Two Lost Decades: Retrospect and Prospect

• Author: Courtney Blackman
• Pages: 3-20

TWO LOST DECADES

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In an address to students of the University of the West Indies at

the Mona campus in March 1980 (reproduced in The Practice of

Persuasion), I described the 1970s as the ‘Decade of Disaster’ in

the context of Caribbean economic history. I added, ‘If you think

the 70s were rough, wait until you see the 80s.’1 We have navigated

the 80s even less adroitly than we did the 70s. The majority of

CARICOM residents are worse off than they were at the end of

the 1970s. Indeed, Guyanese are worse off than they have been

in living memory. Jamaica remains mired in balance of payments

difficulties; the habitually better-off Trinidadians have devalued

their currency twice in two years, and the traditionally solid

Barbadians drift aimlessly into the 1990s. The period 1970–1990

may well go down in West Indian economic history books as ‘Two

Lost Decades’. The question now is, ‘How do we get back on track?’

It is now the habit for political leaders of the more developed

countries of CARICOM, when seeking external aid, debt

restructuring, or soft loans, to attribute the decline of our

economic fortunes to the oil crisis, falling world commodity prices,

the protectionism of the industrial nations, and other acts of God

and man. There is both truth and deception in these excuses. In

fact, the Pacific rim countries of Hong Kong, South Korea,

Singapore and Taiwan — variously called the ‘four tigers’, the

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TWO LOST DECADES

RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT

THE PRACTICE OF ECONOMIC MANAGEMENT

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‘four dragons’ or the ‘gang of four’ — have flourished over the

last 20 years in the same international environment as CARICOM.

Furthermore, the least endowed territories in CARICOM, namely

the OECS and Barbados, have outperformed the better endowed

Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago. We must therefore

look elsewhere than to external factors for explanations of our

loss of two decades. Our thesis is that the misfortunes of the last

20 years are, to a large extent, rooted in mistaken development

policies reflecting the prevailing Caribbean economic doctrines,

and are therefore intellectual in origin.

Some of the leading proponents of that conventional wisdom

now claim that their errors are recognizable only with the aid of

hindsight. In his book, The Poor and the Powerless, the Marxist Clive

Thomas pleads that the strategy of ‘state ownership and control’

of the region’s resources neglected important considerations:

With the vision of hindsight, the importance of these considerations

seems self-evident, but at the time they were less obvious and, as a

result, a number of serious errors were made.2

Similarly, the radical New World economist Norman Girvan,

in a review of Clive Thomas’s book, concedes the possibility ‘that

the present position of radicalism ... may, with the aid of hindsight,

be exposed to have severe weaknesses as well’3 In fact, there were

a few dissidents whose warnings went unheeded. In a 1975 paper

entitled ‘The Economic Development of Small Countries: A

Managerial Approach’,4 I expressed concern at the trend towards

nationalization in the region. In the Mona speech mentioned

above I sharply criticized both the Marxists and the New World

group:

I am especially at a loss to understand the attraction of an economic

model, conceived in early industrial Britain, and first applied in

pre-industrial Russia. Even stranger is that the empirical evidence

of its forced application under the Soviet neocolonialist regime