The Prime Minister told us that the PP's economic development plan, were they to be re-elected to office, devolves into three parts, the green, blue and silver economies. This is simply an attempt to use catch phrases to hide the Government's inability to comprehend and respond to the significant challenges facing this country and the region in the diversification of our economies; to create an economy that can adapt to an unknown global economic future, given also the known consequences of our depleting energy resources, the threat posed by shale oil and gas and new finds of petroleum that are easier/cheaper to produce.
We cannot afford to await the onslaught of the crisis of a depleted petroleum resource and we cannot predict where the global economy is going; an economic conglomeration into which we have to export to survive. For the past four years this Government has demonstrated its ignorance of the mechanics of economic transformation with its talk of growth poles, a highway to spawn small businesses, industrial parks, gateways to the Americas etc.
We have to develop an economic system that lies somewhere between these two (responding to a crisis or predicting the future); one that can respond to a range of potential challenges, not just those that are known or we can anticipate. We have found ourselves in the unfortunate situation of being unable to adapt, to respond to expected crises given the history of our economy, the plantation, in which the natural resource provides the wherewithal to purchase all we require and so creating a private sector that has become accustomed to being awarded foreign exchange to import-markup-sell.
We pin our hopes on finding new sources of oil/gas. The on-shore private sector has even forgotten where the foreign exchange comes from and blames the Central Bank for failing to provide it even when the income from the energy sector has fallen. Dr Farrell says that we have to die to diversify. He has gotten it wrong. We as creatures that cannot adapt in an unpredictable and hostile world, will die. Our regional colleagues who have been unable to adapt to a world of no preferential tariffs, natural disasters, of reducing tourist arrivals and significant threats to their financial services sectors, are now drowning in debt.
An economy that can adapt is also referred to as an Experimentally Organised Economy. In this kind of economy, knowledge – the ability to use it to try new ideas, build new things and even create new knowledge by experimentation – fashions a creature, an economy, that can learn from experience, interpret socio-economic changes as pointers to the unpredictable future, allowing the economy to prepare for whatever comes.
In our economy this adaptability requires learning and R&D Centres that generate the knowledge, the experience and the risk financing that funds both the experimentation and the derived products and services as the economy continually responds to, and adapts to, particularly, step changes and whatever the future may hold. Our current onshore economy ignores this knowledge tree, innovation.
Hence economic diversification is not about doing something in the green economy (making solar panels) or in the marine economy (building a port) or whatever in the silver economy (recalling retirees to the job market). It is about creating a population, an embryonic economy, that engages in the acquisition, use and creation of knowledge via continued experimentation with new products and services for the global market.
Mary King