Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The best insight, instant feedback, accountability the all new Talk Radio Freedom 106.5 I
[00:00:09] Speaker B: welcome Dr. Vannis James, who is an economist and also a friend to Freedom 106.5 FM in that regard. Good morning to you, Dr. Vannes James. How are you?
[00:00:21] Speaker A: Good morning, how are you?
[00:00:23] Speaker B: I am blessed. I am good. So I know that leading up to October 12, the conversation has always revolved around what has or what should be looked at in terms of priority. I want to go in the opposite direction for a minute to see what kind of performance we've had for the year and if those things should be applied to the new budget and do we really expect any changes? What say you?
[00:00:56] Speaker A: Well, the record of the performance is available to a discerning public and when I look at that record, I see a pretty mixed weigh in towards poor performance, some of it driven by the circumstances and some of it driven by the choices made by the government.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: Now, in terms of how, in your opinion, how we recover from that, applying those lessons to the 2026, 2027 budget, because my question for the morning has been do we expect major changes for that year and what should be definite changes in your opinion, to the existing way of doing things towards 2027?
[00:01:52] Speaker A: Well, there are some deep reforms that the country needs in order to deliver better budget performance against better growth performance for the economy.
By that I mean that what a government normally wants to do is turn look at the current circumstances and plan 4, 5, 10 years, maybe down the road, and then the budget every year is an implementation device.
Now what you want to do as a citizen is consider that longer term plan because that is what really will ultimately change the fundamental circumstances every year. You are just chipping away a little bit at that. But we need to understand what the long term plan is to restructure the economy, which is the number one priority the country has to have.
If you're dealing with our living standards and from the record we have, a fundamental reform of the structure of government is also a foundational basis for better long term growth performance.
Let me, let me remind you and your audience that the growth performance that you have that people talk a lot about is tied closely to the structure of the economy you are operating.
We have been operating for 70 years, since 56, that's 1956. We have been operating what we would best call what Lloyd best used to call an enclave economy, an economy built on foreign investment in the energy sector. Fundamentally, that's what we have been working with and that economy is a high risk economy.
That's an economy in which your income is very uncertain, very volatile, and subject to deep negative swings of the kind that we are undergoing now.
And ultimately, ever since I was a young economist in the university right here, we've understood that we have to change that now. That's decades ago and we're still here and we're still struggling with that idea. So any government that takes power has to pause and think a little bit about the kinds of investments needed in order to change that. And we know what that set of investments are today. We have a lot better data than we had in the 50s and all the way up to 1970 and so on. We have a lot better data now. We understand the dynamics much better. And so we know where we really have to go with that story.
Government needs to get on top of that and get started down that road. And the quicker we learn that as government, as a people, meaning, the better for all of us. But we will learn from the record that you can't make any progress on that score within the authoritarian structure of government that we are operating and have operated since 1956.
[00:05:24] Speaker B: Now, policies was one of the things that was brought up in the first hours of today's show that policies need to be implemented, policies need to be developed.
You also spoke about data centered research and data centered change.
Is it that we are ignoring the data that has been on repeat, as you said, from, for decades now? And how do we now apply that data, knowing fully well that we may have outdated systems?
How do we go about making that change?
[00:06:03] Speaker A: Well, the historical record is pretty clear now. First of all, let me say that it has to be data centered. There is no question about that. It has to be evidence based. But you have to be able to read the evidence.
You don't just have facts, you have to construct and interpret them.
And when you look at the record of Trinidad and Tobago, there's something that stands out that goes to this issue of policy.
The fundamental barrier to the diversification of the economy is the fact that government is the owner and controller of the main industries through which we could do diversification.
Government owns and controls the education sector for the most part, right? 99% of it, really. A couple of private things going on, but not particularly significant all the way through primary, secondary, tertiary, you know, uwi, UTT and so on, all owned and controlled by the government. And they are all directed to local supply.
It is government policy that says that UWI educates Trinidad and Tobagonians.
