LETTER OF THE DAY

Translate creative drive into aspects of life, work

THE EDITOR, Sir:

I very much enjoyed reading Errol Hewitt's column on Sunday, 'Jamaica salt! Fe true!?'

I left Jamaica in 1961, as a boy, when my parents decided to emigrate to the UK. I have recently come back here to live (my wife has a new post and I am enjoying early retirement). In between, I worked as an economist for the IMF for about 20 years.

Mr Hewitt makes many good points, but I stalled at "The IMF agreement has signalled what the country has known for a long time: that our policies over the last 30 to 40 years have been leading us down slippery slopes to penury."

Jamaica has not been pursuing consistently bad economic policies for the past 40 years. Policies have certainly not been consistently good. But, Jamaica, like the UK in many respects, had an economy that suffered, among other things, from a series of governments who wanted to overturn policies of their predecessors. That meant a series of stops and starts in economic progress, which cumulatively had negative effects. One glaring example of this is a country that struggles to manufacture many things for which there is good local (and potentially international) demand, despite ample local resources. Let's sum that up with the term 'lack of competitiveness'. It's a characteristic that impairs much of the potential progress the economy could enjoy. It is strange especially as we are a nation of superbly competitive people. So, what went wrong to kill our natural drive?

lack of competitiveness

Whether this lack of competitiveness is the result of poor political leadersship is not clear to me. What leadership has done, however, is fail to produce in the mass of people a strong belief in the programmes that they have tried to implement. This ensured that political independence could never lead to economic independence. With it came the slow death of what Jamaica had going for it, with its people's drive.

This needs to be fixed. Politicians may help in that, but really it has to come from people recognising that they are the problem and the solution - meaning those words to be used in the most positive senses. We need to translate the kind of drive we have in athletes, musicians, and other creative artists, into the fabric of the many mundane aspects of life and work.

Dennis Jones

Economist