President of the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) Lance Hinds says he wants to see “an adjusted relationship” between government and the private sector that focuses “much more closely” on the specific roles of the two in the task of building the country in the period ahead.
“We are told every so often that the private sector is the engine of growth in the economy and that the government serves as the facilitator. I share that view and that is how it should be,” Hinds told this newspaper in an interview earlier this week.
According to the Chamber President, there is need for a close relationship between government and the private sector but that relationship needs to be informed by “a greater measure of clarity and professionalism” and there was a need to remove what is often the perception of one party leading and another being led. Asserting that this is not the manner in which the business community is expected to be seen in a market-oriented economy, Hinds said the private sector must play its designated role and leave government’s role to government.
Asked to define what he believed to be the private sector’s particular role in its relationship with government, Hinds drew attention to the Chamber’s 2014 Competitiveness Manifesto which outlines what the business support organisation considers to be the ‘top 20’ barriers to Guyana’s competitiveness. Those barriers, the Chamber says, includes limited education and training opportunities, serious limitations in the country’s ICT infrastructure, an unattractive foreign investment climate and the absence of a culture of market innovation and research and development.
Hinds, meanwhile, told Stabroek Business that the Chamber was in the process of making plans to engage the new political administration “in the context of precisely that enhanced relationship” he alluded to earlier. “It really is a matter of keeping things professional and insisting that both sides deliver on their obligations, commitments and undertakings,” Hinds said.
According to the Chamber President, the “real role” of government ought to be to create the room in which the private sector can grow. “The obvious means by which that mission can be accomplished is to transform thinking into legislation that provides that space for private sector growth,” he added.
Hinds told Stabroek Business that in its hoped-for early engagement with the new administration it would seek to draw attention to the need to enhance the capacity of the country’s training institutions and the creation of new ones, the development of “a more equitable tax regime,” and the enactment of legislation designed to build confidence in Guyana as an investor destination.
