JAMAICA’S macroeconomic profile presents a structural paradox. Employment is at its highest, yet wages and productivity remain low; inflation on target, yet general prices are perceived to be high; interest rates are low, yet firms cannot access capital; and many new businesses open, yet a large percentage of them fail early. The general economic foundation appears stable, which is necessary but not sufficient for growth and development.

Jamaica’s macroeconomic puzzle is not difficult to diagnose but has been challenging to remedy and redirect. The fundamental problem is that Jamaica produces too little of what it needs to consume, build, trade and grow. This is the central constraint. Jamaica does not lack workers; it lacks organised production and vertical productive diversification. There is too much economic activity absorbing the nation’s effort without building skills, raising output, or generating durable value.

This reality is rooted in history. There was a time when Jamaica ranked among the most economically significant territories in the Atlantic world. Port Royal was one of the most important trading hubs in the 17th century because of the volume of goods and wealth transiting through it. Jamaica’s geographic position, at the intersection of major sea routes linking Europe, North America, and Latin America, made it a logistics centre long before logistics became a formal discipline. That geographic advantage has not changed. What has changed is how the economy is organised around it.

Colonial Jamaica, “the Pearl of the Antilles” that made England wealthy, was built on scale. Sugar, cotton, and other export crops were produced through large, coordinated systems. Production was organised, infrastructure was shared, logistics were central, and learning occurred across large units. The system was morally unforgivable, but economically comprehensible. Taking away the brutality, there was a clear economic logic to learn: location, scale and coordination are necessary conditions to accumulate wealth through expanding output.

After emancipation, that logic collapsed and a new economic system emerged. Jamaican minds rejected exploitation. Ownership became synonymous with freedom, and the large-scale mono-crop plantation system was replaced by small, multi-crop subsistence farming, each producing a variety of crops in small quantities. Each plot became personal, each decision individual, each output detached from a wider national production objective. The economy became full of motion, but short on momentum.

This fragmentation was reinforced by the psychological legacy of the plantation system. For generations, work was inseparable from coercion and subordination. Labour was not experienced as a pathway to advancement, but as an obligation imposed within a rigid hierarchy. In the post-emancipation period this shaped economic behaviour in subtle but enduring ways. Autonomy became a form of security. “Working for oneself,” even at subsistence scale, was often preferred to participation in larger coordinated enterprises, which could resemble earlier forms of dependence.

This produced structural consequences. Economic activity became dominated by small, owner-operated ventures optimised for income stability rather than scale expansion. Control was prioritised over growth. Many firms remained intentionally small, even when opportunities existed to integrate into larger productive systems. The result was not a lack of entrepreneurial ability, but the absence of aggregation. Entrepreneurship became a mechanism of survival rather than a platform for compounding productivity.

Jamaica’s labour productivity (output per worker) has been persistently below most of its peers in the Caribbean and the average for upper- to -middle-income countries, even after years of policy reforms. While global productivity in manufacturing and services expanded sharply over the last two decades, Jamaica’s remained relatively flat, reflecting a deeper structural problem beyond macro policy.

Prosperity does not emerge from fragmented effort. No country becomes wealthy through isolated endeavour, however sincere. Scale does not imply exploitation; it implies cooperation. Ownership does not require isolation; it requires structure. Modern wealth is built through organised production, shared infrastructure, technical mastery, and logistics — not through disconnected hustle.

This is where China’s experience becomes instructive, not as a model to copy but as a principle to understand. China did not leave production to drift. It did not assume that markets alone would align private incentives with national outcomes. Instead, it articulated long-term productive goals and organised the economy business, technology, logistics, agriculture, finance, labour, and the State around them. Production was intentional. Coordination was deliberate. When China decided to build dominance in electric vehicles, technology, or manufacturing, it did not merely signal ambition. It aligned finance, infrastructure, land use, research, provincial specialisation, and export strategy. Provinces were not left to do everything; they were assigned roles. Supply chains were mapped. Learning was cumulative. Firms pursued profit, but within a framework that rewarded alignment with national productive goals.

The results are measurable. China’s share of global manufacturing output expanded from less than 10 per cent in 2000 to around 30 per cent by the early 2020s, illustrating how coordinated industrial strategy can reshape comparative advantage and global supply chains. Productive capacity grew not by chance, but through calibrated ambition. This was not central planning in caricature. It was coordinated capitalism with direction. Jamaica, by contrast, talks about sectors without organising them. Tourism, agriculture, BPO, finance, logistics are named but not integrated. Regions are labelled but not connected. St Elizabeth is said to be agricultural, Montego Bay tourism-based, Kingston financial, but the processing, logistics, skills pipelines, financing structures, and infrastructure that would make those designations productive at scale are weak or absent.

Specialisation without coordination is not strategy; it is description. What Jamaica lacks is an overarching productive framework, one that answers basic questions with clarity: What does each parish/town produce at scale? How does that production move? Who processes it? Who finances it? Where are skills built? How do firms plug into something larger than themselves? Without this, businesses operate independently, agriculture remains fragmented, finance floats above production, and parishes compete rather than complement.

China’s lesson is not about size, ideology, or control. It is about coherence. Development accelerates when private effort is pulled into a shared national direction, when learning is pooled, coordination is rewarded, and execution compounds over time. Jamaica needs to learn and implement what China insisted upon: organisation. A productive vision that is spatially grounded, sectorally integrated, and relentlessly executed — irrespective of which Government is in power. Jamaica needs rules to govern its growth and developmental trajectory, just as it has fiscal rules.

The country’s geography still offers advantage. Its people still possess capacity. All that is needed is for the country to organise production at scale, elevate technical mastery, rebuild collective/cooperative systems, and align effort with output. Economic development is not a descriptive condition — it is the result of deliberate, coordinated action.

Andre Haughton is a professor of economics at The University of the West Indies (The UWI), Mona, specialising in international finance, global political economy, the structural challenges facing developing economies, development in small states.