Norman girvan-reinterpreting the caribbean

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Open Library American Libraries. Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Certainly the inhabitants of the region have been ambivalent about accepting a definition that was originally imposed from without and is still today very much an intellectual or norman girvan-reinterpreting the caribbean creation.

In the Hispanic islands, the nationalist current identified itself with Latin America on cultural, linguistic and historical grounds. It also meant being grouped with islands that were non-Hispanic, still under colonial rule and overwhelmingly black. The former makes us part of the historical and cultural experience of the Greater Antilles, the latter Rodriguez Julio An analogous ambivalence is evident among the non-Hispanics.

Haiti, which had been isolated since its Independence a century earlier, was African, Francophone, and uniquely Haitian. This was originally as a result of the activities of the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission and subsequently that of the work of regional historians and social scientists. The first two were, however, founded as exclusively Anglophone clubs.

Identity may overlap in name but may be in contradiction in content. The process of forming a common Caribbean psycho-cultural identity that transcends barriers of language and ethnicity is at best slow and uneven. The French territories have the status of Overseas Departments of the French Republic and their inhabitants are French citizens. In what follows we examine the principal socio-economic characteristics of the Greater Caribbean and the insular Caribbean.

Socio-economic characteristics Within the countries of the Greater Caribbean there are wide disparities in size, population, and per capita income, see Annex Table 1 for detailed data. The grouping is dominated by the G3 countries, which together account for between two-thirds and threequarters of the total population, GDP and land area Table 2.

Mexico alone with 90 million people has a greater population than all the other countries combined and 46 percent of the aggregate GDP. Venezuela has over three times the population and four times the GDP of the whole of Caricom. Per capita income in the G3 is also higher than that of Central America and the non-Caricom insular states and slightly below that of Caricom.

GDP per capita are averages weighted by population. Source Based on Annex Table 1 The balance of the regional population is divided fairly evenly between the Isthmus states and the insular Caribbean. As a group, the Isthmus states are the poorest in the region, with an average per capita income is only about half that of the G3 and of Caricom.

There are wide income disparities among countries, Costa Rica and Panama having income levels times the level in Nicaragua and Honduras. The last two are among the poorest countries in the hemisphere. The insular Caribbean has a higher per capita income than that of the Greater Caribbean as a whole. Within this group, there are wide income disparities between the nonCaricom and the Caricom states, among Caricom states, and between the independent states and the dependent territories.

These income differentials are associated with size, location and political status. The next section discusses these and other socio-economic characteristics of the insular Caribbean in greater detail. The insular Caribbean The insular Caribbean is an extremely fragmented and heterogeneous sub-region. With just 37 million people it contains 28 distinct political entities and these vary widely with respect to size, political status, income and language.

Their political systems vary from multi-party parliamentary democracies in most of the Anglophone countries to Executive Presidential systems in several and the one-party popular democracy of Cuba. The dependent territories belong to four metropolitan powers. Constitutional arrangements range from virtually full internal autonomy, as in Puerto Rico and the Netherlands Antilles; to the sharing of responsibility between locally elected administrations and the metropolitan authorities, as in the British and French dependencies.

There are at least 6 official languages6 and several local Creoles are also spoken. Here there is a paradox: although the majority of Caribbean entities are English speaking, the majority of the population is Spanish speaking; with French being second in importance. The chart below shows the distribution of population by language.

The subgroups are: i ii iii iv Larger Island States: four states in the Greater Antilles containing three-quarters of the population, with an average population of nearly 7 million. These are Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Jamaica; Smaller island states: nine states, mostly in the eastern and southern Caribbean with populations under 1.

Summary information on the subgroups are provided in table 3, norman girvan-reinterpreting the caribbean additional details on human development and poverty in table 4. Chart 1. It includes Haiti, one of the poorest countries in the world with very low human development7. Cuba has done best in terms of level of human development compared to level of per capita income8followed by Jamaica.

The incidence of poverty is very high in Haiti, where two-thirds of the population live below the poverty line; and significant in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic where one-third and one-fifth of the population respectively are estimated to be in absolute poverty. In Cuba one-sixth of the urban population is estimated to be at risk of being unable access their basic needs requirements.

It has slipped 34 places in ranking since For Cuba this was 18 infor Jamaica 9, for the Dominican Republic 1. This is due to falling commodity prices and debt and adjustment crises the Dominican Republic and Jamaica exacerbated by the effects of political turmoil Haiti and the collapse of the Soviet Union Cuba. As a result, they have lost substantial ground in their human development ranking in the world during the s.

Their average per capita income is 4. Economic growth in the last two decades or in the s has been propelled by the expansion of tourism, off-shore banking services, manufacturing, banana exports, and energy-based industries. Investment has also been strong due to political and social stability and successful macro-economic management in the norman girvan-reinterpreting the caribbean of cases.

In some of the smallest islands the fruits of economic growth have been fairly widely distributed due to the small populations, the dispersal of tourism and banana cultivation, and strong public sending on social services. Yet problems of poverty and vulnerability cast a shadow over the future of these countries. In six of the nine countries the incidence of poverty is 15 percent or over, and the rate reaches over 20 percent in Trinidad and Tobago and two of the Windward islands and over 30 percent in Dominica.

The Windward islands banana producing economies are also threatened with severe dislocation due to a WTO ruling against the preferential treatment they receive under the EU banana import regime Lewis Vulnerability to natural disasters is evident in the damage sustained in the Windward and Leeward islands during the annual hurricane season, and in episodes such as the volcanic eruptions in Montserrat, which have dislocated an entire island community.

