DAN Blog

My first blog:  Visiting Jamaica from London – on business – but it’s Friday afternoon, early evening the week-end is upon us.

For most Kingstonians and other Jamaicans, it’s time to temporarily forget their economic worries left behind by Dr.Omar Davies  the Minister of Finance who is off to the IMF/World Bank meeting in Singapore. Unfortunately he will not have taken the economic mess he has created, instead he will temporarily experience the miracle of Singapore. Dr.Davies will be ensconsed in one of the Island state’s luxurious hotels, oblivious of the fact, or conveniently forgetting that in 1962 Jamaica had both a higher GNP and faster growth rate than Singapore. Today Jamaicas’s under US$3,000.00 per capita income is roughly 10% of Singapore’s.

Maybe it’s unfare to blame Dr. Davies alone for the economic mess in which this island paradise finds itself, after all 60% of the university educated Jamaicans have migrated to London, New York, Toronto, Miami, Atlanta and elswhere, yours truly among them.

Which came first though, the chicken or the egg?,did the educated elite leave and caused the mess, or did the ceonomic mess caused the brain drain?

Monday I will share my thoughts on the matter, what do you think??

Have a great week-end wherever you are, hope its not Baghdad, Kabul,Dahfur or Zimbzbwe.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 15th, 2006 at 11:46 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.