We lead the Pacific in reforms
SOLOMON Islands is one of the leading reformers in the Pacific.
Paul Holden, Lead Economist & Team Leader of Pacific Private Sector Development Initiative (PSDI), highlighted this in Honiara, Tuesday.
Dr Holden said this has resulted in growth for a period of 10 years of more than 3 percent.
“Solomon Islands is being a leading reformer in a number of different areas in promoting access to finance, in making it easier to register a business, and in improving the performance of its State Owned Enterprises,” Dr Holden said.
“Having said that, there are number of areas that we need more works to be done,” he added
Dr Holden said major reforms were achieved in the SOEs, assisting businesses to get finance, and to bring more women into the formal economy because they are the backbone of the formal economy.
“They (women) have huge talents and we would like to see them participate in formal businesses more strongly,” he added.
Dr Holden said they based their conclusions on their report on a very long engagement in Solomon Islands which started back to 2004.
He said this has resulted in a significant amount of knowledge on the part of PSDI team of the special conditions here, in particular in order to produce the most recent one.
“We undertook extensive interviews with private sectors to try and understand their problems.
“We undertook extensive interviews with government to try and get understanding of issues they believed to be important.
“And we took the results of these interviews and from that we based our conclusions of our report,” he said.
Dr Holden and Vijaya Nagarajan, a gender specialist of Asian Development Bank, presented the findings of PSDI report to the government, private sectors and banking institutions at Heritage Park Hotel yesterday.
Meanwhile, he said about 1,500 jobs have been created by 35 companies over the past years.
Dr Holden said this was found in the newly registered Company Haus.
“We found 35 companies created 1500 jobs.
“They created hundreds of millions of dollars of investment,” he added.
Dr Holden said this came about through the reforms implemented by successive governments.
Some of the reforms include the Company Act and establishment of the Company Haus.
He said the Company Haus is recognized around the world as one of the leading institutions for registering a business.
“We found that governments over the years have been restrictively receptive to the notion that the private sector is the engine of growth.”
By EDDIE OSIFELO
