The Private Sector Commission (PSC), in what it described as its “initial scoping of the budget impact” issued a press release on Tuesday headlined ‘PSC congratulates Minister of Finance, Government of Guyana on tax reforms’. The release was issued during a media briefing called ostensibly to discuss the 2011 budget presentation delivered by Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh on Monday.
To some of us in the media the decision by the PSC to summon the media to a briefing on the budget less than 48 hours after its presentation came as something as a surprise, since, in the past, both the PSC and the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce have allowed themselves time to undertake a more measured analysis of the finance minister’s pronouncements before forming opinions of their own and communicating these to the media. In fairness to the PSC, however, last Tuesday’s release did say that its pronouncements were based on an “initial scoping” of the budget.
The contents of the PSC statement are significant in two particular respects. First, there is its preoccupation with congratulating Dr Singh and the government for “bringing our country to this watershed position in its history,” a pronouncement which we take to mean that it approves of the contents of the budget presentation. The second respect in which the release is significant is that much of the rest of the document is spent applauding the government for the long-awaited reduction in corporate taxes and patting itself on the back for its own position of “collaborative advocacy” – whatever that means – which, presumably, contributed to the decision by government to reduce corporate taxes.
Another two-and-a-half-line paragraph of the release is devoted to stating “categorically” that the increase in the tax threshold will bring “unprecedented relief” to approximately 40,000 tax-paying workers while two others make passing references to spending on the social sectors and the modest increase in what remains a meagre old age pension.
It is not, of course, that the PSC does not have a right to speak highly of the 2011 budget if it is happy with its offerings. What is noteworthy about the statement, however, is its lack of even the “initial scoping” to which it lays claim and what appears to be a deliberate and embarrassingly overdone swooning at the feet of the government, exemplified by such patronizing statements as “the Government of Guyana has in fact moved the engine of growth into top gear”.
Several months ago, this newspaper commented on a document issued by the PSC purporting to be its own presumably independent assessment/review of the Guyana economy but which, in the main, turned out to be mostly a regurgitation of official statistics. No attempt whatsoever was made to apply analysis to those statistics. It was, purely and simply, an echo of the government’s position on the economy.
In one respect it really is a matter of ‘keeping up appearances’. The realization of the goals of the National Competitiveness Strategy is simply not possible without a considerable measure of collaboration between the government and the private sector in addition to which, of course, the private sector is customarily spoken of as ‘the engine of growth’ in an economy over which government still exerts considerable control. Government/private sector collaboration that is informed by a measure of cordiality is as it should be. On the other hand, the culture of collaboration between government and the private sector in the region is usually attended by an overarching private sector independence which allows for working together and, where necessary, for constructive disagreement. One is unlikely, for example, to see a repetition anywhere else in the Caribbean of the overwhelmingly patronizing tone of the PSC’s January 18 press release which appears to have been issued primarily for saying thanks to the government for reducing corporate taxes. In the process the PSC did not even bother to offer in its statement anything else that deserves any real media attention.
