Important Pillars
The talk about competitiveness is not idle chatter and no one thinks that the administration sees it that way. But something has got to be wrong when two of the most important pillars of innovation that support improvements in competitiveness will record some of the slowest growth in 2012. The two areas are education and information technology. According to budget projections, for a 10 percent increase in expenditure, output in the education sector is expected to grow by less than two percent. This output is expected even after the education industry exhibited growth of seven percent last year and an average growth of five percent over the last three years with smaller budgets. Information technology also fares poorly in performance. After spending an additional G$6.8 billion on the e-Government network and the One-Laptop-Per-Family programmes, output is expected to grow by three percent after growing by over 10 percent annually for the last five years. One therefore has to wonder what the words “We will continue to promote
