Dear Editor,
Many of us will have been impressed by the manner in which our Prime Minister, Ms. Silveria Jacobs, handled the management of borders and infection threat of the COVID-19 epidemic. I certainly was. She indicated in some of her press conferences that she had been following the science-based advice of professionals in the epidemiology field. That was the correct approach and those that ignored the science have caused great damage.
Besides medical science, there is also economic science and this letter is to recommend to our prime minister to follow economic science in the same manner as she has the medical science. Like the medical science, there are large numbers of opinions and views, but in the middle of it all there are strong consensus positions that should be the basis for policy to advance St. Maarten.
In the case of developing countries, a core economic consensus says that an excessive percentage of tax revenues spent on public sector non-investment costs result in restrictions that limit policy-makers in respect of investment that could be used for growth or restructuring of the economy.
In the case of St. Maarten our small scale and our choice of a heavy overhead of Dutch modeled governmental apparatus heightens the risk.
In the case of St. Maarten it has become obvious that political will to restrain this public sector expenditure is not there and that investment always takes a back seat to public sector employment.
The consensus also says that if the developing country tries to escape the high public sector non-investment costs by borrowing new funds then there is a high risk of the country falling into a debt trap as so many Caribbean jurisdictions have. Ironically, this is what the Prime Minister was calling for when she exited the recent Kingdom Ministers Council Meeting attended by the three Caribbean Prime Ministers of the Kingdom.
Efforts to advance long-term policies for St. Maarten that are based on a more sustainable model are often refuted on the basis of them coming from a biased business sector or an autonomy-reducing Kingdom partner, the Netherlands. When it comes to the core science of economic development these are political arguments, not economic science ones. Let’s follow the science in economics as well as medicine.
Robbie Ferron
