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In this book, From State to Markets: Journey of the Jamaican Economy, the
author has produced a comprehensive and up-to-date work on the development of
Jamaica's modern economy from Independence to the present. This journey of the
Jamaican economy, described in magisterial style by Cezley Sampson, did not
begin in 1962, but had its antecedents in 300 years of British colonial rule,
characterized by a dominant sugar monoculture, monopolistic control of essential
services and industries, dependence on imperial trading preferences and an
underdeveloped Public Service that was neglectful of the rural poor in particular.
Sampson traces the post-independence development of Jamaica's public sector
and public enterprises, in the areas of competition policy, law and institutions and
in the provision of essential services of health, education and water. He outlines in
meticulous detail, the reform processes undertaken by the different political
administrations that have resulted in the creation of executive agencies and the
plethora of regulatory institutions that are today, essential parts of Jamaica's
economic governance landscape.
But the work does more than that; it provides a sweeping history of the country's
economic experience of what the author describes as the 'socialist economic policy
adventure of the 1970s' and its replacement by a take-over of Jamaica's economic
policymaking into a forcible clientelist relationship with the International
Financial Institutions in the period of the 1980s and beyond. However, starting in
the decade of the 1990s, the country was able to gradually free itself from the grip of
the Washington Consensus with their advocacy of supply-side economics and,
through a process of privatisation, begin to transition into the market driven
economy that we know today.
The book tells the story of the privatisation of the Jamaican economy through
case studies of six core sectors of the economy namely Aviation (Air Jamaica and
the two international airports): Agriculture (divestment of sugar-producing
enterprises): Telecommunications liberalisation: Financial sector liberalisation
and the privatisation of National Commercial Bank: Electricity sector liberalisation
and regulation; and Public/Private partnership in the Road Sector.
An outstanding feature of this work is the range of reference material the author
has gleaned from published works by the country's leading economists as well as
reports from state agencies Ministry Papers and other official documents,
supplemented by numerous maps, tables, graphs and other statistical material.