Mainland states The three mainland states contain 55 percent of the land area but only 4 percent of the population of the sub-region. In spite of their low population densities they are relatively poor. Per capita incomes are similar to those of the larger islands, though Belize is considerably richer on average than the other two.

Both Guyana and Suriname have an export structure that is dominated by primary commodities--bauxite in the case of Suriname and bauxite and sugar in the case of Guyana—and both have been negatively affected by the weakening of commodity markets since the s. Internal political conflict has also contributed to economic decline. Puerto Rico predominates in this subgroup in terms of population and GDP.

This territory has 10 percent of the population and 42 percent of the GDP of the insular Caribbean as a whole. The factors behind the high incomes of the dependent territories are similar to those applying to the smaller island states, with the additional advantages of dependent status. Resource transfers to support social services are substantial in the US and French dependencies.

The British and Dutch dependencies have become major off-shore banking centres, taking advantage of their political attractiveness associated with colonial protection. Most of the dependent territories have large tourist industries and small populations—a combination that inevitably results in high per capita incomes. The Caribbean Diaspora One consequence of these trends has been the continued growth of intra-regional migration as well as of external migration flows.

This is not a new phenomenon, as intraregional migration dates back to the end of the 19th century. Contemporary flows are oriented to the expanding tourism and service economies of the smaller island and dependent territories from the labour surplus, crisis-affected economies such as Haiti, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Guyana, Dominica and more recently Cuba.

External migration has also continued on a substantial scale. Although this phenomenon is not as well researched as it ought to be, especially intra-Caribbean migration, the following indicators are illustrative of its importance. The net loss of population from the region in the period has been estimated at 5. Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico each had close to 1 million of their native-born population living abroad at the close of the s.

In relation to the resident population, the overseas population at the end of the s stood at 40 percent for both Jamaica and Guyana, 36 percent for Suriname, 23 percent for Puerto Rico, 21 percent for Trinidad and Tobago, 15 percent for Haiti, and 10 percent for Cuba. By the early s the overseas population was sending home in remittances an amount equal to 71 percent of the value of exports in the case of the Dominican Republic, 32 percent in the case of Haiti, 29 percent in Jamaica and 17 percent for Barbados Samuel Table 6.

In Jamaica, remittances have been the fastest growing source of foreign exchange inflows in the s. Hence, the Caribbean Diaspora is undoubtedly an important source of household income in many of these societies as well as a major aspect of people-based integration within the social life of the region itself. To summarise, the insular Caribbean has a small number of densely populated states whose living conditions are not too dissimilar from those in the rest of the Greater Caribbean, and a large number of mini-states and dependent territories, some of which have been able to secure relatively high incomes by specialising in tourism and financial 10 services.

It is likely that income differentials within the sub-region have widened in the past two decades, intra-regionally if not intra-nationally. Pressures arising out of shifts in the world economy and other developments generally referred to a globalisation are evident in the difficulties experienced in the most populous countries during the s, and the uncertainties now faced by some of the smaller states.

Poverty is a major problem in the larger countries and in several of the smaller societies, notwithstanding their higher per capita incomes. Even the relatively prosperous societies—including the dependent territories—are highly vulnerable to events not of their own making and to forces outside of their control.

Norman girvan-reinterpreting the caribbean

Caribbean people continue to move in search of survival and a better life, as they always have. But for the sub-region, vulnerability, differentiation and fragmentation continue to be major issues. Regionalism in the insular and the Greater Caribbean Regional integration, or at least co-operation, is frequently advanced as a strategy of confronting the challenges of globalisation and the risks of marginalisation facing the insular and the Greater Caribbean.

In the s there has been renewed interest in regionalism as shown by the Report of the Independent West Indian Commission, the expansion of Caricom, the formation of Cariforum and the creation of the Association of Caribbean States. In the wider norman girvan-reinterpreting the caribbean there have been efforts to consolidate Mercosur, the Andean Community, and the Central American Integration System in response to the formation of Nafta and the drive towards the EU Single Market.

Regional integration cannot substitute for what is lacking at the national level. Essential foundations of effective regionalism are internal political and social cohesiveness and policy coherence. Several societies in the insular Caribbean are facing severe problems of governance and political legitimacy including Haiti, Guyana, Suriname, Jamaica, and possibly Trinidad and Tobago.

These are rooted in ethnic and class conflict and in some instances in the fragility and erosion of national institutions. These problems will make it difficult to embark on regional projects that require negotiated compromises, concessions on national sovereignty and consistent implementation. In the Greater Caribbean the movement towards effective regionalism will also be conditioned by success in resolving problems of internal legitimacy in several of the G3 and Central American states.

Caricom is often referred to as one of the more successful integration groups in the developing world. But the Community has disappointed many who saw in it the possibility of organising a cohesive economic grouping with harmonised and coordinated economic policies. Initiatives that failed to be completed include the harmonisation of fiscal incentives, the regional industrial policy, joint strategies of agricultural development, and the organisation of joint industrial enterprises.

Progress towards the CSME has been steady, but agonisingly slow; and the target date for completion has been put back several times. The proposal is for a Free Trade Agreement between the two sub-regions and between both and the Dominican Republic, with co-operation in business enterprise development, in tourism and investment promotion, and in external trade negotiations.

Initial response has been lukewarm, as both sub-regions see little scope for the expansion of intra-regional trade and are preoccupied with the more immediate issues of Nafta parity and the EU post-Lome negotiations. Yet as the small countries of the insular Caribbean and the Isthmus discover the limits of their leverage in the post Cold War era, interest in a strategic alliance of this kind is likely to grow.