By Shanique Richards
St. Kitts Reporter
The 12th Sir Arthur Lewis Memorial Lecture was presented by Professor Michael Spence, 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics, and Chairman of the World Bank Commission on Growth and Development.
The event was held at the Sir Cecil Jacobs Auditorium at the ECCB Headquarters on Thursday. In light of the evening the Deputy Prime Minister, Hon. Sam Condor gave welcome remarks to Michael Spence and his family and thanked him for giving this lecture on an evening which was also very significant as he celebrated his birthday.
Other dignitaries present at the event included Governor General the Hon. Cuthbert Sebastian and the Hon. Dwyer Astaphan.
Also as a part of this ceremony the presentation of the ECCB 2007 Best Corporate Citizen Awards were also given to the deserving commercial banks for eight different categories: Educational Development, Cultural Development, Environmental Awareness, Financial Literacy and Awareness, Customer Service, Social Services, Sports Development and the overall Best Corporate Citizen Award for 2007.
ECCB Governor Sir Dwight K. Venner in his introductory remarks spoke of the importance of being knowledgeable about what must be done in order to achieve sustained growth and development and also pinpointed a few factors that give rise to the importance of the information presented in the lecture.
“We are experiencing significant change in three areas which has a great impact on the economy. These three include the depreciation of the US dollar, the changes in oil costs and the rise in food costs. Because there is no control over these matters we will have to be more efficient in increasing the quality of goods and services to make them more attractive for domestic consumption and export,” said Venner.
The lecture focused on the issues of sustained high growth and poverty reduction in developing countries: What we know and what we do not know at this stage of the development of the global economy.
“I think it is fair to say that the fraction of the world’s population that was living in countries that were either relatively well preserved or growing rapidly was well under 20% of the total. We are now living in a world where considerably in excess of 60% of the world’s population are living in countries that look like they are growing quite quickly and getting wealthier quite quickly or they are in the category of getting relatively there.
“You cannot grow at these high speeds without the knowledge and the demands that come with the global economy. We are not interested in high growth for three years then a year of low growth, we are looking for sustained high growth. The reason for this is because that is what produces big changes in the level of poverty and income.
“If I stand correctly most people are not interested in growth but they are interested in their health, opportunities to be creative, interact with other human beings and so on, that kind of freedom in a number of dimensions. We must be interested in growth because in creates options in relations to those more fundamental things. It is a kind of supporting condition in absence that it’s probably necessary to spend most of one’s time worrying about getting through the next few days a month except for the very poor.
I think we know at some fundamental level that what drives these high growth rates is a process of catching up, of rapidly using the knowledge of how to do various things that had been developed either in the past or other parts of the world. The driving force in the early stages of the high growth places, is the combination of global demand which is very large and relative to the size of most developing countries with China being the only exception, is very elastic and when you combine that with a very large supply of unemployed labour, that labour supply is elastic. Therefore, you basically can grow as fast as you can invest. One of the key factors is that people kind of say that through high savings and investment but I would like to emphasize that it is high private and public sectors investments, with respect to the public sector investment it is said that the actual level of the public sector investment for government is in education and infrastructure which you will find high variables. The reason government investment is important especially in these two areas is because that is what increases the returns in the private sector investment which is an approximate driver of growth,” Spence said.
After the lecture was the presentation for the ECCB Best Corporate Citizen Awards among Commercial Banks. The Good Citizens Awards for Educational Development was presented to Republic Bank of Grenada Ltd, Cultural Development to Bank of St. Lucia, Environmental Awareness to National Bank of Dominica, Financial Literacy and Awareness to Republic Bank of Grenada Ltd, Customer Service to National Bank of Anguilla, Social Services to ABI Bank of Antigua and Sports Development to Bank of St. Lucia. The 2007 Best Corporate Citizen Award, which was given to the bank that made the most significant contribution overall, was given to the Republic Bank of Grenada Ltd.