You've never heard any government from 56 to now say we're setting up a university to attract foreign students to come to Trinidad and Tobago.
You've never heard any and you don't hear any now.
I live in Tobago and I've been preaching to the community here that we need to get involved in the export of tertiary education.
You never hear any government thinking of it that way. That's because of the nature of the political process that we are operating. And if you're a young person, you know it is exactly the same thing with the health care sector.
All of the health care delivered in the country is delivered to locals. We have no dimension of our health care system designed to export health care. What people normally talk about as health tourism, there are major ways in which that's done all over the world. When real sickness come down on many, many people in China and Tobago, they pack their bags and they go to the US for example. That's health tourism.
You don't get sick. Americans saying, boy, let me go to China and Tobago to get killed.
That kind of thing is because government has designed the system purely to focus on the local market. I have colleagues, for example, who pack their bags and head to Turkey to get the benefits from a collaboration between Turkish universities and Johns Hopkins Medicine, a collaboration I recommended here in 1997 in Tobago when we were building the Scarborough Hospital.
I recommended and we did the work, talked to Johns Hopkins Medicine. We got all the agreements required to come here and collaborate with us to put together a globally high quality health care system to service both the local market and the international market. We got all the agreements and so on. And then I might tell you quite frankly that once Ocho Charles lost the elections, the PNM under Orville London said, we don't need that, we need a public utility. So we have a public utility focused purely on supplying the needs of the local population.
At the same time, when I made that recommendation, colleagues, they launched a huge agenda along the same road in Turkey.
And today they're getting a whole big global flow of persons going there to get lower cost, high quality medical care. Exactly of the kind that we were proposing back in 1997. So this is 20 something years later, as you know, and we're still in the same boat. That's the point I'm making. It is government policy that focuses the health care system purely on the local market and it's the same for the financial sector. I think Manning had an idea about changing that, but the work required to get that done and the understanding needed is so deep he backed off when all was said and done, you know, got it done in a pretty decent way.
The Bahamas, they came back in 2013, 14 and launched, spent about $5 billion heading down that road. And they're making something out of it today. They're generating about US$31,000 per citizen in the Bahamas as a consequence of that. Before that they were somewhere in the range of 13, 14, 15,000. Kind of like where we are in Trinidad and Tobago in Reeves Dumps now, you know, some you could see. Of course, it's the same thing that was done in the Cayman Islands. It's the same thing that was done in Bermuda. And we have an example inside of Caricom in what St. Kitts Nevis is doing in terms of tertiary education.
Grenada started to go down that road.
[00:11:52] Speaker B: Georgetown University.
[00:11:54] Speaker A: Exactly. And they made some progress, but they've kind of stalled along the way. But St. Kitts Nevis is making a lot of progress and they're up to 21, 22,000 US dollars per in St. Kitts Nevis. Now. We're still in the teens with all the oil and gas because of the huge amount of uncertainty in the oil and gas. What they are doing is what I like to describe as industrializing tourism.
You bring people into the country to get high level modern services. They're not just coming to go to the beach, they're coming to get high quality services under what in the, in the global trade language we call mode to cross border trade.
You trade, you bring people into your country, but not for the weekend. You bring them to stay for three months and four months and five months or come six times a year and so on in order to get access to high level modern services.
That's the direction in which the country has to go. And the reason we're not going there is government policy. The reason we have government policy that way is precisely because government owns them and government is authoritarian. They're not wickedly authoritarian in them. That's the way the constitution of the country is set up to say cabinet runs the country and cabinet is accountable to the parliament. But of course, if you read the constitution, you will see no mechanisms of accountability because of the size and structure of the parliament.
So we have a lot of work to do to get going down that road. And you need a government that understands enough of that to take the steps required. When we called for that in 1970, you too, you may not have been born, but when that happened, the leaders of that call were all jailed by Eric Williams.
And since then the country has been very Intolerant to people who speak the kind of language I am talking about here, that the system is authoritarian, from the home to the schools to the everything. Local government, the tha. The tha is the worst example of an authoritarian government in the entire Caribbean, worse than Trinidad and Tobago.
