Don Robotham | Is the issue simply productivity?

The debate about the failings of the Jamaican economy has largely focused on productivity. The argument has been that our productivity is low and the task is to increase productivity. But, is low productivity the core issue?

The answer is ‘no’! The core issue for the Jamaican economy is that we remain a low value-added economy exporting largely raw materials and raw services. Because we are a low-tech economy, we are also a low-wage economy stuck in the middle-income trap for many decades. How to move out of this low value-added economy to one of greater economic complexity is the real issue within which the productivity challenges arise.

If we increase productivity but continue to produce the very same profile of low value-added goods and services, the economy will not develop, incomes will not rise and the tax base will not expand. It is absolutely critical that we understand this to be our core problem and put the low productivity issues in that context. Our goal must be not simply to increase productivity in the same-old, same-old set of activities. Our goal must be to shift the economy up a higher gear, so the level of technical sophistication of our exports is completely different from what exists now. This is a much bigger challenge than increasing productivity, and requires a much more profound set of measures than what has been put on the table so far.

The Harvard Atlas of Economic Complexity should be consulted by all Jamaicans who are interested in this issue. Economic complexity is a way of capturing the level of value-added of an economy. Jamaica, at 79, ranks lower than both Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic and has experienced a sharp drop in our economic complexity ranking between 2010 and 2021. We are classified in the second-to-lowest group in terms of global ranking of economic complexity. How to reverse this downturn and get out of this low-tech trap is what we need laser-like focus on.

MINISTER OF LITERACY

Low literacy is the chief obstacle. We need a minister of literacy to focus resources on this long-standing and grave handicap. One of the most talented and creative people in the world is being denied the chance to realise their full potential because of low literacy. Recently, a well-known company did an evaluation of its adult employees, all of whom had gone to high school and many of whom had at least one CXC. They discovered that these workers were at a grade 5 level and particularly weak in terms of their lack of reading skills. This is above the norm in the Jamaican adult population and the labour force as a whole. There will be no moving out of this low-tech trap and no increased value-added production, unless we break the back of the widespread adult illiteracy in our society. Low literacy affects everything, including crime and violence.

HEART cannot solve this problem. HEART has been around for 42 years and our productivity is lower than ever and our economic complexity continues to decline. The reason is that HEART is built on sand. You cannot impart high-level skills to a population with limited reading skills. Nor can you develop STEAM or any other form of high-school innovation. We must stop the evasion and get to the root of the problem, which is the failure of our primary schools to deliver literacy to our children, especially to boys.

How to do this? We need a minister whose sole responsibility is to drive the process of making our school and adult population literate.

This minister of literacy would command a large group of reading specialists who will be deployed in the early years of primary education and whose sole task will be to impart literacy and nothing else. Class sizes will be drastically reduced to the small groups needed to make literacy teaching effective. We must meet our children where they are and teach English as the foreign language it is. The considerable expertise in The University of the West Indies’ School of Education needs to be mobilised.

INCREASE IN LIBRARY TEACHERS

There should be an increase in library teachers and the library service, whose sole task will be to support the work of the reading specialists. Reading specialists and library teachers will be paid at a much higher rate than other teachers, indeed of doctors and other professionals, so as to attract the best people. A system of incentives and national honours for parents and schools and communities which achieve literacy goals must be established.

We must end the process once and for all whereby the primary system churns out thousands of children into high schools who are unable to read proficiently. These high schools, in turn, flood the labour market with semi-literate persons who we then turn around and ask HEART to upskill. This has not happened and is not going to happen. If we do not tackle this issue at its root in the early years of primary education and confine ourselves to narrow discussions of adult productivity, then 42 years from now we will still be weeping and wailing.

There are other measures which are needed, such as industrial policies to help firms move up the value chain. These are crucial but I single out what I regard as the central one. If we really want to have a different quality labour force which is not simply highly productive but productive of higher value-added goods and services, then we must tackle our deficiencies at the root. So, let us broaden the discussion from a narrow one of productivity to focus on the bigger issues and the broader context in which the productivity issue arises.

Don Robotham is professor of anthropology and founding director of the advanced research collaborative of the graduate centre, City University of New York. He was pro vice chancellor for graduate studies and research at UWI. Send feedback to drobotham@gmail.com and columns@gleanerjm.com