Clarke

The first part of this article was published as yesterday's Public Affairs column.

The decade of the '90s saw the greatest expansion of global manufacturing outsourcing in history and presented Jamaica with an unprecedented opportunity to expand its manufacturing output.

Remarkably, what we saw was a net outflow of manufacturing jobs from Jamaica in the midst of this great outsourcing phenomenon, while much of the developing world benefited. We missed our opportunity because, instead of building our manufacturing capacity, government policy was focused on increasing our short-term capacity to consume the manufactured goods of other countries. Today, 60 years after we started on the road to industrialisation, we are relatively further behind than we ever were.

To get back on course to industrialisation and rekindle Robert Lightbourne's dream, we need to pursue and implement a number of critical measures. Among them are:

1. Monetary policies that:

a) stimulate the flow of competitively priced credit to the productive sector.

b) price the country's productive output competitively.

2. Fiscal policies which:

a) remove all taxes that are not borne by our competitor from Jamaican products which face global competition at home or abroad.

b) by reducing transaction costs and facilitating cheap mortgages, assist productive businesses to expand and restructure, using their fixed-asset holdings to secure inexpensive financing.

3. Incentives designed to help our producers to access the best available technologies and strong marketing support in overseas markets.

4. Trade policies aimed at:

a) removing obstacles faced by our producers in accessing lowest cost inputs.

b) ensuring a fair trade environment in our domestic market, to ameliorate unfair advantages enjoyed by foreign competitors.

c) opening viable export markets for our value-added products.

5. Investment promotion strategies that include:

a) the capacity to identify, package and sell economically valuable investment projects.

b) strong strategic relationships with specific local and overseas investment institutions, capable of attracting capital to finance these projects.

c) a programme to aggressively target productive enterprises migrating from the developed world in search of lower production costs. In spite of the global economic crisis, the business imperative to move production from the high labour cost environ-ment of the developed world to the lower labour cost economies of the more competitive developing countries is bound to continue.

6. Policies to keep the cost of energy used by industry, competitive.

7. Coordination between the education curricula and the technical and skills needs of industry.

Adequate commitment

Above all, we need to change the pattern, which emerged after Robert Lightbourne's tenure, of less-than adequate commitment to industrial development in our political administration. The decades of the 1990s and 2000s have been, by far, the worst. During that period the full industry portfolio was held by no one with even a passing interest in, or smattering knowledge of industry.

The way forward for our country must include leadership of this critical portfolio by persons with knowledge of and commitment to industrial development.

Importantly, the leadership of the industry portfolio must be able to recognise and fight against destructive macro economic policies, especially when finance ministers are oblivious to their damaging consequences.

Without this, we will continue to flounder in the economic wilderness with no hope of ever being the beacon of industrial advancement Robert Lightbourne once dreamt we would become.

Claude Clarke is a former trade minister and manufacturer. Feedback may be sent to columns@gleanerjm.com.