T&T is eco­nom­i­cal­ly sit­u­at­ed in a place where it should be do­ing much bet­ter than it is cur­rent­ly do­ing when it comes to the ease of do­ing busi­ness. This ac­cord­ing to the ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the Mona School of Busi­ness and Man­age­ment in Ja­maica, Dr David McBean.

Re­spond­ing to ques­tions posit­ed by the Busi­ness Guardian, McBean said: “T&T with a per capi­ta in­come of US$15,000 com­pared to Ja­maica’s US$48,000, should be in a po­si­tion to out­per­form its Caribbean neigh­bour giv­en its re­sources.”

He con­tin­ued: “A quick re­view shows that Ja­maica is ranked 71st in the world for ease of do­ing busi­ness, while T&T is ranked at 105. While ta­bles do not of­ten tell the whole sto­ry, it is in­struc­tive to see what fac­tors dri­ve the rank­ings and how rel­e­vant they are to us as de­vel­op­ing economies.”

In 2014, T&T was ranked 66th on the ease of do­ing busi­ness ta­ble, while Ja­maica came in at 94th. How­ev­er, Ja­maica’s im­prove­ment ac­cord­ing to McBean has to do with the coun­tries de­ci­sion over the last decade, to em­bark up­on “a num­ber of re­forms (with mixed re­sults) to im­prove its busi­ness cli­mate.”

These re­forms, ac­cord­ing to McBean, have fo­cused on re­duc­ing the bu­reau­cra­cy, trans­ac­tion costs and time tak­en to do ba­sic things such as reg­is­ter a com­pa­ny, and “elim­i­nat­ing cer­tain tax­es be­low min­i­mum thresh­olds (stamp du­ty, etc).”

Con­se­quent­ly, Ja­maica is now ranked 6th in the world on the score for start­ing a busi­ness while T&T is at 79th. It is al­so ranked 15th for Get­ting Cred­it which, ac­cord­ing to McBean, is “due to its im­ple­men­ta­tion and en­hance­ment of cred­it re­port­ing sys­tems, which is key to its 71st plac­ing.” T&T is ranked at 67th when it comes to get­ting cred­it.

McBean not­ed that Ja­maica was al­so “sin­gled out for im­ple­ment­ing the ASY­CU­DA Cus­toms sys­tem, which would en­hance its cus­toms ef­fi­cien­cy (Ja­maica is ac­tive­ly push­ing to im­prove its po­si­tion as a ma­jor lo­gis­tics hub, lever­ag­ing its Kingston Port op­er­a­tions).

“It is, how­ev­er, in­struc­tive that Ja­maica can score as high as 6th in a sin­gle cat­e­go­ry, but end up be­ing 71st over­all.”

He al­so not­ed that there are sev­er­al cat­e­gories that Ja­maica ranks be­low 100 such as Get­ting Elec­tric­i­ty which is at 120th. McBean said T&T was giv­en low marks for pay­ing tax­es, ranked 160th, which is an in­crease from 166th in 2019 where it was “dri­ven down by its de­ci­sion to in­crease the cor­po­rate tax rate.”

Ac­cord­ing to McBean, “this il­lus­trates how gov­ern­ments must bal­ance what they be­lieve is in their na­tion­al in­ter­est to do, ver­sus an EODB World Bank rank­ing”.

He ar­gued that T&T has an op­por­tu­ni­ty to in­crease its rank­ing, by ad­dress­ing some of the low scores such as its 126th rank­ing in the cat­e­go­ry deal­ing with con­struc­tion per­mits, 158th in the cat­e­go­ry Reg­is­ter­ing Prop­er­ty, 160th in pay­ing tax­es, 134th in trad­ing across bor­ders and 174th in en­forc­ing con­tracts.

McBean said the Caribbean has the in­fra­struc­ture and hu­man cap­i­tal to deal with the afore­men­tioned im­proved the var­i­ous rank­ings, “but lack the po­lit­i­cal will to over­haul the struc­tur­al in­ef­fi­cien­cies in our le­gal and reg­u­la­to­ry sys­tems.

“Of­ten we con­tin­ue to have ana­logue sys­tems and process­es in an in­creas­ing­ly dig­i­tal work.

“Change is of­ten feared, as we see the po­ten­tial down­side of lost jobs in the short-term as out­weigh­ing the ben­e­fits of in­creased eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty that ben­e­fits the en­tire so­ci­ety in the medi­um- to long-term.”

