Barbados’ private sector is not living up to the popular mantra “to whom much is given much is expected”.
Executive coordinator of the Caribbean Policy Development Centre, Shantal Munro-Knight, thinks that while corporate Barbados has been crying out for improved business facilitation, concessions and other forms of assistance from Government, it has not shown it is deserving of such help.
“I don’t know that we have an especially innovative private sector, I don’t know that we have an outward private sector, I don’t know that we have a private sector which has made educating itself on the opportunities that exist externally a priority,” she said while participating in a discussion on redefining the role of the public and private sectors. It was held at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus.
The development specialist used the example of the Economic Partnership Agreement between Europe and the region as an instance where the private sector was not doing enough to help itself.
“We have the economic partnership agreement that was signed in 2008 and yet still it cannot get off the ground and that agreement was signed on the basis of providing opportunities for the private sector in the Caribbean, including Barbados, to reach into markets in Europe and yet we have the private sector not being able to take any action supposedly because it is waiting on Government,” she noted.
“So I really think that we perhaps have to just be honest and go a little bit deeper about the extent to which the private sector itself acts more like an innovative thinking group and is able to itself introduce a level of its own flexibility, new models of how it works, new models of how it engages partnership.”
The civil society representative also believed that the public private partnership model still being favoured by countries, including Barbados, was outdated. “. . .the whole thing of partnership is now wider, you have new models of partnership that include the public, the private and the civil society society. In the United States the government . . . is experimenting with a whole new model of partnerships that includes a wider plethora of players than the private sector,” she said.
“And where you have the Government being able to say ‘listen there are critical areas which we can see there is expertise that exists within various sectors within the society’ and I would give those opportunities to those sectors’.
“So in the area of social welfare that is something that you would give to the social development sectors like the civil society to be able to operate and to be able to run.
So that model of partnership has to be extended and the private sector needs to be included only to the extent to which it can show itself an effective partner. We include the private sector on the basis that it is supposed to produce all of these things,” she added.