Budget consultations
EDITORIAL
Stabroek News
March 19, 2004
Each year the Minister of Finance engages civil society in a process of engagement to listen to the cries/needs of the various sectors and ideally, to see how to address these in the national budget presentation.
These sessions could be very useful but have petered out to be a routine 'play' with the same jaded actors and in many instances with just the dates of the submissions changed. The demands have always been the same; more tax relief, raising the income tax threshold; establishing a deep water harbour....to name a few.
Dialogue is good, but these sessions should be meaningful and not just be seen as an exercise in futility. The government sat with the IMF in early February to set the broad macroeconomic outlines and targets for this year's budget. How much can be accommodated within such a framework is difficult to say as the precise nature of the discussions with the IMF is usually top secret for this government until budget presentation.
What is clear is that the macro targets would have been set and this will leave little room for any meaningful consultation with the private sector or innovation with the deadline for the budget presentation encroaching.
What would be a more sensible thing to do is to have the pre-budget consultations with the international financial institutions before these targets are set. It is not good enough to be saying to civil society that the government is constrained and has to meet IMF conditionalities as a reason for rebuffing demands.
Rather, the Minister of Finance should sit with civil society early enough and this would allow it time to determine what is possible and what is not possible and to determine which direction it can manoeuvre or innovate. It can then sit with the IMF to determine the targets and seek as much as possible to test the limits of those targets in those consultations.
Two very good opportunities are presenting themselves to allow the government to start planning ahead. The government now has a new budget law which requires planning in four-year cycles, while the second Presidential private sector summit is in the planning stages.
The summit can be used as a forum to challenge the private sector to come up with ideas and innovations to surge the economy forward. The government will from 2005 have an opportunity to capture these innovations in a new budgeting cycle. Labour will have to form a constructive part of those engagements.
The Presidential business summit can become a triennial event, forming the basis of new financial cycles for the government while the fine tuning takes place in the budget years themselves and is influenced by present day realities.
Together, the government and civil society can work to fashion a future in which all of us feel we have a say and a stake, one where there is a light at the end of the ever-darkening tunnel. It requires much innovation.