Making Brand JAMAICA work for Jamaica.....In Jamaica we do not control enough points along the value chain of producing any good or service to claim to have an industry. A case in point; in the mid-1990s Jamaica enjoyed one of the highest levels of foreign direct investment per capita mainly caused by the rapid expansion of hotel rooms by the Spanish.

Henley MORGAN  Wednesday, April 01, 2015 

GOD forbid it to be so, but if Jamaica were to be hit by a great catastrophe causing the loss of all humanity, there is not a single monument, not even a proper venue; nothing that would say to the succeeding generation, this little island is the birthplace of one of the great genres of popular music -- reggae. As clear a case as ever of the farmer eating the goose that laid the golden egg.

Making Brand Jamaica work for Jamaica

Sadly, the same is true for athletics. People come from all walks of life, from home and abroad, overflowing the National Stadium to be part of the spectacle that's Boys' and Girls' Champs. At the end of the event, we are left with hoarse throats, an empty stadium, and emptier pockets. Beyond the psychic pleasure of being world beaters on the track, and a few athletes lucky enough to get scholarships and later in their career to become icons, there is nothing substantial or lasting to show.

This is so for a reason so simple it is laughable. Jamaica is good at producing icons. Icons invariably become rich for themselves, for their families, for people in their immediate circles, and for the tax man ready to exact his pound of flesh. Industries are what produce wealth, measured by Gross Domestic Product (GDP), for a nation and its people.

The Jamaican economy is characterised by sectors, not industries. There is not a fully developed sports industry, or music industry, or any other industry for that matter. There is the manufacturing sector, the agriculture sector, the construction sector, the entertainment sector, the tourism sector, and the banking sector. The standard dictionary definition of industry is, "a distinct group of integrated productive or profit-making enterprises as a whole". A sector is merely, "a distinctive part of an economy". Highlighting the difference between the words "whole" and "part" in the given context may seem to some readers as nothing more than semantics, making much ado about nothing or a bad case of splitting hairs. But the difference can have serious consequences for the wealth of a nation.

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In Jamaica we do not control enough points along the value chain of producing any good or service to claim to have an industry. A case in point; in the mid-1990s Jamaica enjoyed one of the highest levels of foreign direct investment per capita mainly caused by the rapid expansion of hotel rooms by the Spanish. Yet in all those years the country continued to experience negligible GDP growth largely because of the absence of linkage enterprises operating as members of an integrated manufacturing or service industry. The foreign exchange brought in to invest in real estate and construction went back out to import goods and services. more