- REUTERS
Costa Rica's President Abel Pacheco (right) shakes hands with Galician President Emilio Pérez Touriño before their private meeting in Santiago de Compostela, in northern Spain last month.
A group of the island's leading economists and social scientists has come together to produce this august series. The well-considered views reflect careful and in-depth analyses of the state of the Jamaican economy as well as identify trends and ideas which will take us into the future.
EVERYONE PRETTY much agrees that the Jamaican economy has underperformed over the last several decades, even without having precise measures of that underperformance at hand. Often, we find that 'hard data' contradict our casual impressions, but not in this case. The hard data actually corroborate the widely-held view that the Jamaican economy has done poorly, both absolutely and relatively.
Jamaica's level of production per person - a common measure of economic performance - was 23 per cent lower last year than it was in 1972. Over a span of more than three decades, we have managed to make ourselves worse off by nearly a quarter. Taking a slightly longer time span, as a result of impressive but not outstanding growth in the 1960s, we are around 15 per cent wealthier than we were at independence, which only shows that we have not, in those last 30 years, managed to undo all of the apparent gains of the first decade of independence.
FEW ECONOMIES WORSE THAN JAMAICA'S
While Jamaica has been having a rough time of it, the rest of the world has marched on impressively, especially in the last 15 years when growth rates around the world have been higher than in previous decades. This generally good performance in the rest of the world includes many economies that are classified as developing, many that are small, many that are oil dependent, and quite a number that are all three. Examples can be found of economies that have done worse than Jamaica over relatively small periods, but few, perhaps none, can be found of economies that have done worse over the last 30 years.
Of course, it is often argued that the journey of a small, oil-importing, resource-dependent, debt-ridden, developing economy is a challenging one to begin with. The volatility of world commodity markets and the fickleness of tourism earnings do impart a measure of insecurity to Jamaica's economy. Right now we are only too painfully aware of the adverse effect of sudden and sharp increases in the price of energy - not for the first time in our economic history - and small economies have a unique vulnerability in a rapidly-evolving globalised world.
Notwithstanding a measure of truth in all those claims, none of them adequately, or even partially, explains the underperformance of the Jamaican economy.
Jamaica's economy entered its long-term stagnation in the 1970s, despite world alumina prices tripling during the course of that decade. While world oil prices jumped twice in the 1970s, it gradually fell, relative to other commodities and products over the course of the ensuing 20 years, to end up, by the late 90s, at a lower relative level than it attained in the early 70s.]
International interest rates have been on a downward trend for the last 25 years and cannot, therefore, be held accountable for the stagnation of this indebted country. No, none of the international factors that impact Jamaica's economy seem to be correlated with its poor performance.
SAME GLOBAL CONDITIONS
Besides, the other small, oil-dependent, developing economies in the region and in the world, face the same global conditions, and, to a country, they have done better than Jamaica. While Jamaica's per capita GDP is only 15 to 30 per cent - depending on your method of measurement - higher than in 1962, our neighbours, facing similar external forces, have fared much better. Costa Ricans are more than 70 per cent wealthier than they were when Jamaica gained independence. Income levels in Trinidad and Tobago have more than doubled, albeit they are an oil producer, but Panama, an oil importer, has thrived equally well. The Dominican Republic has almost tripled in per capita income while the Bajans are more than four times better off. And these outcomes are not even near to those of the true stars of small-economy development such as Botswana, Hong Kong, and Singapore, all of whom have managed to increase their per capita income levels more than seven-fold over the last 40 years.
So, Jamaicans cannot look to the buffeting of world commodity prices or the burden of international interest rates or any other global development to account for their poor economic outcomes relative to other small, equally vulnerable, developing economies. For that failure, Jamaicans have no choice but to take responsibility.
