The Tribune

By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

A leading accountant yesterday urged the Government to give the proposed National Tripartite Council a real mandate to improve the Bahamas’ economic competitiveness, warning that this “cannot be allowed to slip beyond this point”.

Raymond Winder,, Deloitte & Touche (Bahamas) managing partner, told Tribune Business that the country’s latest fall in the World Bank’s 2014 Ease of Doing Business rankings - repeating a trend seen for many years - showed this nation was “not moving the meter in the right direction”.

Noting that Shane Gibson, minister of labour and National Insurance, had recently foreshadowed upcoming legislation to create a National Tripartite Council, featuring union, business and government representatives, Mr Winder said such a body also needed to tackle issues relating to the Bahamas’ economic competitiveness.

Pointing out that he had suggested this when president of the Chamber of Commerce, Mr Winder said: “I recommended at that point in time that we set up a programme to enhance competitiveness.

“One of the things I recommended was having this

National Tripartite Council. Singapore went through this process many years ago, and we cannot allow our competitiveness to slip beyond this point.

“I hope that the Government puts people on this Council that truly understand these issues, and the importance of making the necessary sacrifices to ensure we remain competitive.”

The Deloitte & Touche (Bahamas) managing partner urged the Christie administration to equip the National Tripartite Council with the resources and mandate that would enable it to do the necessary research and data gathering.

“This is so we can try and make decisions that will prevent us sliding further in this global environment of competition, which is so important when one talks about attracting investment,” Mr Winder told Tribune Business.

“It’s clearly time we as a country took note of these things, and seek to improve the categories where we have stopped.... Foreign investors, I’m sure, use this [the World Bank rankings] to determine where to invest or not invest.

“This issue of competitiveness has been on the frontburner for a long time, but clearly we have not moved the meter in the right direction,” he added.

“For years I have personally raised this issue of competitiveness as a point of reference that we need to be concerned about. The more we become less competitive, the more difficult it is for small Bahamian businesses to survive in the Bahamas, and it makes it more difficult for us to attract the kind of foreign investment where more dollars remain in the Bahamas after the investment period.”

The 2014 Ease of Doing Business rankings, released on Tuesday, showed the Bahamas falling from 76th position last year to 84th out of 189 nations this time, dropping in seven out of the 10 categories in which countries are assessed.

While this nation was given credit for reducing the top Stamp Duty rate on real estate transactions to 10 per cent, and reforming its corporate insolvency laws, neither did anything to improve the Bahamas’ rankings.

The country remained at a lowly 182nd for the ease of registering property, with no change, and stuck firmly at 32nd for ‘resolving insolvency’.

And, in what is likely to be greeted with ironic cheers by the Bahamian private sector, given the impending introduction of Value-Added Tax (VAT), the only category where this nation showed improvement was in the ‘ease of paying taxes’ - where it moved from 50th to 45th spot.

The Bahamas fell nine spots year-over-year, from 66th to 75th, when it came to the ease of obtaining construction permits.

And it dropped from 78th to 83rd on the ability of entrepreneurs to start a business, a drop of five positions. A fall of the same magnitude, from 67th to 72nd, was suffered on the ‘ease of trading across borders’, while the Bahamas also dropped by four places - from 82nd to 86th - on the ease of getting credit.

Amos Ferguson, head of the Institute of Bahamian Architects (IBA), yesterday told Tribune Business it was “not surprising at all that we’ve slipped” on the ease of obtaining construction permits.

Attributing this to continued “bottlenecks” at the Building Control Department, he added: “We’re going in the wrong direction. The Minister is trying to initiate some policies. If he gets that done that should help, but we need to fix what’s there now, otherwise there will still be a problem.

“We’ve been dropping every year, which is a problem. It’s not only the fact we’re dropping, but that it takes so long and there’s all these processes.”

Mr Ferguson said that if the status quo was maintained, construction permits and industry jobs would continue to fall in number.