NGA meetings underway in Washington

by Sabrina Salas Matanane

Guam - Governor Eddie Calvo is in the nation's capitol attending the National Governors Association's Winter Meeting focused on growing state economies. During the opening plenary session, chairman and CEO of Gallup Jim Clifton spoke on that very issue. Gallup is a leader in organizational consulting and public opinion research. During the session Clifton spoke about the nation's 6 million small businesses and how they're not thinking about how they can hire, instead they're trying to cut people.

Clifton said small businesses are talking about how they can create a customer and that out of the 6 million businesses only 25 percent are trying to grow or trying to go global like Facebook or Groupon.  He adds those are the types of businesses that we need to support as there's $3 billion in gross domestic product there.

Calvo said, "If we're driven by small business how do you get more customers and it's not just customer from Albany or a customer from Oklahoma, how do you get that small business entrepreneur who doesn't have much regulation to other customers in this global economy?" Clifton noted, "I understand your question one thing is one of the reasons we have the slowdown is that we're not selling stuff fast enough to each other so we do need more competition, but you're right that won't take us to the great big GDP numbers that we need to continue the relationship that we have now with the rest of the world.

"And so what that gets you too and remember we do need that competition we do need everyone, so we can get another 7 percent out of that but the big answer is export."