[00:14:24] Speaker B: Now, I wanted to ask you, though, the municipal changes that was approved within, I think last 24 to 48 hours, has that added to the problem or has it given space for relief for the changes that you are discussing?
[00:14:42] Speaker A: Same story. The design. You see, to do the design properly, you have to redesign the whole system.
Even if you try to do something sensible with the municipals or you try to do something sensible with, say, the tha. As long as the central government is the financing, the main lines that matter for development, they control all of them. They control population policy, immigration policy, trade policy, and so on. Once it's set up in an authoritarian way, all the fundamental foundations for success at the local level, the municipal level, the THA level and so on will be all stymied by poor policy and authoritarian policy at the central level. So the whole system has to be redesigned, taking into account the need to provide arrangements through which the citizens can practice democracy. And what that means is share, communicate the information we have with one another. And then, of course, you have a well designed legislative mechanism to take all of that information, do politics, of course, and translate it into policy. But if that is going on all the time, you will get incremental improvements over time in the performance of the polity itself and the performance of the policy making process.
So that concentration of power and authoritarian design of power is the number one reason we do not make the steps we need to make in order to diversify the economy. Let me just give you one example, give your audience. And so an example of how that would have worked. This would apply to almost any of the communities all across the country. But if you.
I remember it would have applied to, say, Palm east, when I was a young agricultural economist studying the communities across the south, for example, it would have applied to them. But the example the country knows best is Laventille.
All across Laventille, because of the steel band, calypso, carnival industry.
And you saw the flurry of innovative, creative developments from the 1930s, 40s all the way through in that community, especially with the steel band, but with calypso and all them things they do. And then if you ask yourself, what if that community was empowered to spend its own small share of the budget to develop that industry in its own way for its own purposes, they would have the best university of music in
[00:17:37] Speaker B: the world, maybe with foreigners wanting to come in to experience the development of pan. Now, there are schools, schools strange enough in the United States, that offer a degree in PAN from the history of the instrument, the development, the making, the tuning, the marketing, patent, everything, understanding the whole process. And yet you could get a master's in it, which a doctorate even, which I find astounding that the University of the West Indies did not take up that program and have it here.
And in that manner, you would find a diverse rep of nationalities coming to do that program.
Now, I wanted to ask you, with all the changes that you are recommending, what would be the first policies you would implement if you had the conditions that you are recommending?
[00:18:38] Speaker A: First of all, I would.
The first, the most, and maybe the most urgent policy that we need is the reform of the government.
That's your biggest development project.
Now, once you do that, the communities would be empowered. And if they are empowered, it is their program more than anything else that would do the leading edge of the diversification program. All of the creative industries and so on would be liberated from their dependence on the government. And the communities will drive them. And that's where we are most innovative, don't forget. So if you're talking development, your innovative capabilities have to be liberated.
That industry has demonstrated that it can innovate year in, year out, just like you do with your cell phones. Every year, these sellers come up with new music, new song, new this, new that. So they would have liberated that and we would have had a leading edge and we could get a leading edge of our development through them. So I would take that structural reform of government and the liberation of the creative industries as my number one development priority.
Now, after that, I make a beeline for healthcare, education and finance. Now, you can't do all of them, and you can't do them alone in Tobago. You've got to do them in collaboration with the rest of the region. You need a big division of labor. So you could say Trinidad and Tobago, putting in your data centers and so on, could head down the road of something like nuclear medicine. Whereas you might do IVs in Barbados, as they're doing now. You just blow those things up and you have to rationalize across the member states of caricom. But it can be done if all the governments in the region come together and understand the damaging effects of authoritarian rule.
And let's do a common broad regional drive towards inclusive government. And then in that context, we would be able to sort out the Rationalization of industrial allocation. So you could answer the question we have yet been able to answer in the CARICOM arrangement. What is the role of each country?
Why should any one country be in the network?
