In my column ‘Stop comparing Jamaica with Singapore’, published in the Jamaica Observer on August 2, 2022, I sought to make the simple case that Jamaicans should not be too harsh on themselves by comparing Jamaica’s economic achievements with those of Singapore, an outlier.

Contrary to the popular narrative, there is no evidence of former Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Kuan Yew expressing any modicum of praise for Jamaica’s economic achievements in the immediate post-Independence period. Instead, he was disrespectful to all Jamaicans. Yet, it seems to me, he is highly revered here to the point that it would not be surprising to one day pass a bust of him keeping Nanny and the boys company down at Emancipation Park.

This is what he had to say about Jamaica and Jamaicans: “[H]is [Michael Manley] country was a well-endowed island of 2,000 square miles with several mountains in the centre, where coffee and other subtropical crops were grown. They had beautiful holiday resorts built by Americans as winter homes. Theirs was a relaxed culture. The people were full of song and dance, spoke eloquently, danced vigorously, and drank copiously. Hard work they had left behind with slavery.” This is not an uncommon narrative used by some commentators to mischaracterise Africans and people of African descent the world over.

The issues facing Jamaica are varied and deep and require a collective sense of urgency and effort to fix. It will take a social contract to re-engineer the socio-economic landscape. It will require much effort, which many are not willing to make when prosperity awaits on the daily flights out of Kingston to Miami, Atlanta, and New York. Perhaps information and communication technology will allow for the best of both worlds in which the Jamaican Diaspora provides greater contributions, beyond remittances, for the upliftment of Jamaica. To seek better opportunities is understandable. People will gravitate to societies which provide hope and whose systems they perceive as trustworthy.

There is a perception that Jamaica is a society with low levels of trust. There is a lack of trust of those in authority and lack of trust between ordinary people. In such an environment, productivity is likely to be low. Lawrence Powell (lead researcher), Paul Bourne, and Lloyd Waller in their 2006 ‘Leadership and Governance Survey’ found low levels of trust among Jamaicans. For example, about 60 per cent of respondents agreed that most people are not essentially good and cannot be trusted.

On the vexing issue of poor educational outcomes, it will take a village to correct same. Teachers cannot and have never done it alone. No child excels without the strong input of parents, the extended family, or the community. Every child must be nurtured in an environment where learning is taking place in various forms for most of the day, including after school. Sadly, many children are left to parent themselves or their caregivers do not have the resources to cater to their learning needs.

Daily, our teachers are faced with students screaming for help; sometimes their screams are expressed violently. Our teachers don’t only teach, they perform the roles of parent, nurse, security guard, pastor, entertainer, psychologist, administrator, etc. And when the school day ends, their work does not stay at school, their work travels home with them. I imagine ministers of government work hard too; the difference is, they are better compensated. Therefore, and contrary to the pontifications of some, Jamaican teachers deserve every single holiday they receive, and if they choose to moonlight in the US during the summer months, so be it.

I now return to the substantive issue of this piece. Instead of using an outlier it is better to compare Jamaica with a country such as Barbados. Comparing Barbados with Jamaica is not new. Jamaican academics — Orlando Patterson and Peter Blair Henry — have compared the divergent economic achievements of Barbados and Jamaica. Patterson’s comparison can be found in the first chapter of his book The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament. Henry’s article ‘Institutions vs Policies: A Tale of Two Islands’ was co-authored with Conrad Miller. While Michael DaCosta’s 2007 article ‘Colonial Origins, Institutions and Economic Performance in the Caribbean: Guyana and Barbados’ compares Barbados with Guyana, in some respects it also provides a comparison of Barbados and Jamaica.

The arguments put forward by DaCosta and Patterson are similar as they focus on geography, history, and institutions as the fundamental causes for Barbados’s success in comparison to the performance of Guyana and Jamaica. Henry, on the other hand, situates Jamaica’s underdevelopment within the context of poor policy choices, while Patterson acknowledges the immediate impact of poor policies but does not see them as fundamental causes of Jamaica’s underdevelopment.

Henry argues that since Barbados and Jamaica share a similar colonial history and would have inherited similar British institutions, including the legal framework, we must look at other factors, such as poor macroeconomic policies, to explain the divergent economic outcomes of the two countries. DaCosta and Patterson would argue that the real contexts of those institutions differed. Barbados (“Little England”) was akin to a settler colony, where the white planter was happy to spend much time. But this was not the case in Jamaica. Barbados is small (430 square kilometres) and relatively flat and could be easily protected, while Jamaica is about 26 times (10,991 square kilometres) the size of Barbados and the terrain more varied. Jamaica was therefore harder to protect, harder to manage, harder to maintain critical infrastructure, to name a few. The reader is encouraged to read Patterson’s work, which explores in greater detail many more differences between the two islands, differences which have long placed Barbados on a better path to economic development.

Poor policy choices are not the fundamental reasons for Jamaica’s underdevelopment; poor policy choices are proximate causes, immediate causes. The fundamental causes, the deeper causes, of Jamaica’s underdevelopment are to be found in geography, history, and institutions. As one popular quip goes, Is Manley’s Fault (IMF). In my view, the die was cast long before Manley’s policies.

Dr Samuel Braithwaite is a lecturer in the Department of Economics at The University of the West Indies, Mona. Send comments to the Jamaica Observer or braithwaitesamuel@gmail.com.