September 2015 Issue Business View Caribbean

Business View Caribbean - September 2015 25 members and acting as the sector’s representative to the government and its regulatory agencies. Accord- ing to Pengelley, “The master plan is to promote local manufacturing wherever possible as a national priority – and to do that through collaboration with the govern- ment of Jamaica at whatever point in time.” From its beginnings, the JMA has worked with suc- cessive Jamaican administrations to help promulgate numerous legislative, regulatory, and tax policies and reforms, designed to help the country’s manufacturing industry prosper, while simultaneously advancing the overall health of the Jamaican economy. It is still one of the Association’s major functions. “The strength of the Association is actually the power of our lobby,” Pengelley maintains. “And the power of the lobby has come from influential membership but it also comes from a spirit of collaboration. The government has its own agenda and its own problems, so we have stood by its side to contribute and collaborate to make sure we get the right results for Jamaica, overall, but, cer- tainly, for our manufacturers.” A key achievement, according to Pengelley, was con- vincing the government not to tax inputs into the manufacturing process, but rather to levy a tax on the market side. He explains why: “Every time you drive up the cost of inputs, you drive up the cost at the very beginning of the process, so before you even convert that raw material into a product, you’re incurring high costs. And on an island where about 90 percent of our raw materials are imported, you’re paying for that way in advance of actually going through the conversion process.” In the late 1980s, with the help of JMA’s interven- – Ribbon Cutting: Expo 2014 is opened with Ribbon Cutting. (L-R Anthony Hylton, Minister of Investment, Industry and Commerce; Gary Sinclair, CEO of LIME [LIME is one of the island’s two major telecoms providers); Brian; Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller; Marjory Kennedy, President of the Jamaica Exporters’ Association