Laser focus on growing economies

Gervase Warner, President and Group CEO of Massy Holdings, believes that the region must spend what little it has extremely wisely and have a laser focus on growing their economies.

The Central Bank of Barbados’ 41st Annual Review Seminar keynote discussion, “Rebuilding Economies for the Future: Opportunities for Resilience through Diversification”, featured Warner along with Ian Durant, Director, Economics Department at the Caribbean Development Bank and Michelle Doyle, Advisor to the Governor at the Central Bank of Barbados.

The panel discussion took place earlier this week and Warner, was responding to the question of what the Caribbean region could do to strengthen its position in the request for global borrowing mechanisms which cater more specifically to Small Island Developing States (SIDS).

The CEO agreed that the SIDS should mobilise the resources which would help build the GDP for access to investment funding, but also believe that it would be extremely difficult for the region to access funding to make investments without growing their individual economies.

“We really ought to be interested in managing our affairs well, where the little that we have, we spend it extremely effectively. We should have such laser focus on that because largely, we are not wealthy countries and cannot afford a lot of waste but we all know that there is a lot of waste in our systems,” said Warner.

Expanding further, he explained that the region must begin to operate with a laser focus and discipline in the area of better resource management, drive more expenditure towards investment, to make the economies productive, as it was productivity that drove growth.

“It is productivity which will allow our countries to be competitive, to use this emerging platform of digital technology and be able to have access to the global stage in services that could be offered anywhere on the planet. This is available to us but we cannot have access to that if our economies continue to shrink,” said the CEO.

Warner contended that the region may have unequal opportunity but there can be a focus of growing people out of poverty, besides the usual support. He outlined that the real solution to poverty was to lift people out of the poverty, give them the education, give them the opportunity, give them the access to technology and platforms that allow them to participate in a different space, on different levels.

“That for me that’s the key focus because we keep looking for somebody to give some investment from somewhere, and we continue to be affected by different crises, whether they are economic, whether they are health, or whether they are climate. We need to find ways to grow our countries ourselves and that requires more discipline than we are accustomed to. There is not a simple way to do this, but this kind of hard work pays its own rewards,” said Warner.

Michelle Doyle added that there was also a need to put competitiveness within the region to be driven towards investing in human capital development through the retooling of the citizens.

“How we create opportunity in order to embrace change and some of the new business models that we are seeing coming to the fore because that type of creative thinking, being nurtured, is what will take us forward to be able to apply the technology that we have available to us in a meaningful and developmental way. So that our workforce development in terms of the younger demographics of our population, can really be targeted in terms of some of the STEM disciplines so by that besides science, technology, engineering, mathematics, I think that these elements in terms of foundational initiatives and investment is what is required in order to get us to that next level as well,” said Doyle. (AS)