AS THE official signing of commitment to the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) approaches, the New Year has witnessed stepped-up discussion of Jamaica's preparedness to exploit any of the presumed advantages associated with this new arrangement.Of course, the traditional argument favouring the CSME is that it gives domestic producers a larger market to facilitate increased competitiveness. Undergirding this argument is the assumption of large-scale production that is consistent with the expanded regional market (approximately seven million persons).
Precursors to this development include the new LNG deal with Trinidad; the earlier investments of Trinidadian and Barbadian investors in the local financial sector; and the cross-listing of shares of Jamaican companies on the Trinidadian and Barbadian stock exchanges.
But despite these several demonstrations of positives associated with a regional grouping, there is a strong perception that the Jamaican economy is not ready at this time to exploit possible expanded output of goods and services to the regional market. This has been largely fuelled by the near decimation of the manufacturing sector in the early '90s and the negative impact of the protracted high interest rate regime. There is also the marked imbalance of trade with Jamaica and her CARICOM partners.
Only last week, Senator Dwight Nelson, of the Jamaica Confederation of Trade Unions, argued that local workplaces were not prepared for the challenges of the single market. Allied to this concern is the high percentage of Jamaican workers that remain untrained.
On the plus side, Jamaica's involvement in the CSME could prove the catalyst for Jamaican companies to merge and restructure their operations to become more efficient. In fact a number of the larger private sector companies have started this process to enable them to exploit the larger regional market.
What is clear, however, is that there has been no serious discussion on the ground of the benefits of regionalism and in particular how the small and micro enterprises could become involved. If the concerns of the naysayers regarding the Single Market facilitated this process, then the CSME would have provided a much needed wake-up call for the local economy.
Additionally, our preparation for the regional single market should be seen as a part of the overall process of making the local economy globally competitive. That, after all, should be our ultimate objective.
