Matalon tells Government of Jamaica: Stop ignoring private sector
Published:Friday | October 1, 2010 | 12:00 AM
Joseph Matalon argued on Tuesday that the government's failure to implement a range of reforms proposed by the private sector is holding back economic growth in Jamaica, and suggested that business may have to think anew about how they make their case to the administration.
Matalon is the president of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ), which earlier this year published its so-called Economic Framework Programme, the latest of a long series of documents proposing initiatives for jump-starting an economy that has had little growth over the past quarter century and is expected to decline by nearly three per cent in 2010.
Among the broad proposals set out by the PSOJ are:
❍ comprehensive tax and administrative reform;
❍ overhaul of Jamaica's complex legal and regulatory systems;
❍ improving access to credit by reforming existing legislation covering the use collateral;
❍ fast-tracking regulations of the establishment of credit bureaux;
❍ accelerating land-titling reform; and
❍ dealing decisively with Jamaica's high energy costs.
"... We have been less than effective advocates in convoking successive government that they should implement the proposals, that we have consistently made over the years, to achieve the economic growth that will result in significant improvements for the majority of Jamaicans in their standards of living," Matalon told a breakfast meeting of private-sector leaders.
"This, then, will be our major challenge for the year ahead - it is clear that as an organisation, the time has now come for us to critically examine our approach to advocacy so that our leaders will have no option but to consider seriously the several well-thought-out proposals that have been developed after considerable research and consultation."
Matalon, who recently began his second term as head of the PSOJ, did not indicate what the organisation might do differently to more fully embrace its policy platform, and neither could other private-sector leaders throw light on future strategies.
But Matalon said Jamaicans were impatient with the "wait for growth" message that governments have offered in the past.
The lack of political will to implement the PSOJ's policy prescriptions, Matalon said, was, in the organisation's view, "the real impediments to achieving private sector-led economic growth".