Dear Editor,
So many conversations about the condition of country Sint Maarten are based on comparisons with other “territories” or “countries”. Hardly ever does one see reference to the role that scale (size) plays in this comparison.
Every government has to collect revenues and has costs in executing its programmes. Developing country governments have relatively higher costs due to a less-developed civil service, less capitalization and inherited infrastructure. Developing countries must spend more in capital projects to make growth and higher standards of living possible. Sint Maarten suffers from all the above, but even more because of its small scale.
Let’s take the example of Parliament. Holland has a parliament of 150 seats. The population is 17.02 million. This means that the cost of one parliamentarian is borne by 113,300 of the residents. Here in Sint Maarten we have 15 Parliamentarians for 45,000 persons so the cost of one parliamentarian is borne by 3,000 people.
Now to be fair, we only have one level of government (no municipalities) so there is an extra cost for provincial and municipal government in Holland. But it will not correct the fact that each resident in Sint Maarten has to pay for the parliament function 38 times as much as the resident in Holland. It is also exacerbated by the fact that the Sint Maarten parliamentarian earns more than the Holland parliamentarian.
The parliament example is only one that stands out. If one takes many of the government bodies and allocates their cost on a per resident basis, you are likely to find their cost per beneficiary to be extremely high. This applies to entities whose services are of a general nature like the Council of Advice, the Audit Chamber, law writing costs, etc.
With other government services that address specific matters, the cost per resident should be more comparable but not the overhead cost. Whilst the cost of roads or social services should not vary much, the cost of supervision, R and D, systems upgrading, etc will be disproportionally high in a small political entity.
This is all not to say that small political entities are not viable. The example of Singapore is the obvious one. But small political entities need to be focused on how they can beat the economies of scale that large entities enjoy. The likelihood of failure is going to be high if there is the assumption that models can be imported without question from larger entities (like Holland) without regard for the financial and developmental consequences.
Robbie Ferron
