EDITORIAL - Red tape and ramparts

Like a government bureaucrat, Valerie Veira is quick to haul out the defensive rampart, as was the case this week at a forum hosted by this newspaper.

In the event, she reinforced the need for special and specific attention - with someone being held accountable for the outcomes - to be paid to unravelling the red tape to doing business in Jamaica. In other words, the situation requires more than acknowledgement of a problem, as was done, at the same event, by the junior commerce minister, Sharon Ffolkes-Abrahams.

Ms Veira runs a government agency called the Jamaica Business Development Corporation (JBDC), whose job, we apprehend, is to provide advice and technical support to firms, particularly small and medium-size ones. We are yet to appreciate why the JBDC exists as a separate agency rather than functions being collapsed into a department of JAMPRO, the investment and trade-promotion agency. That, perhaps, may happen if the Government actually gets around to a serious overhaul of the public sector.

The immediate issue, though, is Ms Veira's perspective on complaints by entrepreneurs about difficulties faced when attempting to get ventures off the ground. "Half of it is not really bureaucracy, it is unpreparedness," she said.

Often, she claimed, people had no idea what businesses they wanted to enter, or how much money they wanted to borrow for the venture. We can only suppose that Ms Veira's reference is primarily to people setting up micro or small enterprises, where, admittedly, there is a problem of capacity.

But this reflexive reversal of blame is to slither over the real difficulties of doing business in Jamaica, as was accepted by Mrs Ffolkes-Abrahams and captured in global reports on comparative competitiveness. But worse is if it reflects, as we think it does, a culture of protective insulation in the public sector that is suspicious of the private sector and any process of change.

NEED FOR AGGRESSIVE REFORM

Jamaica's circumstance of historic low growth, high unemployment and social dysfunction insists on aggressive reform of the bureaucracy to complement fiscal adjustment and talk up investment opportunities.

For instance, in the World Bank's latest Doing Business report, Jamaica ranked 94th of 181 countries and 15th of 32 in Latin America and the Caribbean - a mid-tier ranking that does not suggest an environment where investors would be rushing to put their capital. Indeed, there were 167 countries that made it easier than Jamaica for people to pay their taxes.

Or, as Mrs Ffolkes-Abrahams put it, "rather than make it easy, we make it difficult" to do business. We agree with her that the whole system needs to be attacked.

But it can't merely be policy declarations left for implementation by a self-perpetuating bureaucracy to implement. Somebody in the political executive has to own the process, which requires Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller deeming such transformation a priority.

A crude comparison is the PM appointing Luther Buchanan as her czar for rural clinics, except, in this case, the job would demand more than shadowing the health minister and, maybe, counting bandages. This would be real work to a serious end, on which the PM and her Cabinet would be required to keep a close eye.

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