Capital market confab stresses public-private partnership
Published:Sunday | January 29, 2012 | 12:00 AM
Sabrina Gordon, Business Reporter
A central theme out of the Jamaica Stock Exchange seventh regional conference on investment and the capital market was the need for partnerships between the private and public sectors, an area economic planner Dr Gladstone Hutchinson said is central to the success of Vision 2030.
He also sees the mobilisation of assets as central to Jamaica's push towards developed- country status.
"What we are talking about is a modern partnership between the Government and the private sector, where Government concentrates on its core function of providing certain guarantees so that the private sector can concentrate on project and business risk for activities it is best at," said Hutchinson, the director general of the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ).
"There is a very important strategic alliance between private capital and the state," he said, speaking on the last day of the two-day conference at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston.
"We must find a way to allow private capital and state to pursue their best interest and do so in helping the national interest outlined by Vision 2030."
Long-term national development
Vision 2030 is a long-term national development plan crafted as the road map to First-World status for the country of 2.7 million which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary of independence.
The road map is now in its third year of implementation. And while Hutchinson said most of the indicators are on track, areas such as economic growth, security status and environmental stewardship status remains in negative territory.
Among the areas being pushed by Hutchinson is climate-change adaption.
"This is a big area for partnership," he said.
He also touted opportunities in the divestment of government owned assets, community development, empowerment, urban renewal and probate reform to unlock real estate assets frozen or idled by unadministered wills.
"We can get the economy going if we solve the probate-reform issue because the primary asset of people is land and they cannot use it, which could lead to significant economic elasticity," Hutchinson said.
"Asset mobilisation can create an enabling business environment."
There are about 6,000 cases of wills for properties which cannot be probated because of difficulties in the processing of documents.
"We have already solved where the bottleneck is. It basically means that we have to electronically put all these things on the system, scan them, and put them in, so that we can move," said the PIOJ head.
He cited problem periods between 1920 and 1945, especially when wills were informally written on what he said amounted to scraps of paper leaves. The law has already been revised and "we are expecting to have this breakthrough within the next couple of months," Hutchinson said.