After returning to Venice, Italy, from his travels to China in 1295, Marco Polo set down his encounters in a book, The Description of the World that for years, enthralled parochial Europeans.

He told them of Cambaluc (modern Beijing), a city with magnificent palaces and wide highways; of Japan, where the people were civilised, well-favoured and independent; of ships larger and better con-structed than anything they had ever seen; of "a kind of black stone, which is dug out of the mountain like any other kind of stone and burns like wood".

To many of Marco Polo's contemporaries, his book was nothing more than hyperbole, an exquisite exaggeration from a man whose long travels might have caused sea water to get in his brains.

Yet, for generations, it inspired Europeans to seek wider horizons and grasp the idea that life could be better than what it was. I am no Marco Polo, but my travels throughout the Caribbean have caused me to compare, as he did, the realities of my own home, with what exists beyond its borders.

'Leave Island Any Time'

Years ago, a friend explained that LIAT, despite what it has been dubbed officially, actually means "Leave Island Any Time". My experience attests totally to this. Recently, LIAT cancelled my flight from St Kitts to Antigua and I had to be re-routed through St Maarten to get a connecting flight to Kingston. In St Maarten, immigration officers detained me for more than two hours because they wanted to see an air ticket to prove that I would be leaving the next day.

When Air Jamaica arrives in Nassau, Bahamas, Jamaicans are directed to a special line where the interrogation is more austere and scrutiny more intense. In Trinidad, immigration officers ask Jamaicans more questions than their counterparts in the US. It is clear that there is the belief, in all of these countries, that the average Jamaican wants to flee his own country, and this represents a threat to the economic health and possibly the social stability of their country. And maybe they have good reasons to think so.

There seems to be a universal law which propels humanity to seek to leave life materially better than how he entered it. Historically, when the opportunities for progress are scarce, Jamaicans have never been shy to travel. In Cuba, Panama and Venezuela today, you will find the grandchildren of Jamaican migrants whose quest for a better life during the early decades of the 20th century sent them into sugar plantations and construction projects in these countries. In the post-war reconstruction period, thousands of Jamaicans migrated to Britain to work in factories. Every Jamaican has at least one cousin in North America. It is, therefore, not surprising that approximately five per cent of the 19.5 million people living in New York are Jamaicans.

Traditionally, Jamaicans have never been excited about migrating to the English-speaking Caribbean. In fact, when a Jamaican says he is "going abroad", he means North America or Britain - never Trinidad, Bahamas or St Kitts. These countries would be referred to as "small islands". But things are now changing; Jamaicans are less selective.

Over the last five years, the Jamaican economy has crawled at an average rate of growth of 1.4 per cent, which compares with 7.3 per cent in Trinidad and Tobago, 5.1 per cent in St Kitts and Nevis, and 2.9 per cent in Guyana. Just about everywhere else in the English-speaking Caribbean seems to be doing better than Jamaica now.

Certainly, this is the opposite of how it was in the 1960s. Former Prime Minister Sir Alexander Bustamante's anti-Federation stance in 1962 was centred on the argument that the relative under-developed state of the other nine Caribbean islands in the proposed Federation would be a burden on the Jamaican economy.

So important was Jamaica to the Federation that Trinidad's Eric Williams read tersely the eulogy for the West Indies Federation, "one from 10 is not nine, but zero". Thus, the idea of regional political union was buried. Paradoxically, in the new attempt to deepen regional integration, Jamaica is now sometimes perceived as a burden.

Jamaica has gone backwards, and this is not because there has been no growth. But rather, economic growth has been so slow that all the other countries in the Caribbean have either rushed past us, or are on the verge of doing so. If Jamaica had grown at a rate of three per cent annually since Independence, the economy would be twice the size it now is. We should never forget that ultimately, backwardness is relative.

Inward journey

Yet, for all of the suspicion surrounding the arrival of Jamaicans in St Maarten, The Bahamas and Trinidad, culturally, Jamaica remains a powerful force - reggae music abounds. The taxi driver in Belize knows everything about the 1988 hurricane because of Lovingdeer's song Wild Gilbert. Recently, while Jamaican media commentators debated the virtue, or the absence thereof, of "daggering", I saw high school children in a motorcade in Belize City vigorously thrusting their pelvises to some heavy Jamaican dancehall rhythms. This reflects the duality of the Jamaican character in the region - he is scorned because of the economy, and at the same time embraced because of his culture.

It is not easy, for all is not lost. Good leadership can still transform the economic fortunes of the country.

Marco Polo inspired his countrymen to make an outward journey, I encourage mine to take an inward journey and find wider economic horizons. This is where the revolution must begin.

Cedric Wilson is an economist who specialises in market regulations. He may be contacted at conoswil@hotmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com.