Conclusion

• Author: Lloyd G. Waller/Densil A. Williams/Omar E. Hawthorne/Donavon Johnson
• Profession: Head of the Department of Government at The University of the West Indies, Mona. His research focuses on research methodologies; governance and public policy; and digital transformation/Professor of International Business at the UWI/Lecturer of International Relations and a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Leadership and Governance at ...
• Pages: 95-105

Introduction

The study, on which this book is based, used the qualitative approach to

explore the experiences of US businesses. The unit of analysis included the

same items/factors used in the Doing Business report (DBR). More specically,

the study provided qualitative data regarding the experiences of US rms

‘doing business’ in Jamaica. It compared, triangulated, and contrasted the

ndings of the 2015–2018 Doing Business reports with the experiences of

foreign rms doing business in Jamaica during that period. It also provided

a deeper understanding of doing business in Jamaica and demonstrated the

value of a mixed-methods approach to analysing doing business in countries

around the world. The exploratory case study methodology was used as the

methodological framework for this study and the ‘case’ was Jamaica.

The Trustworthiness of the DBR

The study found that the DBR was not entirely accurate or truly representative

in its reection of doing business in Jamaica. First, on the matter of acquiring

construction permits and acquiring electricity, World Bank (2018) failed to

account for the fact that most of the businesses in Jamaica do not need

construction permits or faced difculty in getting electricity because they

mainly acquired already-constructed properties equipped with power. The

ranking would therefore only reect the experiences or conditions of only very

few businesses in the country, thereby rendering it an inadequate reection

of doing business in Jamaica. Furthermore, World Bank (2016) produced

ndings revealed that entrepreneurs’ access to electricity in Jamaica

was in a worse state than in 2015. World Bank (2016) found that Jamaica

dropped 13 places on the ‘getting electricity’ ranking, thereby indicating that

entrepreneurs’ access to electricity had become more difcult and showed

only slight improvements for 2018. The ndings of the present study provided

a contrasting result in that entrepreneurs indicated that accessing electricity

was for them a simple and hassle-free process.

Conclusion