Today’s issue of the Stabroek Business details the contents of a letter it received from Chairman of the Private Sector Commission (PSC) Major General (ret’d) Norman McLean that seeks to provide an update on the now twice postponed public/private sector National Economic Forum which was originally scheduled to take place last September.
The primary reason why the Stabroek Business chose to bring the matter of the status of this forum into the public domain has to do with the importance of the country as a whole coming to a clear understanding of just how closely government and business are collaborating to set an agenda for the economic direction of the country. We believe that the planned forum and its outcomes would have helped to provide that understanding.
In his letter Mr. McLean identified the nine areas, roughly coinciding with the country’s key economic sectors that will be the subject of study and discourse at the forum and the intention, presumably, is to have the forum pronounce with a measure of clarity on the particular initiatives that will be taken to boost those sectors.
Equally important would have been the indications which the forum would have provided on the way forward on the long-standing public/private sector agenda on issues that include import duties and taxes, customs procedures, high energy costs, among others, matters that have, over time, been the subject of differences, even rifts between government and the private sector.
The idea of a National Economic Forum, we are told, arose out of an engagement between private sector officials and President David Granger last year and thereafter, according to Mr. McLean, the forum “was mandated by His Excellency, the President, who has charged us (meaning the PSC, presumably) to organize that Forum.” At the same time and as we reported in today’s issue of the Stabroek Business, Mr. McLean, in his letter, alluded to the involvement of “some members of the diaspora” and “the Office of HE and Dr. Clive Thomas” in the planning of the exercise.
By way of seeking to provide an assurance that the forum remains on the proverbial front burner Mr. McLean says in his letter that it remains “a work in progress” and whilst that at least provides some measure of reassurance, one can argue that we really ought to have been in a far better place at this stage as far as planning for such a forum is concerned given the fact that it has been on the agenda since around June last year.
As was pointed out to this newspaper earlier during an interview with President of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry Lance Hinds and his Senior Vice President Vishnu Doerga, there are several important issues that make engagement between government and the private sector particularly important at this time not least of those being how the private sector and country’s economy as a whole can benefit from prevailing low oil prices.
One might ask, the assurances which Mr. McLean seeks to provide, notwithstanding, whether there exists the requisite level of mutual enthusiasm for a National Economic Forum, particularly since – and oddly in our view – the exercise of planning the forum appears to have been assigned entirely to the PSC and, equally significantly, there has been, as far as this newspaper recalls, no really newsworthy official pronouncement on the forum or no update on the progress being made in its planning.
What is perhaps even more interesting is Mr. McLean’s careful avoidance of any pronouncement which addresses, even remotely, the issue of a time frame for the staging of the planned National Economic Forum. Instead, he confines himself simply to providing the assurance that “it will happen” but that it may be in an unexplained “different form.”
One might argue that it may have been to everyone’s advantage to have the forum take place prior to the presentation of the 2016 budget since the outcomes of the forum would have served as a rudder of sorts to steer the direction of the budgetary proposals for this year. As it happens, the forum, whenever it takes place, will be convened against what would have already been the fait accompli of an already presented 2016 budget which could well limit any effective decision making by government on the matter of spending on initiatives that might be considered worthwhile during the deliberations.
The point has been made elsewhere, that such fora have been convened before and there has been no real evidence of their outcomes being infused into charting the country’s economic direction. In the case of the most recent forum of its kind this newspaper does not even recall its findings/outcomes ever having been made public. The other point to be made of course is that for what it is worth a forum of this nature would at least tell us more about whether government and the private sector are ‘on the same page’ as far as the country’s economic direction is concerned.
