The Economic Renewal Programme (ERP) has been receiving some well-deserved flak from some quarters, notably from Prof Dylan Jones-Evans on his blog . This is not surprising, because as I have pointed out earlier, the ERP is well written but ‘fatally flawed’ .
Sadly, one cannot but agree with most of the critical points raised by DJE. Nevertheless, there is one thing that seems to mitigate this which is that, in this document, the WAG appears to be moving away from a position of interference in business and concentrating on attempting to indirectly improve the ‘business climate’ by redirecting funds back into education and infrastructure. This is properly the role of government and should be applauded.
As DJE points out this means that many small businesses may find some kind of ‘support’ no longer available. Although it is debatable whether any of the present and past ‘support’ provided was of much use as it contributed to the insidious growth of the ‘grant culture’ , it is true that some advisory and development agencies have helped ‘support’ some start-up businesses. The glaring omission from this so-called support has been to the retail sector which has always been excluded from most types of economic initiative or grant funding. This seems crazy to me since, like England we are also a ‘nation of small shop keepers’ . We are not a nation of entrepreneurs and never will be (thank God!).
Anyway to reiterate, the main flaw in the ERP is its failure to recognise ‘the elephant in the room’ which is that business finance and the banks need reform. Without control of the money, through these reforms, the vision expressed in the ERP is irrelevant to business.
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