PayPulse report does not take many things into consideration – Gonsalves

Minister of Finance Camillo Gonsalves says a recent report that puts St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) as having the lowest salaries in the region, does not take a lot of things into consideration.

“It’s incredible to me that there is so much social media commentary and uninformed political chatter about a report that no one seems to have actually read,” Gonsalves told SEARCHLIGHT on Wednesday.

Last month, the results of the Pay Pulse 2023 Caribbean Salary Survey painted a bleak picture of salary compensation in SVG, noting that out of the 15 countries surveyed, SVG ranked as the lowest-paying country in the region with 73.3 per cent of salaries falling below the regional average.

The second annual Caribbean salary report was conducted by the Caribbean Society for Human Resource Professionals (CSHRP) and officially released at a launch event at the National Export-Import Bank of Jamaica (EXIM Bank) in Jamaica on November 22.

Commenting on the report, Gonsalves said for one to read it, you have to be willing to pay US$500 to download it from the website of the Caribbean Society for Human Resource Professionals.

“However, the first 10 pages of the report are available online and from what I was able to glean from those 10 pages, it seems like the Caribbean Society for Human Resource Professionals surveyed an average of about five companies per Caribbean country regarding the salaries of 30 specific job titles.

“The report compiles reports of base pay, and I am not clear if it takes anything like tax rates, allowances, NIS deductions and the like into consideration,” the Finance Minister said.

He noted that the 30 jobs titles surveyed by the report are dominated by high end jobs, Chief Executive Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer, DevOps Engineer, Software Engineer, Financial Analyst and Auditor among others.

“Given the profile of the job titles surveyed, it’s hardly surprising that countries that are home to many large corporate headquarters would have higher base salaries in those fields than St Vincent and the Grenadines. Especially if the Caribbean Society for Human Resource Professionals only surveyed a couple of corporations in SVG.

“I could not tell if the survey discussed taxes and deductions. I do know, however, than many countries have far higher NIS/Social Security deductions and tax burdens than St Vincent and the Grenadines, while some have lower deductions. Some clarity on whether the survey was comparing net, take home pay, would’ve aided…,” Gonsalves told SEARCHLIGHT while noting that the survey does not take cost of living into account.

“As anyone knows, the cost of living from one country to the other varies widely – the cost of rent or property, transportation, food costs, utilities, customs duties, tariffs and the like. The critical question of how far your dollar goes in each country was not a subject of the survey,” Gonsalves said.

He added also that it is useful to look at the latest data from the World Bank on purchasing power parity.

“The purchasing power parity measures the absolute purchasing power of a dollar in different countries and reflects the rate at which the currency of one country would have to be converted into that of another country to buy the same amount of goods and services in each country.

“The World Bank measures the per capita income of each country in terms of purchasing power parity. Unlike the Caribbean Society for Human Resource Professionals’ report, the World Bank data is freely available online.

“What it shows is that St Vincent and the Grenadines smack in the middle of Caribbean countries for per capita income measured by purchasing power parity – behind such high-income countries like the Bahamas, Barbados and Trinidad, and right alongside our neighbours Saint Lucia and Grenada,” Gonsalves said.

He noted also that World Bank data shows that over the last 20 years, St Vincent and the Grenadines’ per capita income is among the fastest growing in the Caribbean.

“This is all publicly available data. Anyone can read it and analyse it. But maybe the truths contained in that data are inconvenient for those who seek to trumpet reports that they haven’t even read,” Gonsalves stressed.

He added that in his opinion, the report of the Caribbean Society for Human Resource Professionals is “very” useful for human resource professionals who are seeking to learn what the base salary is for various high-end corporate jobs across the region.

“That is its purpose. It is unfortunate that people are trying to make this narrowly-focused report a proxy for something else…,” Gonsalves commented.