Today Newspaper St. Maarten

Not an outline of the government’s agenda for the coming year, but a focus on policy challenges and opportunities. That was, by necessity, the focus of the governor’s address at the opening of the parliamentary year.

This way, the address remained rather neutral and maybe that is as it should be, coming from the governor. There is some reason for optimism with economic growth expected to be 2 percent and a healthy debt to GDP ratio.

The challenges for ordinary citizens remain the same though. Poverty seems to be here to stay, education and tax collection need a lot of attention.

These are not new issues, but they touch the core of our community on many levels. Like all of its predecessors, the new government has a lot of work to do. How decisive the new team will be, ought to become clear within the first hundred days of its reign.

We’d say: tackle tax reform in a hurry (but not hurried) and everything else will flow from there.

Editorial: Government's policy challenges and opportunities by admin