 Hello and welcome to Celebrating Excellence. South Alois, one of St. Lucia's Nobel laureates, stated that the fundamental cure for poverty is not money but knowledge. He understood that development is about structural transformation by creating new economic opportunities. Here's Dr. Adrian Ogier, economist, producer and 2010 Caribbean laureates for arts and letters on the concept of knowledge as an engine of economic growth. Well probably in this conversation and at this moment the most important thing about Sir Arthur Lewis was that he was one of us. He was a St. Lucian, first he was a Caribbean person, second and he was a great economist. Great economist in the sense that he was a thinking man grounded in the reality of where St. Lucia was, where the Caribbean was, where other developing countries were in terms of their trajectory and that's an important word because we are on a path, we're not starting off as fully formed economies or fully formed societies or even in those days as fully formed nations. So Sir Arthur I think was very conscious of the fact that we were on a path towards something better, bigger, more sustainable. The important thing about him also was that he was a groundbreaking theorist who was able to gain international respect, international acclaim for a, focusing on the plight of developing countries with obviously the Caribbean as his primary lab or workshop and also on the broader subject of development where not much work had been done at the time to really understand what is the trajectory, what's the cycle, what is the path of developing economies, how do they move from basic agricultural, peasant, excess labor situations into something that more resemble the wealth and affluence and sustainability is the word we use now of larger, more advanced economies. And so he started this ground work by establishing some basic premises of what do you have in small economies like those in the Caribbean coming out of the plantation era, coming out of colonialism, coming out of even post emancipation. You had a lot of ordinary everyday people who had no education, no facilities, no access to finance, very few resources and he quantified that very simply into land, labor and capital which meant you had people who we still speak about as our chief resource but without land which is part of the wealth of your people and your country and without capital which is both finance and equipment and access to those things, technology also and I would say in our modern era also intellectual capital that without those other commodities he recognized that the labor was largely going to be poor for a long time and so this is the I think the eye opener that Sir Arthur offered us back then as developing societies and also which we ought to be mindful of even today that unless you develop the synergy between your land, your labor and your capital you really not going to fulfill the development potential of these islands and unfortunately we remain in a significant imbalance of land, labor and capital which is what Sir Arthur really wanted us to achieve as economies. That understanding of what needs to be done or what needed to be done in the Sir Arthur Lewis model is probably best articulated in his approach to investment by invitation which was the reason why you started getting your national development corporations, your industrial development corporations and those other generic models which were supposed to drive investment into these societies, into these economies. It was based on the Sir Arthur Lewis recognition that you needed to bring foreign capital into the economy so that your people could have access to it, could have ownership of it and eventually could be masters of it so that their wealth and their income would continue to rise and expand out of the subsistence agriculture into more middle income and eventually up into higher income. Unfortunately we have lost track of that synergy between the land, the labor, the capital. We have lost track of the need to add the investment capital to the domestic labor and hold on to the land and so some of the models that we are pursuing have not produced the kind of income and wealth for our own people that Sir Arthur Lewis model would have suggested which is to say that we spend quite a lot of time and money and energy encouraging and subsidizing what is not so much investment but really extractive capital industry and it means that our own people remain in the position of supplying largely unskilled, largely underpaid labor to an economic formula which is not really driving their wealth and their incomes upward over the life cycle. So you are actually in a stage now of our development where the incidence of poverty is rising, our public goods like health, education, security, environment etc, basic infrastructure is not really thriving and the overall economic growth profile which is the rate at which the economy is growing is not keeping up with development country average. So the time really has come and has passed and hopefully will come again for us to really re-examine the development model that we are rather unconsciously pursuing and which really is not generating the kind of results that we should be seeing. It's very easy to substantiate that with evidence, if you look at the growth rates over the last three decades they have not been impressive, they have not kept track with developing country averages and although we are spending upwards of 1.6-1.7 billion annually on the government budget, we are not seeing the results in the rank and file everyday lives of solutions. We continue to see dominant industries grow without commensurate improvement in employment for example or in wages and we are not generally seeing the skills level within the economy increasing as Sir Arthur Lewis had contemplated that you would have untrained labor, you would add capital to it and that untrained labor would become progressively more efficient, more productive, higher earning and therefore you would have an accumulation of wealth in the domestic population. We are not seeing that and it is time I think for us to really pull the intellectual capacity of the region together and ask ourselves whether the development model conscious or unconscious, actual, virtual or assumed is actually producing a designated deliverable. What is our current economic trajectory? How does it keep us out of poverty, ignorance and disease? How does it promote savings? How does it increase average household earnings and the stability that translates into the kind of social advancement that Sir Arthur would have wanted these societies to have achieved by now? That conversation needs to happen at the highest possible levels and also to at a level that really involves rank and file citizens in the realization of their dreams for themselves and for their families, for their children and for their communities. The 2023 Nova Lawrence Festival theme is celebrating excellence, nurturing our creativity, consolidating our legacy. It's the 30th year of celebrating St. Lucia's Nova Lawrence. If you've never attended an event, don't you think it's time that you should? And if you're watching after the festival, visit the Facebook page at Nova Lawrence Festival St. Lucia to follow upcoming events. I'm Delia Delore. Goodbye.