Everyone would be able to answer that for his or her own country, and we would be able to make some progress there. So that's the second channel to which you will make real progress. You make a beeline for those. Those are the industries in which we have both dynamic comparative. Dynamic comparative advantage and innovative advantages. When you take account of our creative industries. And of course, once you head down that road, you know you're talking about the industries in which all your top talent, your best scholars are in medicine, your best scholars are in.
And so once you begin to understand that, you see the greatest room for innovative work based on science.
Your medics are practicing medicine based on science. You just put that on steroids. The same is true for your engineers and so on.
And to some extent, you get a little bit of an example of how that works when you look at the development of real estate programming in St. Kitts Nevis, which has adjusted its housing stock to deal with the inflow of foreigners who want to now become citizens of, say, St. Kitts Nevis, dual citizens and stuff like that. All of us could play that game. And our engineers and so on, our architects would be, Would come alive with creative designs to match what we're doing with our dynamic services.
[00:22:40] Speaker B: The thing is, when you suggest that people coming into the region, there is a very real reality that we seem to avoid in that there are conflicts around the world and people are looking to come to safer spaces. And the Caribbean being one, CARICOM has a very important role in that, regulating who comes how. We keep structure not only with resources, but the space of jobs as well.
Their skills can help in terms of that diversification. And I'm getting to the point of looking at how jobs have changed over the years, especially as we are looking to advancements in technology, AI being the ability to work remotely. You and I are talking via zoom rather than you being in studio here. So in terms of the frameworks for IT, work visas, permits, resources like that, should we be focusing on establishing not only security systems, but frameworks that give space to that exchange of information?
And not only that, it would be exchange in currency, money.
Can we talk a little bit about that? Because the examples I have here is like Thailand, Bali, that have capitalized on that to the point that they're kind of going backward in stopping some of these visas for foreigners. Who seem to, as they say, you give an inch, they take a yard. Can we explore that but still learn from their mistakes to regulate how that happens here?
[00:24:38] Speaker A: Well, let's anchor all of that conversation on one critical fact, and that is that if you look across the long march of history, and especially if you look in the modern march of history, what happened to, to Japan, China, South Korea and so on, you learn that it is the international movement of talent across borders that is the number one driver of development.
Right after setting up arrangements under which some policy could be made.
Remember, those arrangements differ according to economy. In our Caribbean space, we've got to deal with authoritarianism. That may not be true in China, for example.
Now, once you understand the importance of the international flow of talent, what you see is there's a two way movement. In our case, we experience it as brain drain. But in the Americans, in Britain, in the Americas and Canada and so on, and in Britain and in Europe, they benefited over 400 years in the inflow of the best talents from all over the world.
Just as an aside, we will not, maybe an important aside, we will not want to forget that what happened to Africa under the slave trade and all of that was that the best people were taken and moved into the Caribbean and America in order to underpin what was then a plantation system. But what happened is who were the people building the roads and all of that, all across the sugar industry and all these were the building talents you stole from Africa.
So the world knows that, knows the experience that it is the international movement of talent. And the North Atlantic benefited from that over the decades. Nowadays they're turning their backs against it for racial reasons. Well, okay, we in the Caribbean understand enough of that to say, okay, that looks like an opportunity. You say, man, if you want to leave your country, you have a PhD in physics, you want to go somewhere else to look for a better opportunity? Look what we're doing here in the Caribbean, we're creating room for you to express your innovative capabilities and build your social networks and all of that.
