Robert Buddan, Contributor

Jamaicans at home and abroad celebrate 45 years of Independence this week and since this period coincides with an election season, questions will be asked about what has been achieved in Independence and what has been achieved under the last 18 years of PNP administrations.

Forty-five years after Independence we find ourselves in a world where the tasks of creating jobs, a new economy, and better governance have to be approached in this context. Globalisation is not about to change course and no government that we elect can make it do so. What we must do is make globalisation work for all Jamaicans as we celebrate Independence globally.

Jamaica is well on the way to adjusting to globalisation.The fact that we have the highest cellular phone penetration rate among developing countries is just one indication of this. How we manage globalisation will go a far way in determining how well we meet the objectives of nation-building set by the first generation of political leaders.

One of the first questions that occupied these leaders since 1944 was how to create jobs for the army of unemployed Jamaicans. The PNP had adopted the objective of 'full employment', an economic term to reduce unemployment to a minimum and keep the economy competitive. Full employment would be achieved when unemployment was reduced to five per cent. This objective has remained elusive. However, government data show that unemployment has declined from almost 19 per cent to under 10 per cent in the last 18 years, the lowest since Independence and 73,000 new jobs were created between 2004 and 2006. Evidence suggests that these new jobs were created because of liberalisation to adjust to globalisation.

Full employment

When the PNP formed the Government in 1955, it hoped to achieve full employment by 1961. But it had always felt that Jamaica needed a policy of industrial development for this to happen. Before this, the colonial administrators conceived of Jamaica's future mainly as an agricultural society, a view it had held since Emancipation. The PNP argued that agriculture could not absorb the large body of unemployed. Nonetheless, it felt that agriculture would continue to be important to create jobs and exports. Despite the recent blows to traditional agriculture from a combination of changed world markets and severe weather conditions, the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands can claim 19.8 per cent growth in agriculture in 2006/7, the largest growth sector of the economy last year and a sizeable growth by any standards. The link between agriculture and expansion in tourism is further evidence of the impact of globalisation.

Jamaica's optimism in the 1950s was founded with more certainty on growth in new industries, especially bauxite and alumina and manufacturing. Tourism was also to be a leading sector in this new economy. It was in these areas that the new political leaders departed most strongly from the colonials and they were proven right. After gains and reversals on the world market, bauxite and alumina production in 2006 was at its highest since 1974 when the first wave of bauxite expansion ended. The future continues to look good, as investments in this sector are greater than they were in that first phase. Again the growth of the world market for bauxite and alumina is evidence of the positive spin-off from globalisation.

Tourism too set a new record in 2006/7. In 1955, Jamaica received 35,000 tourists and that was regarded as a very good year. In 2006/7, Jamaica broke the three million barrier and the expansion of the sector is planned to create 15,000 new rooms over the next five years. Manufacturing, on the other hand, has not kept up its share of GDP. But the Jamaican (and Caribbean) economies are growing as service economies. The greatest change in the Jamaican economy is the change from agriculture to services, including tourism, telecommunications, banking, insurance, foods, and transportation. These are the new growth areas of the national and world economies.

Today's transnational economy

The greatest change in the Jamaican economy since Independence is the change from national to transnational, one that includes Jamaicans across borders. In the 1950s, Jamaican politicians could not have anticipated the impact that the Jamaican diaspora now has on the economy. Remittances now exceed earnings from sugar, bauxite and tourism. Jamaicans now have as great an impact on the foreign earnings of their country as foreigners do and this must be the greatest positive development since Independence. For the first time in the history of the country, ordinary (and extraordinary) Jamaicans contribute as much to the country's foreign earnings as any 'foreign' sector does.

What is even more encouraging is that this potential remains largely untapped. It is to this transnational economy that Jamaicans at home and abroad are looking to develop newer cultural and creative industries and where the service economy can grow even faster. Jamaican (and Caribbean) negotiators are now asking partners like the United States, Canada, and Europe to include free trade in services in new agreements about to be negotiated. Jamaica needs these agreements to cover the new class of service entrepreneurs here and overseas who do not have the same advantages of those entrepreneurs in the more limited goods-producing areas covered by the CBI and CARIBCAN.

There was a time when Americans, Canadians and British controlled our services like banking and insurance. Now, there is a stronger Jamaican and Caribbean mix, including those from the diaspora. The changing economy reflects the opening up of the old economy to Jamaicans at home and overseas and to Caribbean people in our single market. Forty-five years after Independence, the Jamaican economy is fast being globalised to facilitate Jamaicans because they are a global people. Critics of liberalisation must bear in mind that liberalisation opens up more possibilities for Jamaicans in the transnational economy. But being part of this global economy, the national economy must naturally become more competitive by world standards. This is what it means to make Jamaica achieve world-class status.

World-class infrastructure

Developing world-class infrastructure, education and training, and public services are therefore the first great challenges of the 21st century. All of these sectors are already parts of the new transnational economy and society. Remittances have increased from US$184 million in 1990 to US$1.6 billion in 2006/7. The pragmatic vision of the future, therefore, must be to integrate the two overlapping Jamaicas to combine and take advantage of the capital, experience, and markets of the diaspora with the national, creative, and cultural advantages of the local society so that linkages can be established between large, medium and small businesses from the most local community levels to the highest transnational standards.

The challenge of making the parts fit together is a challenge of governance, both here and abroad. There is a mood of patriotism in the diaspora and hope in Jamaica for a government whose perspective is not so local that it does not see the connection between the global and the local. Elections might be national but development is global.

Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona. Email: robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm.