Tony Fras­er

"A pre­req­ui­site to pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and ef­fi­cien­cy is ac­cess to a large pool of ed­u­cat­ed peo­ple which re­quires, in fu­ture, easy and wide­spread ac­cess to good schools."

"...I would add that the good pro­fes­sor al­so said it was dif­fi­cult for coun­tries like Trinidad and To­ba­go to build oth­er pro­duc­tion ca­pac­i­ties, since there are no near prod­ucts that we could eas­i­ly branch over to from oil and gas. There­fore gov­ern­ment pol­i­cy needs to sup­port the de­vel­op­ment of hu­man cap­i­tal and en­cour­age dis­cus­sions and sup­port for a more busi­ness type cul­ture." The above are parts of two re­spons­es by read­ers to last week's col­umn. The sec­ond quote was made in ref­er­ence to the com­ments of Prof Ri­car­do Haus­mann's po­si­tion on di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the lo­cal econ­o­my. For those who did not read the col­umn, it es­sen­tial­ly tasked the Gov­ern­ment, in par­tic­u­lar the Min­istries of Fi­nance, Eco­nom­ic Plan­ning, Food Pro­duc­tion, Trade and In­dus­try, Ed­u­ca­tion and a cou­ple oth­ers with the re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for es­tab­lish­ing a plat­form for di­ver­si­fy­ing the econ­o­my away from its his­tor­i­cal de­pen­dence on oil, gas and oth­er en­er­gy-re­lat­ed se­mi-fin­ished in­dus­tri­al goods for ex­port.

As the col­umn point­ed out, the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion now needs to be­come re­al af­ter decades of talk about it. And now that there re­mains a for­eign ex­change cush­ion to be used for the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion ef­fort, that should be the fo­cus rather than con­tin­u­ing to have the earn­ings of the en­er­gy sec­tor squan­dered on con­sump­tion in the malls, lux­u­ry ve­hi­cles etc. While this col­umn is in full agree­ment with ex­pen­di­ture on ed­u­ca­tion to cre­ate the hu­man ca­pac­i­ty to ef­fect the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion re­quired, de­vel­op­ing the ed­u­ca­tion pack­age for stu­dents from pri­ma­ry to uni­ver­si­ty and oth­er non-aca­d­e­m­ic in­sti­tu­tions has to go far be­yond the very re­strict­ed cur­ricu­lum of­fer­ings of the present.

The need is for in­no­v­a­tive pro­grammes to train a cadre of tech­ni­cians in skills to be used for the pro­duc­tion of unique goods that could be­come mar­ketable and com­pet­i­tive in in­ter­na­tion­al trade. Put dif­fer­ent­ly, the old gram­mar school cur­ricu­lum should be broad­ened to make pro­vi­sion for oth­er skills; so too should the ca­pac­i­ty for tech­no­log­i­cal in­no­va­tion be de­vel­oped. Ex­pen­di­ture on ed­u­ca­tion must not sim­ply be made for the Min­is­ter of Ed­u­ca­tion to say how many mil­lions were spent on how many schools and how many stu­dents came through the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem; spend­ing must be tar­get­ed and mea­sur­able on the ba­sis of re­turns.?We have to de­vel­op an ed­u­ca­tion and train­ing sys­tem at the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary lev­els that would cap­ture those who would be­come "bad boys" and gang mem­bers, those with­out an in­ter­est in pure aca­d­e­m­ic sub­jects; the new cur­ricu­lum must al­low them to be­come cre­ative in their in­nate ca­pac­i­ties.

The ed­u­ca­tion and eco­nom­ic sys­tems need to pro­duce grad­u­ates for the Car­ni­val, mu­sic and en­ter­tain­ment in­dus­tries. Sport­ing fa­cil­i­ties can be­come eco­nom­ic cen­tres for lo­cal, re­gion­al and in­ter­na­tion­al pur­pos­es. Emp­ty boast­ing about NA­PA be­ing com­pa­ra­ble to the Syd­ney and Hong Kong fa­cil­i­ties is fu­tile. If how­ev­er the Car­ni­val and Cul­tur­al Cen­tre had been con­struct­ed, it would have pro­vid­ed a per­ma­nent cen­tre for cre­ative arts and cul­ture. Such a cen­tre would not on­ly nour­ish our souls, but would pro­duce ex­portable goods and ser­vices and em­ploy young ar­ti­sans, per­haps save the lives of hun­dreds of young peo­ple. As in the oil and gas in­dus­tries from which na­tion­als go abroad to ser­vice oth­er en­er­gy cen­tres in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, hun­dreds of Car­ni­val ar­ti­sans can ser­vice the Trinidad- cre­at­ed car­ni­vals in North Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope.

