Does Ja keep missing the boat?

By John Rapley

In my last column, I wondered if Jamaica was determined to fail. As ever more countries raise their growth rates and catch up to the developed world, Jamaica remains a steadfast outlier, one of the relative handful of countries still falling behind. This is puzzling, because the country's obvious endowments should make it a development leader.

Few are the voices that maintain that Jamaica really has no problem. On the contrary, one of the country's greatest weaknesses now is the sort of fatalism that Jamaica will always, as the late Rex Nettleford used to say, find the problem to every solution.

While there have been some notable achievements since Independence - in particular, in its Human Development Index, the island punches above its economic weight - nonetheless, the country could be doing much better.

Peter Blair Henry's recent book, Turnaround, has stirred the debate once more. Back in the days when I was running the Caribbean Policy Research Institute, Peter and I were building a partnership between CaPRI and Stanford, where he was then based. We spent a lot of time talking about Jamaica's challenges and opportunities. Engaging, brilliant but humble, and always hopeful, Peter believed a more market-friendly approach would put Jamaica on the road to growth. And he was always quick to argue that the oft-cited handicaps to Jamaica's growth, like its small size, were actually strengths.

Jamaica's indigenous intellectual tradition has long been marked by the country's flirtation with dependency theory in the 1970s. The University of the West Indies' Social Sciences Faculty, where I worked before setting up CaPRI, was - and to some degree remains - its bastion. And the knee-jerk reaction of many Jamaican intellectuals to the suggestion that the free market will solve Jamaica's woes is to say, "Look around you." Three decades of structural adjustment and where have we got? What we need, such scholars tend to suggest, is to do what countries like Korea and Taiwan did: Implement a state-led development strategy.

I'll avoid the contentious debate between the Leftist scholars and neoclassical economists over whether Jamaica has ever actually implemented structural adjustment. The latter argue that Jamaica has, at most, offered the appearance of structural adjustment, while maintaining a paternalistic development model in which governing elites favour their political and business clients.

Asian model not for Ja

All I will say is that when I first landed on Jamaican shores two decades ago, I was a resolute exponent of the develop-mental state. Within the decade, while still singing the virtues of state-led development, I'd come to the conclusion that the model cannot work in Jamaica. Perhaps it could have, 40 or 50 years ago. But the requisite features of the developmental state are largely absent in our blessed island.

The success of the so-called Asian model does not actually show that more state equals more development. It's a good deal more complicated than that. In some Asian countries, like the Philippines, more state was disastrous. Korea's developmental state was managed by a technocratic elite, with a high degree of autonomy, who were sheltered from political meddling by a visionary political leadership. Free to implement long-term plans, they got into the business of picking winners - identifying those firms and subsectors they would nurture for growth.

But often overlooked is the fact that they also could be ruthless in throwing the losers into history's dustbin. This made them many enemies among those businesses which couldn't keep up, and it took courageous - and not always democratic - leadership to resist pressures to maintain the status quo.

Separating winners from losers in Jamaica? Don Wehby once joked to me that Jamaica's approach is to pick losers, then shower them with money in the hopes they become winners. Ask a local exponent of a state-led approach to suggest what firms or subsectors should go to the wall, and you'll likely encounter silence.

And yet, Jamaica's bureaucracy was once a bastion of professionalism and expertise. At one time, it probably had the skills needed to implement a state-led development programme successfully. Where did we go wrong?

I'll treat this topic in my next column.

John Rapley, a political economist at the University of Cambridge, is currently on a visiting professorship at Queen's University in Canada. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com and jr603@cam.ac.uk.