CAPRI Commentaries

In April 2023, Jamaica hit a record low unemployment rate of 4.5 percent, underlining a shift from a decades long economic problem of surplus labour capacity. The current rate of less than 5 percent, defined by most economists as “full employment”, is unprecedented in Jamaica’s post-independence history, during which unemployment averaged 17 percent. The labour market situation has created a shortage of workers across several industries and skill levels and has led the…

Jamaica possesses the highest proportion of urban residents on informal land holdings within the Latin American and…

Prime Minister Andrew Holness, in a recent address to students and teachers, acknowledged the controversy surrounding the call for a total ban on corporal punishment (hitting/slapping/physical punishment). The National Commission for Violence Prevention, the entity established in 2019 and charged by the Prime Minister with developing recommendations to reduce the prevalence of various forms of violence in the country, has identified corporal punishment as a violation of the “personhood” of children and has…

The evocative idea of the darkest hour being just before dawn was coined by Thomas Fuller almost 700 years ago, in his religious treatise, A Pisgah Sight of Palestine. While acceptable as a literary device, it is a literal inaccuracy since the darkest hour usually is around midnight. It nonetheless remains a powerful metaphor and an appropriate one to describe the Jamaican economy…

In 1891, Jamaica hosted its first globally publicized ‘International Exhibition’ to promote local products and attract investments to the island, inspired by the successes of exhibitions such as the London Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace (1851) and the Paris Great Exhibitions (1700-1800s). While the 1891 exhibition is seldom remembered, the London and Paris exhibitions continue to be studied in intellectual property courses the world over, as it was in this context—that of the Industrial Revolution—that intellectual property protections were first…

CAPRI’s 2020 landmark study on Jamaica’s violent gangs, Guns Out: The Splintering of Jamaica’s Gangs , repeated the commonly held premise that Jamaica suffers from a “culture of violence.” Ongoing work in the security field has since prompted a reexamination of that hypothesis. A closer examination of the available evidence yields no indication that a distinct cultural propensity is responsible for Jamaica’s high rates of violence, particularly with respect to homicides. Rather, it is the enabling environment produced by specific policy decisions of…