreement, would have thought that the public-sector reform programme, and the mechanism to get it done, would have been a priority for the Government.

Hopefully, Mr Dalley offers more than a gamble.

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