Mean­while, the CEO of the Ja­maican Cham­ber of Com­merce Trevor Fearon said that coun­try im­prove­ment was due to a col­lab­o­ra­tive and co­or­di­nat­ed ap­proach to mak­ing busi­ness process­es eas­i­er.

He said: “I think what has been use­ful here is the fact that a num­ber of agen­cies were co­or­di­nat­ing their work through JAM­PRO in­vest­ment and trade agen­cies to look at the cri­te­ria that are used in mak­ing those as­sess­ments and ac­tu­al­ly de­vel­op­ing their work plans around ad­dress­ing those par­tic­u­lar cri­te­ria.”

Fearon in­di­cat­ed that the fo­cused work be­tween JAM­PRO (An Agency of the Gov­ern­ment of Ja­maica’s Min­istry of In­dus­try, Com­merce, Agri­cul­ture and Fish­eries (MI­CAF) that pro­motes busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties in ex­port and in­vest­ment) and the Min­istry of Eco­nom­ic Growth and Job Cre­ation has been a sig­nif­i­cant fac­tor in Ja­maica’s de­vel­op­ment.

While Ja­maica has man­aged to drill down in­to the spe­cif­ic met­rics that con­tribute to the ease of do­ing busi­ness, Fearon said that the coun­try has done very well in some ar­eas and in oth­er ar­eas “we haven’t done as well”.

He said: “So at the same time that you point out that we have made strides in the ease of do­ing busi­ness over­all, we have lost ground on trans­ac­tions across bor­ders.”

Fearon al­so said that coun­tries should not just fo­cus on putting ac­tions or ini­tia­tives in place but should al­so as­sess the im­pact of these ac­tions while com­par­ing what is hap­pen­ing in oth­er coun­tries. He not­ed: “So you can ac­tu­al­ly be do­ing bet­ter than last year but your neigh­bour is mov­ing things at a faster pace.”

When it comes to T&T’s fall from 64th to 105th in the rank­ings, Fearon said that a coun­try can do bet­ter than its pre­vi­ous year “in terms of the ini­tia­tives you un­der­take, but you can still lose your place and slip down in the rank­ings.” He con­tin­ued: “So I won’t pre­sume what the sit­u­a­tion has been in T&T if it slipped in the ranks. It can very well be that it did put in place cer­tain ini­tia­tives but oth­er coun­tries, may have been do­ing things faster.”

The CEO of the Ja­maican Cham­ber of Com­merce ex­plained that do­ing things faster con­tributed to Ja­maica’s im­prove­ment. He said: “If we man­age to get a num­ber of things in place that con­tributed over­all to the do­ing busi­ness up­grade, it can very well mean that oth­er coun­tries in­tro­duced mea­sures, but we were able to do it at a faster rate over the pe­ri­od mea­sured.”

He said that if a coun­try was work­ing on four or five ini­tia­tives in 2018, but did not man­age to get them im­ple­ment­ed in 2018, where­as an­oth­er coun­try had two ini­tia­tives in 2018, but man­aged to get them im­ple­ment­ed, that sec­ond coun­try would come out ahead on that par­tic­u­lar met­ric, be­cause “they man­aged to get things done to the point where it made an im­pact over the pe­ri­od be­ing re­viewed.”

Fearon said: “It’s not the num­ber of things, it’s large­ly the pace with which these things come in­to ef­fect. “

Fearon in­di­cat­ed that tech­nol­o­gy has “un­ques­tion­ably” played a ma­jor part in the thrust to­wards Ja­maica’s im­prove­ment in the ease of do­ing busi­ness. He said: “be­cause now you can do so many things, for in­stance, cus­toms, you can do so many things on­line.”

The CEO of the Ja­maican Cham­ber of Com­merce said the ex­tent that one can per­form cus­toms ac­tiv­i­ties on­line seam­less­ly: “You can some­times ra­tio­nal­ize what you are do­ing in the of­fice (where it is open from 8 am to 4 pm), now it doesn’t mean that you can’t have a shift of peo­ple on the week­end do­ing cus­toms-re­lat­ed mat­ters in the or­ga­ni­za­tions.” He not­ed that these im­ple­men­ta­tions mean that the or­ga­ni­za­tion does not have to close “be­cause a ship doesn’t stop at sea on a week­end - there are still ac­tiv­i­ties that are tak­ing place.”

Fearon not­ed that a coun­try will leap for­ward based on the agili­ty and re­silience of its IT in­fra­struc­ture.