Hundreds lined up at Club Luna the other day seeking a job from a new island destination business. There is nothing surprising there. Thousands in this country are in desperate need of work. Any business conducting open recruitment will receive overwhelming responses from young and not so young Bahamians yearning to earn some monies to pay their bills. I encounter scores of these desperate Bahamians daily.

"Please Mr. Laing, do you have any work? I really have to find something to do," they plead. Those are the older ones. Many of the young guys simply say, "Man Laing, gee ya boy somethin' to do." The reality is that our economy sucks and its anaemia is beating down far too many Bahamians. We need to rev up our economy and we need to keep it revved for a while. How can we do this?

First, greatly improve our level of customer service across the board. This is the lowest lying fruit on our way to a robust economy. We have to "wow" customers with a new level of excellence in service. Generally speaking, the service level in our economy is mediocre at best. Mediocrity minimizes spend; excellence maximizes it.

We must replace those sour faces with smiling faces. We must replace those cheeky attitudes with courteousness and aptitude. We must replace slow, shoddy delivery with fast, fantastic delivery.

If we wow people with our customer service, we can increase our economic growth by at least one percentage-point or some $80 million annually, in my view. If we wow ourselves, wowing our visitors will be a piece of cake. We don't need foreign investment to improve customer service and if we do so we will see greater economic growth.

Second, scale up our population. Our population is too small. Even in the best of times a small population has limited spend. In the worst of times spend is even more limited. With unemployment at or above 15 percent, personal debt at historic levels, businesses scrapping for capital and increases in taxes, an already small Bahamian economy has seemingly become miniature.

So what do we do? We scale up. How? Well, as much as we might like it to be so, we cannot do it organically or indigenously. Our population growth is modest at best - two percent annually - and at that rate it will take many years to add just a few thousand non-spending people to it.

To scale up our population with spending people we can encourage Bahamians living abroad who have built up wealth to return home. We should create some incentives for them to do so. Additionally, we can liberalize our immigration policy, particularly as it relates to processing applications. Yes, I said it, liberalize our immigration policy. We must appeal to a larger number of international persons of means to choose The Bahamas as home, much like Canada has been doing for years now.

I know that talking about having foreigners come into this country is not a popular political point but popularity is not the litmus test for good sense. To get more people buying land, houses, constructing homes, spending in our stores, renting apartments, eating in our restaurants and, yes, paying taxes, we need more foreign people with means to come to live in The Bahamas; and the sooner the better. A 15 percent increase in our population over the next five to 10 years by people with disposable incomes would inject new life into our economy and improve its growth rate for decades to come.

Third, a more strategic approach to direct investment. We must seek those investors whose business interests align with our interests. On this score, largely what is necessary here is government facilitation. Not facilitation that merely means handing out of our bag of incentives whatever we have in it.  Facilitation here means working intelligently with investors, local and foreign, to provide them with that which only the government can give and is absolutely necessary for making the investment come on stream.

It could mean tax breaks, reduced bureaucracy or land leases. It could mean trade agreements with other countries or training programs to supply workers. Whatever is strategically necessary to get a good investment up and running we should be prepared to do. As much as we might wish it to be otherwise, the growth of our economy at the level that we need will not happen in the short to medium term without significant new investments, much of it foreign investment, and we must be prepared to work strategically with investors to make it happen.

o Next week we will look at what we should do about access to capital for local businesses, making it easier to do business in our economy and a number of other suggestions for getting our economy operating on all cylinders. Zhivargo Laing is a Bahamian economic consultant and former Cabinet minister who represented the Marco City constituency in the House of Assembly.

Zhivargo Laing

Click here to read more at The Nassau Guardian