Structuralism and Human Development: A Seamless Marriage? An Assessment of Poverty, Production and Environmental Challenges in CARICOM Countries

Abstract

The article examines the current human development experience of CARICOM nations focusing on the interconnected challenges of poverty, production and the environment that show continuing uneven development. Using an extended structuralist framework based on international political economy dynamics, it incorporates organizational dynamics and domestic politics, especially the role of rents in influencing productive and inclusive development. In this way, the article examines the 2016 Caribbean Human Development Report (CHDR) and finds evidence that human development, proxied by expenditures on education and healthcare, has decoupled from productive capability evinced by decreasing industrial output. We concur with recent critiques of the human development paradigm (HDP) that it has ignored a productionist view of development and thus limits the scope of development policy to bring about broad production transformation. By and large, structural heterogeneity also represents a challenge in CARICOM countries. Linked to questions of development finance, we find that the CHDR’s analysis of environmental concerns offers a narrow instrumentalist view and further marginalizes a deeper understanding of CARICOM countries’ asymmetrical relationship with transnational forces in the global economy. This contribution offers an integrated approach showing continued peripheralization and helps identify structural, socio-political and technical drivers that underpin the region’s complex development challenges.

Keywords:

• CARICOM
• Caribbean plantation economy
• environmental sustainability
• human development paradigm
• poverty
• structuralism

JEL Classifications:

• B5
• O14
• O25
• O54
• Q56

Notes

1 The English-speaking Caribbean refers primarily to 14 members of the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) including Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago. Haiti later gained membership in 2002.

2 The effects were assessed in terms of physical damage, losses of incomes and social services, plus additional costs. In Dominica, damages totaled $930.9 million, while losses amounted to approximately $380.2 million–the equivalent of 226 percent of the 2016 GDP, while damages and losses in Antigua and Barbuda amounted to $155 million.

3 The Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative (ND-GAIN) Country Index summarizes a country’s vulnerability to climate change and other global challenges in tandem with its readiness to improve resilience. Lower ranked countries suggest a high level of vulnerability and low level of readiness and resilience. See here: https://gain-new.crc.nd.edu/ranking. Barbados, Dominica and St. Lucia also feature in the Global Climate Risk Index (Eckstein, Hutfils, & Winges 2018).

4 This study focuses on the 2016 report as it addresses environmental, poverty and economic concerns simultaneously. For interesting reviews of the 2012 report, see (Gomez, Gasper, and Mine, 2016) and (Munroe and Blake 2017).

5 The Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) identifies multiple deprivations at the household and individual level in health, education and standard of living. It uses micro data from the household surveys. Each person in a given household is classified as poor or non-poor depending on the weighted number of deprivations his or her household, and thus, he or she experiences. See: http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/what-multidimensional-poverty-index.

6 The author sat as a member of this committee.

7 Indigence is defined as an individual’s incapacity to afford the basic food basket (UNDP 2016, 102).

8 Hurricane Ivan caused damages amounting to approximately US$3.1 billion, the extent of which was equal to about 10 per cent and more than 200 per cent in Grenada as a proportion of GDP (Heger et al. 2008).

9 Under the United Nations Framework on Climate Change (UNFCC), loss and damage refer to the specific category of irreversible losses (e.g. loss of life, species, land) and costly damages (e.g. destroyed infrastructure) associated with the adverse impacts of climate change that can be considered complementary to adaptation (Gewirtzman et al. 2018).

10 This figure also includes the British Virgin Islands.

11 See EM DAT Database at https://www.emdat.be/emdat_db/.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Keston K. Perry

Keston K. Perry is a Lecturer in Economics at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He thanks the journal referees and editors for their comments and support in bringing the final manuscript to publication.