Towards West Indian Survival

Abstract

This paper puts forward three simple propositions: 1) With political will and wise policies, the three major economies with stabilization, structural adjustment, and debt problems can recover and be on the road to human development by the middle of this decade; 2) In spite of significant change in the international economic, technological, and geo-political environment, the inherited deficiencies of our economies and our small size, the West Indies has an important range of economic advantages and opportunities in today’s and tomorrow’s world; and 3) We need the four instruments of Training, Producing, Saving and Uniting to achieve the four goals of Development, Identity, Self-respect and Interdependence with the rest of the world in the 1990s and the 21st century. Without these goals and these instruments, West Indians as a people will not survive in any meaningful sense of that term.