Last week I came across an article entitled “Growth May Be Good for the Poor - But are IMF and World Bank Policies Good for Growth?”. The answer as usual is, it depends who you ask. However the following chart surprised me.

GINI COEFFICIENTS IN 13 LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES

GINI coefficients are a widely used measure of income distribution where 0 means perfect equality and 100 means perfect inequality. So Jamaica not only had the most equitable income distribution on the list, but was the only place where inequality had significantly declined in the 1990s. This runs completely counter to the common notion that we have one of the world’s highest income disparities and it has gotten worse in the past decade.

As Mark Twain once remarked, it’s not what people don’t know that gets them into trouble, it’s what they know that just ain’t so. So I looked up a few more figures on Jamaica in a world context. (Sources are UNDP, Statin, Interpol, SA CIAC, UK Home Office Research, US Bureau of Justice.)

These population figures demolish two myths. Firstly Jamaica is not primarily a rural country. Secondly our birth and population growth rates are not excessively high.

Now in light of our very low per capita GDP Jamaica’s life expectancy is astonishingly high. We actually live longer on the average than Trinidadians and substantially longer than the much richer American blacks. Indeed despite Cuba’s vaunted health system – which it pays for with a considerable loss of freedom that Jamaicans would probably not tolerate - Cubans live only slightly longer than we do. And we are way ahead of officially wealthier countries like Brazil and South Africa. All this is even more amazing when you consider all the lives prematurely ended by our extremely high murder rate.

Our literacy rate is a bit low, with our male rejection of education being reflected in the fact that Jamaica is one of a handful of countries with more literate women than men. We have relatively few prisoners per population, and certainly far less than the so called “land of the free” which imprisons almost 2% of its black population. However only Colombia and South Africa have higher homicide rates than Jamaica, despite the fact that we have a more equitable income distribution than even the US and Trinidad.

How do Jamaicans live so long on so little? Well whatever the other factors our health care system can’t be as bad as some people claim. A doctor friend tells me that despite our problems almost every Jamaican has access to primary health care. This he says is not the case in the US.

But you have to also wonder if the official GDP figures are really accurate.  Is it not strange that Jamaica’s per capita income (at purchasing power parity) should be barely half of the world average while its normal life expectancy is much higher than normal?

I made some enquiries therefore as to just how reflective official economic figures are of the Jamaican reality. Again the statistics defy common sense. (Cellular phone usage is an industry estimate.)

Now an over 100% increase in motor vehicles, an over 35% increase in electricity use, and a probable 500 fold increase in cellular phones are not the lifestyle changes one would expect in a nation where the average income has supposedly fallen over that 5 year period. Clearly there must be a lot more going on than meets the official eye in this country.

Now everyone admits the unofficial economy in Jamaica is very large, but no one knows quite how large. Indeed one prominent businessman says that neither private or public powers that be seem too interested in finding out, for the answer might raise all sorts of uncomfortable questions. Such as what exactly is the source of all this unrecorded income?

Conversations with experts in the field also suggest that measuring the informal economy is not particularly high on the official priority list. But how can any country plan properly for the future if it has no idea where it really is at the present? A thorough survey of our parallel markets should have been commissioned years ago. The Planning Institute of Jamaica is currently conducting a study of our informal economy, and it will be interesting to see what it comes up with.

Now Jamaica may well be living in a fool’s paradise like Argentina was until it recently imploded. How much longer can we keep piling on debt before we go bankrupt? And no matter what the excuses about drugs and gangs, there must be something fundamentally wrong with a society that has the world’s third highest murder rate. But overall the figures certainly suggest that life in Jamaica is a lot better than the professional doomsayers would have us believe. changkob@hotmail.com