When US Sec­re­tary of State Hi­lary Clin­ton was here for the Sum­mit of the Amer­i­c­as, she did not dis­play an in­ter­est in the Hy­att and the wa­ter­front project, in­clud­ing the In­ter­na­tion­al Fi­nan­cial Cen­tre, but rather in­quired about the artis­tic pro­duc­tions. To dri­ve the new thrust in di­ver­si­fy­ing our prod­uct and ser­vice base, we need to grow-up a class of en­tre­pre­neurs to see the pos­si­bil­i­ties in these prod­ucts and ser­vices in which we have a com­pet­i­tive ad­van­tage and which are unique in the world; they are the kinds of prod­ucts and ser­vices which were talked about by Prof Haus­mann. "Fis­cal mea­sures can play a key role in at­tract­ing risk tak­ers for all op­por­tu­ni­ties.

Gov­ern­ment and civ­il so­ci­ety must cre­ate the en­vi­ron­ment for risk tak­ers to ven­ture forth; we still have a long way to go in af­firm­ing our po­ten­tial to glob­al­ly com­pete," was an­oth­er of the com­ments post­ed in re­ac­tion to last week's col­umn. Food pro­duc­tion has a cap­tive bil­lion-dol­lar in­dus­try to de­vel­op the im­port sub­sti­tu­tion ca­pac­i­ty to di­vert for­eign spend­ing on re­place­ment prod­ucts and al­ter­na­tives. It is an old strat­e­gy, but one which re­mains vi­able. Fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tions, with hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars on their books, have to be­come far more will­ing to take on risks of a high­er na­ture than lend­ing for the pur­chase of con­sumer durables. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, in­stead of de­vel­op­ing such port­fo­lios, once na­tion­al banks have re­turned to colo­nial head­quar­ters.

In ad­di­tion to end­ing the free flow of loans and grants to Cari­com coun­tries, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has to en­gage her col­leagues to im­ple­ment the mea­sures to cre­ate a tru­ly Sin­gle Mar­ket and Econ­o­my in the re­gion. The age-old strat­e­gy of com­bin­ing the re­sources of the re­gion, phys­i­cal and hu­man, to pro­duce goods and ser­vices for ex­port un­der the sev­er­al agree­ments that al­low Cari­com/Car­i­fo­rum spe­cial and dif­fer­en­tial treat­ment needs to be utilised. The Eu­ro­pean Part­ner­ship Agree­ment, the Cana­di­an Basin Trade Part­ner­ship Act with the US, Cari­com's Free Trade Agree­ment with Cana­da, and those with Venezuela, Colom­bia, un­der the As­so­ci­a­tion of Caribbean States, are but a few of the pos­si­bil­i­ties.

The eTeck project de­vel­oped by the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment cer­tain­ly re­quires at­ten­tion. The present Gov­ern­ment, with a Min­is­ter of Eco­nom­ic Plan­ning who has ad­vo­cat­ed the knowl­edge-based in­dus­tries as an op­tion for di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion, must look at the ini­tia­tive as one with po­ten­tial. None of what has been said here is ter­ri­bly orig­i­nal. The strate­gies, poli­cies and pro­grammes have been ad­vo­cat­ed by gen­er­a­tions of econ­o­mists at the lo­cal and re­gion­al lev­els. The fact how­ev­er that they re­main out­stand­ing in­di­cates that they have not been achieved and are not eas­i­ly achieved giv­en the con­straints, many of them po­lit­i­cal. Notwith­stand­ing those dif­fi­cul­ties, eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion is not an op­tion we can choose to en­gage or not; the eco­nom­ic sur­vival of the coun­try de­pends on it.