‘False prosperity’

Senator Cleveland Tomlinson says while the Government boasts about its successful management of the economy, the lived experience of ordinary Jamaicans are not in sync with that claim.

“We are not only concerned about an economy on paper, and that is what the Government is caught up about. We are about whether the economy is matching the lived experiences of the people,” he said last Friday.

In his contribution to the State of the Nation Debate in the Upper House on Friday, the opposition spokesman on productivity, efficiency and competitiveness noted that much attention is understandably directed towards economic growth, investment and the state of public finances, which are important indicators.

However, he argued that for the average Jamaican, the economy is experienced in far more immediate ways.

“It is experienced by the factory worker, whose pay a fortnight cyaah cova him light bill and buy food; the students who leave UWI, UTech, or NCU, whose qualifications have not opened the doors anticipated; and the entrepreneur who has a promising idea but struggles to find the financing and support to build a business around it,” he said, referencing three universities.

He said these experiences raise an important question about the kind of economic progress the country is pursuing and the extent to which that progress is being reflected in the lives of Jamaicans.

Drawing on a study by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation covering the periods 2019 to 2021 and 2021 to 2023, Tomlinson said 55 per cent of Jamaicans are facing food insecurity and 28 per cent go hungry.

“That is the true measure of whether the economy is progressing – what is happening in the lives of the people,” he said.

What is more alarming, he told senators, is when the UN body compared Caribbean countries. This, he said, showed that only Haiti – the poorest Caribbean nation – had a worse food insecurity record than Jamaica.

SEVERE FOOD INSECURITY

“If you look at all the other Caribbean countries, food insecurity was either constant or it declined, Jamaica was the only country with severe food insecurity increasing over the review period,” he said.

Tomlinson also raised questions as to whether the business processing outsource (BPO) workforce is being prepared for the inevitable transition from routine customer service tasks which are increasingly being taken over by artificial intelligence.

He acknowledged that the BPO industry had been promoted by successive administrations and created thousands of jobs for Jamaicans.

He said that in the future, the BPO industry will depend more heavily on the ability of operators and workers to make productive use of new technologies.

“The question for the Government is whether we have been sufficiently deliberate in preparing that workforce and our domestic BPO operators for the transition,” he noted.

According to Tomlinson, celebrating a low unemployment rate of 3.7 per cent with a proliferation of low-skill jobs created today was not enough if the country failed to prepare the people holding those jobs to be economically productive as the industry evolves.

“This is tantamount to selling the people an illusion of progress; a false sense of economic security; I call it false prosperity,” he added.

He argued that the same technological developments that threaten some traditional activities are making it possible for smaller countries to participate in higher-value segments of the global economy.

The growing importance of specialised professional services, software development, research, digital products, intellectual property and the arts, said Tomlinson, means that economic opportunity is no longer determined exclusively by the size of a country’s domestic market or its capacity to undertake large-scale manufacturing.

edmond.campbell@gleanerjm.com