Dear Editor,
Thousands of Jamaicans lining the streets of major cities and towns across the island selling cheap Chinese-made goods have become an effective network-marketing strategy for the Chinese wholesalers. What we would like to see is more investments in manufacturing to create jobs for Jamaicans, and the industrialisation of energy production to facilitate a 70 per cent decrease in the cost of energy. This would be real investment and would benefit the Jamaican people, instead of the cheap subservient wholesale and back-breaking hotel and the marginal jobs on infrastructure projects.
When any investor uses its own people and delete the local Jamaican workers out of the economic equation, they have effectively and structurally removed any chances of the net economic benefits or economic growth accruing to the Jamaican economy and its people. The kinds of foreign investment we have seen over the last two decades have not resulted in any significant growth in the Jamaica economy. This then cannot be a win-win situation.
What makes it even worse is that the governments of Jamaica (political alliance) has traded off the net future benefits to the economy by exchanging the development rights to the strategic real estate land within a major transportation corridor to be developed not by Jamaican workers, but by the Chinese; so there is a double-take again.
There is also a triple-take of economic exploitation, because all the hard currency inflows, some US$2.03 billion, will be sucked out of the Jamaican economy when Chinese-made inferior goods are exchanged in Jamaican dollars and back to US dollars in a foreign bank account. The economic deception of cheap Chinese goods is that they are replaced more frequently, which is a "hidden price", than other-made products, meaning you are spending more of the remittance money converted to Jamaican dollar. But the added value from the frequent replacement of these inferior goods will more than double the compensation from any loss of currency value due to the exchange rate.
Silbert Barrett
net_sbarrett@hotmail.com
The 'hidden' costs of Chinese foreign direct investments in Ja
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Thousands of Jamaicans lining the streets of major cities and towns across the island selling cheap Chinese-made goods have become an effective network-marketing strategy for the Chinese wholesalers. What we would like to see is more investments in manufacturing to create jobs for Jamaicans, and the industrialisation of energy production to facilitate a 70 per cent decrease in the cost of energy. This would be real investment and would benefit the Jamaican people, instead of the cheap subservient wholesale and back-breaking hotel and the marginal jobs on infrastructure projects.
When any investor uses its own people and delete the local Jamaican workers out of the economic equation, they have effectively and structurally removed any chances of the net economic benefits or economic growth accruing to the Jamaican economy and its people. The kinds of foreign investment we have seen over the last two decades have not resulted in any significant growth in the Jamaica economy. This then cannot be a win-win situation.
What makes it even worse is that the governments of Jamaica (political alliance) has traded off the net future benefits to the economy by exchanging the development rights to the strategic real estate land within a major transportation corridor to be developed not by Jamaican workers, but by the Chinese; so there is a double-take again.
There is also a triple-take of economic exploitation, because all the hard currency inflows, some US$2.03 billion, will be sucked out of the Jamaican economy when Chinese-made inferior goods are exchanged in Jamaican dollars and back to US dollars in a foreign bank account. The economic deception of cheap Chinese goods is that they are replaced more frequently, which is a "hidden price", than other-made products, meaning you are spending more of the remittance money converted to Jamaican dollar. But the added value from the frequent replacement of these inferior goods will more than double the compensation from any loss of currency value due to the exchange rate.
Silbert Barrett
net_sbarrett@hotmail.com
The 'hidden' costs of Chinese foreign direct investments in Ja
-->