It’s welcomed news that the government is
paying attention to the Miller/Shaw report and has already addressed six of the
12 recommendations.
The report was written by James C. Miller
III and David Shaw, who concluded early last year that the Cayman Islands had
to take some drastic measures to get rid of its massive debt.
As Richard Rahn wrote for the Cayman
Financial Review in March 2010, “The good news is that the Cayman problems are
readily solvable but will take both political courage and a willingness,
particularly among the civil servants, to make the necessary changes.”
Premier McKeeva Bush has shown that
political courage and has caught flak for doing so.
His government has kept direct taxation
away from its citizens and has found a way to reduce personnel expenses, which
make up about 50 per cent of Government’s operating expenses each year.
Another of the recommendations in the
report was to attract private capital to solve various infrastructure
challenges and develop new enterprises.
That’s being done now with the Dart Group,
the planned economic zone and medical tourism through a deal with the Shetty
Hospital.
A big part of the Miller Report urged the
Cayman Islands Government to privatise the Cayman Islands Airport Authority,
the Cayman Islands Development Bank, the Cayman Islands Stock Exchange, the
Cayman Turtle Farm, the Port Authority of the Cayman Islands, the University of
the Cayman Islands and the Water Authority. The Government has already accepted
bids for the acquisition of the sewerage arm of the Water Authority’s
operations. We would like to see more efforts at privatisation, especially the
Turtle Farm.
It is refreshing to see a government
actually take a report and act on it instead of accepting it and shelving it
away.
The Cayman Islands has spent thousands of
dollars over the years on reports done by experts that, once made public, were
put aside and never acted upon. We now await to see how the other
recommendations are handled.
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Well done Cayman Compass to give credit where credit is due. It was a big accomplishment to avoid direct taxation hopefully this trend of following the paid for advise will continue.