From State to Markets : Journey of the Jamaican Economy
Titled From State to Markets: Journey of the Jamaican Economy, the massive tome of over 900-plus pages which has been in preparation for over 10 years, is the work of Dr Cezley Sampson who acted as advisor and for an extended period, presided over modernisation of the Jamaican public sector under no fewer than four prime ministers and five portfolio ministers, across both sides of the political divide. Dr Sampson’s credentials are further enhanced by the fact that he is the person who was responsible for the establishment of the Mona School of Business in 1990, serving as its first Executive Director.
The book provides a sweeping history of the country’s economic experience of what can be described as the ‘socialist economic adventure’ of the 1970s and its replacement by the takeover of Jamaica’s economic policymaking into a forcible clientelist relationship with the International Financial Institutions of the 1980s and beyond, including a comprehensive and up-to-date work on the development of the modern economy from independence to the present. This journey is described in magisterial style going back to its pre-independence antecedents of 300 years of British Colonial rule, characterised by a dominant sugar monoculture, monopolistic control of essential services and industries, dependence on imperial trading preferences and underdeveloped Public Service, neglectful of the rural poor in particular.
Among the book’s unique features is a rare focus on public institutional development that led to wholesale privatisation of public enterprises and the structural transformation of the civil service. The highlight of this change was a new emphasis on service delivery in the form of ‘executive agencies’, whereby the people of Jamaica have come to be seen as clients for whom the government and its employees are obliged to provide responsive services and not merely seen as burdensome taxpayers.
Jamaicans need to understand the history of our society and where we are coming from to be able to determine the future direction of the country. Unfortunately, Jamaican history has, until recently, been largely written by outsiders and/or by a small white elite establishment that considered most Africans and African Jamaicans as naturally inferior.
This book has been written and is being published in Jamaica’s 61st year of nationhood for all Jamaicans at home and in its far-flung diaspora. It provides an account of Jamaica’s early economic history from Spanish and British colonisation through the period of enslavement up to its abolition. It then traces the development of the peasant community and the smallholder economy which, for almost 150 years after 1838, formed the backbone of the domestic economy and the role of the middle class of predominantly black and brown Jamaicans in pushing for political representation and self-government after the end of the Second World War and finally for independence in 1962.
It also traces the development of the public sector and public enterprises and examines how the legacy of a rigid class structure hindered the development of African Jamaicans by designating ‘blackness’ and cultural norms associated with Africa as being undesirable, while establishing ‘whiteness’ and European behaviour patterns and ideas as desirable cultural values to be emulated. It was not until the advent of black nationalist Marcus Mosiah Garvey with his message of black pride, radical movements like Rastafarianism and the cultural influence of the Hon. Louise Bennett, along with the popular global music of Hon. Bob Marley that Jamaicans began to shake off that legacy and create national institutions that are reflective of their dominant culture. And with the rise of increasing numbers of Black people receiving higher education since 1980, African Jamaican society can now be said to be truly multi-cultural, with Blackness a desirable feature at long last.
It is against this socio-cultural background that the economic development of the country, the establishment and evolution of its public sector and public enterprises and the economic and public policies instituted throughout the various stages of the history, are described, and analysed. While there has been much discussion, debate, and published material on the performance of the Jamaican economy since 1962, there has been little focus on the economic management experiences of the two competing political administrations, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the Peoples National Party (PNP), particularly in relation to institutional, regulatory, and industrial structural changes of the economy as it relates to each political period. In that regard Dr Sampson has set out to describe objectively and dispassionately, what he considers to be the pivotal economic and developmental policies that have been instituted over the period, culminating in the adoption of a market economy in the 1980s, with the attendant and requisite institutions and regulatory and competition regimes.
Both political parties, while in government have had to contend with external economic shocks, ranging from the oil crisis of the 1970s, frequent natural disasters, structural adjustment, and economic stabilisation policies of the 1980 and 1990s; dictates of the so-called Washington Consensus Group, led by the IMF and the World Bank. Like all other periods throughout the country’s history, it is the majority of the African Jamaican people who have had to bear the brunt of bitter IMF prescription, experienced in the ruination of the agrarian sector and destruction of the rural economy and its peasant smallholder communities.
No comparable single body of work exists that describes the development of Jamaica’s public sector institutions, the regulatory framework within which they were developed and operate and the functions they have been designed to perform within an economy that has evolved from state control to a private sector-led market economy. Consequently, the process of liberalising the Jamaican economy and privatisation of its core economic and service sectors, requires an understanding of how the public sector and public enterprises operate, as well as details of the forces that influenced major sector liberalisation.
After four decades of structural adjustment, and especially since 2015 there have been steep changes in the level of inflation and unemployment, both declining to below single digit numbers, decline in debt to GDP to under 100 %, and a semblance of growth seemed to have returned. The IMF would want us to believe that the required structural changes have at last taken place and that Jamaica is on its way to another period of sustained growth. Dr Sampson believes however that the jury is still out. Most importantly the problem of equitable distribution of outcome of economic growth and the creation of a job producing economy is still to be addressed. Just as important is the worrying development of the structural changes in the population. Jamaica has been exporting its child bearing female population:15 to 45 years of age, the result is that the reproduction rate has declined from 2.1 per child bearing female, a level needed to sustain the existing population to 1.8 per child bearing female in 2022; a declining population.
Dr Sampson also goes into considerable detail to trace the process of Divestment that began under the regime of Prime Minister Edward Seaga and continued in the second coming of Michael Manley. The transition from state ownership and control to the private sector blossomed fully under the long tenure of P.J. Patterson, commencing in the 1990s, with a subtle change from ‘Divestment’ to ‘Privatisation’ within an overall policy of liberalisation of the economy. How, why and the process by which six core sectors (agriculture-banana and sugar; the airports (airline and airports; finance-NCB, energy-JPSCo,telecommunications-C&W Limited Jamaica, and road infrastructure-urban transport and highways) came to be privatised, are a revealing aspect of the book.
The publication of From State to Markets Journey of the Jamaican Economy is timely. The case studies of the privatised sectors provide the nation with a background history and context for several current issues relating to some of those sectors. Dr Sampson’s case study of the liberalisation of the Finance sector and in particular the privatisation of National Commercial Bank is a case in point. Similarly, the case study of the privatisation of the country’s two international airports has also assumed greater relevance because of recent events at the privately operated Montego Bay Airport, as are the problems surrounding the construction of the South Coast Highway and continuing hiccups in the implementation of the Public Sector Modernisation Programme.
An outstanding feature of this work is the range of reference material provided and have been gleaned from published works by the country’s leading economists and historians ,as well as reports from State agencies Ministry Papers and other official documents , supplemented by numerous maps, tables, graphs and other statistical material.
The book received the support of several public and private sector entities that ‘adopted and sponsored’ selected chapters in an innovative approach by the publishers. It was formally launched on publication date September 12, at a function jointly hosted by the publishers and the Mona School of Business and Management at the Regional Headquarters of the University of the West Indies.