Economist: Focus on building local market

 SMALL to medium enterprises (SME) are the roots from which an economy can grow, a United States based economist Dr David Martin said.

Addressing the East New Britain SME summit last Friday, Martin encouraged the economic sector in the province to make it their business to create local markets.

He said a country like PNG needs to stop listening to what outsiders want and start looking at what it has and how much it can generate locally for internal consumption, and not so much for exportation.

“We are not thinking about SME formation, we are thinking about outsiders and not creating value from within,” Martin said. “That is a critical failure because if you build industries that are based entirely on a reliance from outside, you are always going to be subject to outsiders’ economic, health and illness.”

He said there needs to be local demand for goods and services so the markets had a chain production that could emerge for locally cash crops.

He told SMEs and technical officers from the provincial administration’s economic sector that PNG should not be controlled by the demand from the world markets but it should be creating markets for services and goods that are not available in the world.

He urged SMEs in the province to be innovative and creative in developing their products and in their marketing approach to generate demand for the products internally and boost trade and grow the local economy.

Martin said that ENB entrepreneurs should be innovative and think outside the box while they utilise locally available resources to set up markets for goods that could have a wider demand not just domestically but internationally.