So come and take a look at what we're doing and you set up appropriate policies to facilitate that. So that's the platform, I think, on which the whole conversation now, once you understand that, you then have other details you have to put in place. For example, what we have recommended from a lot of our work in the UN is that what you do by strengthening your communities is that you create effectively. You are allowing communities to create programs to attract people on a safe, healthy, happy basis so people know they could come into your community, they could be safe because of the way your community is organized. It'll be safer than anywhere in New York. So you want to look for a place where you could raise a family. Look at what we're doing with our education system. Look at the way we are supplementing normal public education with what in the Caribbean we normally call extra lessons. That's our quality control and so on. And we have all kinds of devices that would make a family able, a household able to grow its capacities. So we market that and we say when you come, when you leave, your capacity vector will be this much bigger than when you came in. So here's a place to anchor. And we therefore are taking advantage of the mistakes in the competition for talent that the North Atlantic is making today. So let them go on with their racism. And we say, okay, when you come here, you're at home. Africans live here happily. So do Indus. We live happily together here. Never mind all the back and forth in the politics. You look at how we live together. Hola, we pila ola, we rootiola, we sing chutney songs. And so we're all one people in that sense. And you could just come and join the happy mix of a rich social capital development network. So we, we take advantage of it. That's the sense in which you have to think about immigration and population policy for development.
And when they come, the liberation of the sense of self and happiness and so on explodes their creative talent. At the same time, you're doing your diversification programming, investment programming on your industrial front. So they're seeing better jobs, opportunity to be open minded in their thinking. They'll see in your parliament a place where they could go and share their knowledge and their skills. Completely different to what we have now. Share their information, account for it, explain it. The politicians would. So they'll see a new civilization, a new world as it were, emerging in the Caribbean. And they would want to come for those kinds of reasons.
[00:30:06] Speaker B: Not only for sand, sea and sun, not only.
[00:30:09] Speaker A: Only for science. Exactly the idea. You got it exactly right. Tuska.
[00:30:14] Speaker B: Is your name Tusca? Yes, Martin.
[00:30:16] Speaker A: Beautiful. That's exactly the point. Not only for sea, sun and sand or going in the rainforest, but for all the advanced modern learning systems.
The key to development overall is the speed with which we learn. They will see our fast learning system at work and they'll come to join it for that reason. And they'll take the beach as Anya.
[00:30:47] Speaker B: Any last comments? We've got about seven more minutes to go to 9 o' clock. I mean, I am enjoying the conversation in that we tend to focus so much more on who do what and where the blame loads and all of that. In venturing into what is possible to develop, not only Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean, by extension, to almost fortify ourselves from what can be a very precarious position in what the world is experiencing right now.
I wanted to take a look quickly at how, in terms of the benefit of mental health and how important that part is in the workforce that is expected to carry this burden because we're hearing rumors of taxes, on how to pay taxes, and this region is not agreeing with the policies of the big guns like the United States, France, and there's so much conflict there.
And the foreign policies also affect how we operate within relations with ourselves.
How do we navigate through those things as from the perspective of an economist, where everything has a dollar value?
[00:32:17] Speaker A: Well, let's put our finger on the most important of all the things you've just said that goes to this matter of mental health.
You might recall, at least you would have heard Garvey reminding us that one of the central things we have to learn to do is emancipate ourselves from mental slavery. Almost all of our mental problems in the region, across the Caribbean space, and by extension in our diaspora and so on, is tied to that phenomenon. And the way you get out of it is you have to afford people room to practice democracy, the mental health that we have to look for, that Garvey was talking about, that Lloyd Best was talking about when he talked about us having total institutions that suppress our senses of self and so on. When you want to break out of that, you have to get out of authoritarian arrangements in the home, in the school, in the communities, in the government, setting up places everywhere where people learn to take responsibility for their society and for themselves, for their progress and for their social network progress, including the whole country and so on. And when you provide those mechanisms for practice at every level, community level, and so on, especially wherever government is. So government essentially takes the lead in affording the citizen a chance to practice how to be free, how to speak freely without fear of reprisals and all of those things, that's the doorway through which you would go if you really want to deal with this business of the citizens, a sense of lack of sense of self and lack of self confidence and all of those dimensions of. Of this mental health problem that we're talking about. There's the physical part, of course, which, which goes to quantum, quantum biology. We don't. We Do. I'm not an expert in that area, but that's a tiny minority of the problem. The fundamental problem is a socially created anxiety. People sense that they are very weak relative to the central government.
