In what is one of the earliest concrete recommendations from the manufacturing sector regarding how the Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) garnered from the country’s oil and gas earnings can be used to strengthen the other sectors of the country, the Guyana Manufacturing & Services Association (GMSA) says that it would wish to see resources from the Fund target the aggressive pursuit of the establishment of a value-added manufacturing sector, underpinned by deployment of a “cluster approach” by local small and medium-sized enterprises (SME’s).
This was one of several recommendations put forward by GMSA President Clinton Williams during the course of his Wednesday December 18 address to the GMSA’s twenty fourth Annual Presentation Awards and Dinner at the Pegasus Hotel.
The call for more focussed government attention to providing resources for the strengthening of the various sub-sectors linked to the manufacturing sector came against the backdrop of what, in recent years, has been little if any real movement in this area despite what have been reportedly amicable exchanges between government officials and delegations from the manufacturing sector.
In his address Williams named what he described as the “value-added manufacturing industries” including agriculture, agro-processing, forestry, minerals, light manufacturing and services which he said should benefit from support financed through the Sovereign Wealth Fund and utilising “the cluster approach.”
Williams’ call for a more generous measure of official support for the manufacturing sector will be seen as an attempt to further advance the efforts of the GMSA’s previous leadership team, headed by the Association’s former President Shyam Nokta to work with government to address the issues affecting the sector. The predecessor GMSA administration was successful in securing the creation of a forum to enable “high-level” government/GMSA discourse aimed at resolving some of the more formidable challenges confronting manufacturing and which challenges continue to inhibit the sector’s growth. Williams, in his address, however, described the “continuous engagement” between the GMSA and government as “worthwhile.”
Williams, meanwhile, pointed in his address to what he said was an insufficiency of public/private sector partnerships “that are results-oriented.” These, he said, “are sorely needed as catalysts to accelerate critical developmental imperatives in areas such as air and road transportation, maritime transportation and logistics, clean energy as well as those subsectors associated with our Green State Development Strategy.”
And the GMSA President sounded a decidedly critical note arising out of what he says has been Guyana’s failure to benefit from the significant regional services sector market. The GMSA, Williams says, “considers it altogether unacceptable that despite being one of the first Caribbean countries to establish a “Coalition of Services Industries Cluster”, Guyana’s Services trade has been, for the most part, inward looking.
“Consequently, trade-in-services export receipts continue to be virtually non-existent even though we are signatories to various bilateral and multilateral trade agreements for which reciprocal services trade, feature prominently.” Government, he added, “has a responsibility to intervene to bring this unacceptable state of affairs to an end.” Accordingly, he informed that the Association had “taken the lead” in an initiative facilitated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to revive the regional “Coalition of Services Cluster” the Secretariat for which will be set up shortly and housed at the premises of the GMSA Secretariat.
In his address Williams also dealt with aspects of the country’s business climate which he said were crucial to the creation of a healthy economic environment. Local businesses, he told the assembled public and private sector gathering, “are far more likely to thrive in an environment of more generous tax concessions, and in circumstances where new financial institutions (such as Development Banks) are established to facilitate start- up loans or working capital funding, underpinned by more affordable repayment terms.” The GMSA and the private sector, he said, would “reap tremendous benefits if we had a healthier, better equipped and better skilled workforce.” This can only happen if much more emphasis is placed on renewed and revamped programmes and policies for Technical and Vocational Education and Training.
