As the year ends and a new one beckons, the perennial greeting and wish for a Happy New Year is tempered with the reality that our economy continues to be a topic of hot controversy.
With the best will in the world even the most apolitical among us cannot close our ears to the developments in our midst and while we may not be at death’s door, anyone could easily be forgiven for forming the view that the some aspects of the economy require intensive care.
We deliberately refer to the economy as our economy because in a sense the economy and indeed the Minister of Finance are both public property. What the minister does by way of policy, matters a great deal to every person in this country.
We hang on to his every word because the fate of our standard of living and sometimes the cost of our living is controlled to a large extent by what that the minister decides to do with the financial resources at his disposal. He controls the actions of every other ministry because if he is unable to supply those other ministries with required funding, then the ministries will have to cut programmes accordingly.
A call recently made by the Press for Minister Sinckler to speak to the public on a quarterly basis is timely. It receives support not so much because of the source, though that is important, but more so because the power and responsibility of ministers are exercised on behalf of the public.
Technocrats like governors of Central Banks and permanent secretaries and other advisers are important but the policy buck stops at the minister’s desk, and to put it bluntly, we elect ministers not technocrats.
We are fully of the opinion that the minister is better able to handle himself in communicating to the public than a whole collection of other figures. He is bold and assertive and has no observable difficulty in getting his points across.
No one is asking for the premature disclosure of confidential policies. Yet, in the flurry of opinions from the IMF and in the face of trenchant criticism from the rating agencies, and the varying perspectives of local and regional economists; timely discussions of the policy issues and options available to the Government may usefully be ventilated in the course of news conferences before the final decisions are made for inclusion in the Budget.
Let us face the facts. A minister of finance lives, eats and sleeps the fiscal and other financial issues facing the country. He has the best information and therefore it ought to be to his best benefit to gather the views of the broad mass of people in whose name he exercises the ultimate choices.
There was mention made in the minister’s recent statement about a fiscal council, one of whose objectives would be to promote transparency in the management of public finances.
While the notion of rules and a fiscal council whose job is “to ensure that the country retains adequate fiscal space to provide needed protections to the most vulnerable without compromising the public finances” may sound good in the ears of some technocrats who reside in some international institutions, all ministers of finance in these small economies have to maintain the ultimate control of policy.
In the final analysis, it is their duty as elected policymakers and politicians to know the people, and to take responsibility for the fiscal laws which have a direct impact on the daily lives of those people.
All said and done, it is the Minister and his colleagues who matter most.