The central government could make laws that would take away your freedom and you're helpless against it. And we need to create a whole network of intermediary institutions between us and the central government, between the citizen and the central government. So you have a lot of buffers that you could appeal to. If my community is empowered, when a ministry or minister tries to impose on me, I go to my local community government and I say, boy, look at what they're doing to me. They fire me in an unreasonable way, come in and help me. And because it's in your community network, you get the supports you need. So we have a whole network of changes we have to start to put in place to deal with what you're calling mental health. If you study all of his dynamics. Let me just tell you quickly before the end of your show. In the last five years, I was part of a research team in Jamaica in which we did a full experiment in the school system.
And we put in place a whole program that allowed us to help children in homes that were sources of abuse and so on. We developed thorough grade parenting mechanism, food, social protections, navigating your community, flexibility in the choice of your careers and so on. We covered and followed them for five years as a special group in one school in which those we did not help went through the government's program and those we helped went through the government's program. Plus our program with all those dynamics, parental development programs, all kinds of things. At the end, when I ran the statistics, I was as a statistician analyzing the data. What I found. The children who we helped came from the very bottom of the ladder. Like saying, you know, you do CX, you do SEA, and they send the best students to bishops or QRC or St. Mary's and the worst, right? That kind of thing. We took those were students to the top of the CXC ladder ladder, performance wise in terms of the number of subjects, the quality of the passes and all of those things. And what we proved is that when you provide people room to be liberated from these kinds of. It's expensive because it cost us a lot of money from the foundation that supported it. But so.
So it's not easy for our government to do it. But it's not easy for our government to do it the way we organize. But if you decentralize in the sense of liberating your communities and so on. Then you will see those kinds of programs come in place. We did extra lessons, we did all that.
The gain is a freer mind, right?
They were able to choose between cxc City and Gills. Choose what you want. And some were able to say I want to become a footballer. We say, okay, you could become a footballer, we give you the help. But we also want you to pass at least five subjects. So, so, so. And we saw all that and all of that tells you how important proper programming to liberate.
[00:38:09] Speaker B: But the thing is, I mean the question should be now are we, how to put it? Are we aware of the benefits that can come from an investment like that? We're always talking about what to invest in and looking at the return on investment and so on. But I would think something that you just described there would make a stronger citizenship or citizenry to therefore take the country into the next 10, 15 years. As you first said when we started that governments need to think in long term rather than just to make it to the next budget or to make it to the next election.
[00:38:50] Speaker A: You know, the reason we don't know the reason the society doesn't know is like what I just described for you there. It these things happen in a silo. Once the government is organized the way it is, it has no way to get access to the information.
It's just broaden the mind.
If you set up the government properly, its central facility will be the hearings that allow any citizen to come, not consultations in town hall meetings and so on. Inside the parliament there will be committees that are set up to hear from the citizen on this or that or the other aspect of policy structured opening room for people to come and put their presentations in paper and testify and all of that sort of stuff. If we did that, the flow of information would dramatically accelerate the speed of learning in the country and in the government.
And it is that absence of structure that is at the heart of why they don't know. So I wouldn't go if you call me to a town hall meeting, but if you call me to the open thing that it doesn't matter, I don't have to be your friend in order to come. Any who come, come government, opposition, everybody will come whoever want to help the society. And the information will be shared and communicated in clever testimony, clever interview of testimony and so on, interrogation of testimony. So you have to understand the most important point I'm making, that we have to reorganize ourselves for success.
What we're doing now. And what this government is doing, just like governments over the last 70 years, is continuing to hope that there will be some magic by which policies made in an authoritarian way would lead to Progress. We have 70 years of evidence that that doesn't work, and I think that's about the length of time I have lived in the society. I think we have to be careful not to keep making that mistake.
[00:40:56] Speaker B: Dr. James, I want to give you your flowers and appreciate your time today. And stepping into the Morning Rumble Slash the Human Impact to give us that perspective on exactly the type of thinking that we may need to apply to move the country forward. I appreciate you taking the time, and we'll speak again soon.
[00:41:16] Speaker A: You're welcome.
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