THERE?HAS?BEEN MUCH TALK for many, many years about the need to facilitate business in Barbados.
After all, it has long been recognized and accepted that the best way to individual wealth creation is through entrepreneurship and that this also enhances the country’s wealth.
Hence, the promise to make it easier for all those wanting to do business here, national or foreign investors.
In reality, however, things simply have not gone as many people in the public and private sectors would have liked.
Today, there are still many complaints about our being tardy in facilitating business development and not keeping our promises to remove or reduce existing bottlenecks.
Hence, the comments from Barbados International Business Association president Connie Smith, who noted that “we’re not flexible, we’re not agile enough”.
“It may need tweaking of a piece of legislation here or there to be able to accommodate that particular type of opportunity.”
To help address the problems she outlined, and indeed the myriad other problems highlighted long ago and consistently, Government appointed a director of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, Terry Bascombe, to coordinate the Barbados Competitiveness Programme in May 2010.
He is being assisted by Deputy Programme Coordinator Delano Scantlebury and other support staff.
“Essentially, the assignment would rationalize the incentives and regulatory systems associated with business development, rationalize the institutional architecture of business-development services, lower the cost of moving goods and people, and introduce a framework for clustering initiatives.
“The venture would also improve trade facilitation and logistics, build public-private partnerships, strengthen public-private dialogue, and develop a medium-term competitiveness strategy,” Bascombe said.
Of note was the fact that the 2009 Global Competitiveness Index published by the World Economic Forum ranked Barbados 44th among 131 countries.
But long before the idea of a competitiveness centre, politicians, business leaders and investors had all spoken of the need to be able to fast-track processes for businesses and people wanting to operate here.
Late Prime Minister Tom Adams promoted the idea of an international business sector in the late 1970s, suggesting that some of the bottlenecks be removed.
So, the Barbados Industrial Development Corporation was established; then came the Export Promotion Agency.
In recent times there has been the International Business Unit that works with the newly important international business sector.
However, we are still criticized for the way we do business in a very competitive and changing environment.
There have been persistent complaints about the way key Government departments function, many still working traditional 8:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. hours and not responding to the requests and concerns of businesspeople who require flexibility, speed and convenience.
While supportive of efforts to promote Barbados as the best place to do business, late Prime Minister David Thompson warned that words like “competitiveness” and “survival of the fittest” were used like swords in Barbados.
He felt that these terms merely raised fears and built barriers between people.
In an address to the Barbados Chamber of Commerce & Industry (BCCI) in January 2010, Thompson outlined what has now become the Democratic Labour Party Government’s guiding point – that Barbados was “not just an economy”.
“Sometimes it’s difficult to get that message into the heads of people who are constantly using those phrases which create barriers between managers and workers, between politicians and workers,” he said.
He noted that people came here to live and work not because of tax concessions or competitiveness, but because they could enjoy a harmonious, high standard of living.
Only five months after that, BCCI president Andy Armstrong said: “We need to allow investors and businesspeople in Barbados to see that we’re serious about making it easier to invest and do business in Barbados.
“That programme will go a long way towards streamlining the incentives and take away a lot of the confusion that entrepreneurs currently encounter.”
As a small, open economy, Barbados is vulnerable to external shocks. The private sector must be the engine for its economic growth, which will mean working with both the traditional and non-traditional sectors.
This will require flexibility, particularly on the part of the public sector whose agencies act as facilitators.
Late last year, Barbados Entrepreneurship Foundation head Peter Boos noted, “That means the private sector, really, is where the investment needs to be made and we have to run with the ball.
“I think the only way we’re going to do that is through entrepreneurship and across all sectors.”
He indicated that Barbados could only become a more prosperous society by engaging in global trade.
“The market that we have to serve is not 300 000 people in?Barbados.”
With a daunting economic period ahead in 2012 and business with our traditional partners – the United States, Britain and to some extent, Europe – shrinking, the prospects are not good.
Barbados will have to change the way it does business, especially if the country wants to make a success of its medium-term economic strategy.
The Institute of Chartered Accountants of Barbados put it succinctly last May: “A concerted effort must be made to restructure the economy to enable an innovative, competitive private sector supported by an efficient public sector to produce and supply the goods and services demanded by the marketplace.”
