The President of the Chamber of Commerce says the island is competing with the entirety of western civilisation in a bid to its grow population.
Giving evidence to the Economic Policy Review Committee, Kristan McDonald said that the government’s desire for 5,000 new jobs and population growth are a “common problem”.
While the government shifted its target from a population of 100,000 to creating the infrastructure to support a population of 100,000, it has never been able to shake that figure from the collective mind of the public that it is its stated aim.
Mr McDonald said: “What we need to do is try and think a little bit differently about what our approach there should be, I think our general opinion is that we should be focusing more around how we can improve productivity of our existing people and improving the infrastructures and services, and being less concerned about hard job numbers or population numbers.”
“We feel that the actual metrics being used for the measurements aren’t particularly necessarily the right ones. There are other ones in use by other countries around the world to measure the overall health wellbeing of the population, both from an individual but mental, but also an economic point of view, and their actual effectiveness.”
AI
Instead of the government aiming for 5,000 new jobs, Mr McDonald said the Chamber is concerned about what those jobs will look like, which is currently unclear given the larger societal questions about the future of work and employment.
He said: “We’re seeing significant disruption in the economy at the moment as a result of forces like AI and things like that. That’s not mentioned in the economic strategy to any great degree. So we will always have events like that that will evolve.”
And added that Chamber, as well as other industry leaders, have believed that “just focusing on pure job creation doesn’t necessarily get us a stable, resilient economy, which is what we’re all after”.
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