EDITORIAL - Fast-track the projects

Damien King, the University of the West Indies economist, is right about the boulders in the road impeding Jamaica's economy - none larger and more demanding than the near J$2-trillion debt and the fiscal deficit that it spawns.

That is why Peter Phillips, the finance minister, can't let up on the fiscal stability and broader macroeconomic reforms he has been driving for. The Government has to wean itself off debt, leaving credit for the private sector to invest, create jobs and stimulate growth.

That, however, doesn't mean that the Government is merely a bystander in the business of jump-starting the economy. For while it ought not to get into the subsidy-doling, winner-picking business being called for by those who assume that their guiding hands are better than the market's, or engage in other forms of stimulus spending it can't afford, the State should get on with the job of facilitating the private sector.

The approach to this has to be two-pronged.

CONSTRAINT ON ECONOMIC GROWTH

There is the overhaul, over the medium term, of a weak and inefficient bureaucracy whose incapacities, as Devon Rowe, the financial secretary, reported to a parliamentary committee last month, often result in the poor implementation of projects and financial losses to taxpayers. That also means a constraint on economic growth.

Then there is the immediate need of getting projects going, not only, as critical as that is, for the economic activity they will engender, but for their demonstration effect. That would help in building confidence in the larger reform programme. For, as Densil Williams of the Mona School of Business observed, there is the danger of the society losing confidence if "nobody sees a light at the end of the tunnel".

"What you need to do is find those projects and solutions that can at least allow us to turn the corner," he said.

COST OF DELAYS

The public knows what some of the Government-promoted projects are: the 381-megawatt, gas-fired power plant; the divestment and expansion of the Government's trans-shipment port; the divestment of the Norman Manley International Airport; the Goat Islands logistics facility; the expansion of Highway 2000 with the north-south link; the sale of the Caymanas Track Limited. Additionally, it is widely held to be so that billions of dollars worth of private-sector construction and related projects are trapped by a lumbering bureaucracy in various government regulatory agencies.

The cost of these delays: investment, jobs and growth.

This newspaper would not, in the normal course of things, either advocate or endorse special fast-tracking windows or the specific involvement of the political executive to get projects moving. Our fundamental position is for the Government to begin to seriously implement the long-talked-of reform of the public sector, creating a bureaucracy that perceives itself as facilitatory of the private sector.

That we do so now is indicative of the urgency of the situation. Perhaps it is time for Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller to get that proverbial red phone on her desk and, for the next several months, to gather her ministers, say twice weekly, to do nothing else, to hear the reports on the status of projects and to clear the route to their implementation.

For now, we have to run a dual track, so let's get on with it.

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