EDITORIAL - Sleeping on public-sector reform

It's not good, and perhaps says much, that Horace Dalley is perceived as something as an afterthought in Jamaica's finance ministry, and that the name Veniece Pottinger-Scott elicits either a blank stare or a "Ven who?" Yet they, at least in theory, hold critical positions, respectively, in the political executive and the bureaucracy.

Mr Dalley is a minister of Cabinet rank assigned to the finance ministry, where he has responsibility for the public service. In other words, while Peter Phillips, the senior man in the ministry, attends to the nitty-gritty of fiscal policy, Mr Dalley is about monitoring matters such as the public-sector establishment and negotiating wages with public-sector unions. Except that wage matters may not be so pressing at present, given the wage freeze to which government employees agreed to, up to 2016.

In January, Ms Pottinger-Scott was appointed director general for public-sector transformation and modernisation in the Office of the Cabinet in a job that, as we understood it, made her the new czar of efforts to reform the public sector. If Ms Pottinger-Scott is actually on the job and doing things, she has kept her efforts largely quiet, if not to herself.

We are surprised. For the restructuring of the public sector is a critical part of the broader economic reforms under Jamaica's programme with the International Monetary Fund, which event is in need of acceleration, and requiring a close collaboration between Minister Dalley and Director General Pottinger-Scott.

DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

Or, perhaps it is that the Government shares a different perspective than this newspaper on the aims of public-sector reform, and that the administration presumes that recent fiscal gains lessen the urgency for a process, ongoing for more than two decades, but whose latest iteration began in 2009. That was in the context of a bloated national debt and the Government's outsize wage bill.

This fiscal year, the Government plans to spend J$153.8 billion, or 27.6 per cent of the Budget on wages, which is close to the nine per cent of GDP - from near 12 per cent two years ago - it was projected to reach in 2016. But this is the result of the wage freeze, nascent real growth in the economy, and a bit of inflation.

But equally fundamental aims of reform are to ensure the sustainability of the fiscal corrections, while fashioning a bureaucracy that is entrepreneurial - efficient in delivering public goods while facilitatory of the private sector in its drive for economic growth and job creation.

Our sense is that little has happened on either front, apart from the initial drawing of a list, by Ms Pottinger-Scott's predecessor unit, of government agencies and departments that could be merged or closed, and some elimination of public-sector posts by way of attrition. In the absence of hard, definitive effort, two potentially negative outcomes are likely:

Jamaica will be stuck in an inefficient, underproductive bureaucracy; and

In two years when the freeze ends, the Government will again be scrambling for ways to contain its wage bill, whose calculation does not take into account the annual, unfunded J$26-billion chit for pensions.

Obviously, Director General Pottinger-Scott, Minister Dalley, and the Government, generally, have much hard and politically difficult work to do.

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