BARBADOS HAS A competitiveness problem that the authorities should not ignore. Institute of Chartered Accountants of Barbados executive director Reginald Farley warned that while the foreign reserves, fiscal deficit and debt were a real concern, some underlying problems were chipping away at the economy.
Speaking from the experience of more than 13 years as a minister in the last Barbados Labour Party Government, and as a former Barbados Chamber of Commerce and Industry executive director, Farley told BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY: “One of the issues that we need to face squarely is that Barbados’ economy has become less competitive over the years.”
“We do have some areas in which we are holding our own – tourism and international business – but even in those areas some of the underlying systems that support them need improving,” he said.
“If you take the amount of time to get a police certificate of character, to get a driver’s license, to do simple transactions, and you look at the overall productivity and efficiency of the economy as a whole, the long time it takes to get a land transaction done, and to get insurance settlements if you have a personal injury, there is built in inefficiency upon inefficiency.”
He saw an urgent need to “utilise various technologies, modernise our systems, and commit ourselves to improving the ease of doing business, to finding new ways of doing old things”.
“These days people are using 3D printing to print artificial legs for people but we can’t print drivers licenses consistently. So I am saying that some of these things may appear small, but when they are added together then you realise how much time you lose, how much frustration we create,” he added.
Farley said while Government needed to show leadership on the issue, it was one that the private sector and entire society had to resolve.
“We have all of smartphones, but they can’t just be for checking Facebook and showing pictures of accidents.
“Why shouldn’t we be getting the transport schedule on an app? Technology is there that we can use this opportunity not just to fix these immediate things, but to really jump to another level and to inspire the younger generation that is technology savvy,” he suggested.
Meanwhile, Farley said the absence of speedy policy implementation was another issue that was negatively affecting Barbados.
“One fair criticism that can be levelled is that some of the policies announced in Budget speeches and other measures either don’t get implemented or take very long,” he noted.
