Sinckler lauds Year of Productivity initiative

FINANCE Minister, Christopher Sinckler, has lauded the Year of Productivity initiative, which was officially launched by the Productivity Council on Friday night.

Delivering brief remarks at the garden of the Baobab Towers, the Minister of Finance opined that the link between increased productivity and increased economic growth and prosperity has been undervalued.

To this end, he said the message must be made clear to those who do not understand the correlation.

“We need to move away any cloudiness, to let people understand that the actions that we take both in public and private sectors, and in wider civil society, eventually come back to impact on the output which we gain in our Gross Domestic Product, in our Gross National Product and in all of those measures that determine whether our economy is successful or not. To the extent that is the case, we have to find ways in which we can bring that together.”

He alluded to The Economic and Social Report for 2014, which indicated that while there was marginal growth in productivity across a number of sectors, that rate of growth was not as fast as the previous decade, in terms of the level of output.

“We can see from the economic statistics that while we have seen marginal increases in productivity, it has not been consistently high, to the extent as to contribute to overall increases in output. That is a bugbear for us, a very serious matter which we have to address and address with some degree of alacrity.

“We can no longer expect that we are going to be able to achieve great levels of output to earn our way in the world, to earn more foreign exchange, to pay for the goods and services which we have in the wonderful social development system that we have developed over the years, if we cannot support that, by increasing the levels of our inputs so that we can assure the increased levels of output.”

While thanking the Productivity Council for this bold initiative, he said most persons know what being productive means, saying that it includes setting objectives.

“If we set ourselves certain targets, but through our actions we cannot achieve the end result of being successful in completing those tasks, and achieving those objectives, then we know we are not being productive enough to achieve the goals which we set ourselves.”

He predicted that this initiative will bring the topic of productivity to the fore of national discourse, and stated that he expects that this topic will also be discussed at the highest level of the Parliament of Barbados. (JH)