The Government deserves some credit for holding a summit on Bermuda’s sky-high cost of living.

That this is a major challenge for the Government and the public alike is inarguable. Bermuda has tended over the years to accept high prices as inevitable and to believe that continued economic growth would make it tolerable. Those days, perhaps equally inevitably, are over.

Many Bermudians, young and old, are voting with their feet and leaving the island. At the same time, the cost of living and doing business in Bermuda is a significant hurdle for the economy and for attracting international business to the island.

Several of the panels reported on by The Royal Gazette helped to inform the public about the reasons for high costs — especially of food and electricity — and there were some insights into how the rate of cost increases, if not actual prices, can be reduced.

But, as opposition MP Michael Fahy noted, there was not a great deal that was actually new. It is interesting and important to understand that a fruit grown in California must pass through many hands — each adding to its cost — before it reaches a Bermuda supermarket shelf. But this should not come as a surprise.

Similarly, the main debate on electricity devolved into the idea that a different form of ownership might reduce prices if the profit motive was reduced. But it did not seem to go much further in explaining why Bermuda has the dubious distinction of being a world leader in the cost of power generation.

Mr Fahy has argued that the major problem for Bermuda is its declining population and lack of scale. There is some merit in this, although it is not the sole answer and Mr Fahy, who has past experience in this area, should know better than anyone that his solution — granting status to long-term residents as an incentive to population growth — remains a political third rail.

Nonetheless, it is true that if Bermuda’s population was larger, this would help to reduce the cost of some goods.

Buyers of large amounts of goods can negotiate volume discounts which are not available to others. A US giant such as Walmart can negotiate a much lower wholesale price for a widget when it is buying millions than a mom-and-pop hardware store can when it is buying hundreds. So there would be some benefits to importers if the population was, for argument’s sake, 10 per cent higher than it is today.

But scale — however it is achieved — can be only part of the solution.

Locally, the electricity producer Belco’s pricing is basically divided into three parts: fixed costs that do not change very much, regardless of how much power is generated; usage costs which go up as more power is used and which are passed on to the consumer; and fuel costs, over which Belco has little control. Of those three, if Bermuda had a larger population, its fixed costs could be spread across more people, resulting in a lower price for that segment of its costs. But that deals with only one part of the cost of electricity. The reduction is likely to be limited as things stand.

The great hope with a power supplier is that alternative energy from sun or wind, which Bermuda has in good supply, should be cheaper than fossil fuels in the long term, and would also mean that the suppliers of the energy would be local. However, creating a sustainable energy sector seems some years away.

As for Mr Fahy’s central point, a larger population would have some impact on energy prices, but there are more factors at work than economies of scale.

The problem is multifaceted and requires multifaceted answers. One answer is customs duty, which cost importers and residents $225 million in the past fiscal year, although it included a welcome reduction in the duty on fuel used for generating electricity.

While governments like tariffs because they are relatively easy and cost-efficient to collect, it goes directly to prices and is a regressive tax — affecting the less well-off much more than the wealthy.

To date, the present government has made some reduction in duties — such as the fuel tax — but in general, it continues to impact heavily on prices. A reforming government would look to take advantage of the imposition of the corporate income tax to make substantial reductions in tariffs, rather than nibbling around the edges of the problem.

As discussed in a previous editorial, housing costs remain among the highest in the world. While this newspaper called for a new commission on housing to delve into the problem, it seems obvious that increasing the supply of housing, especially through the provision of lower-cost homes using new technologies on publicly owned brownfield land, would both increase supply and reduce the cost of construction. To prevent the state from having to borrow or tax money for these projects, they could be public-private partnerships, with the Government providing the land.

These are just some of the solutions that could be applied to slowing the rise in living costs in Bermuda.

At least Mr Fahy has some ideas. Apart from David Burt, the Premier, rejecting out of hand the idea of status for long-term residents, the Government came up with precious little.

Alexa Lightbourne, the Minister of Home Affairs, declared the summit a success, but gave little detail on what she said were ideas from industry for reducing costs. These, the minister said, would be included in a forthcoming report.

It can’t come soon enough.