In Defense of Caribbean Tourism

Photo: Jamaica, from rappensuncle’s flickr photo stream. Rights: Creative commons.

Few regions of the world are as dependent on tourism as the Caribbean. “Nonetheless, the literature on Caribbean tourism is surprisingly critical,” writes Orlando Patterson in an interesting opinion column in the New York Times. “Foreign anthropologists complain about the ‘tourist gaze’ and the distortion of local cultures; local chauvinists declaim that ‘tourism is whorism.’” Patterson, a professor of sociology at Harvard, calls these charges “largely puerile.” Tourism, he suggests, “enhances residents’ awareness of indigenous cultures, and it supports large numbers of entertainers.”

Patterson continues:

The criticisms of economists seem more substantial. The two buzzwords are linkages and leakages. On most islands, most of the money spent by tourists leaks right back out of the country to pay for supplies for the tourists, or for the repatriation of profits and salaries. Thus there is little linkage, or integration, with the rest of the economy, leaving the islands solely dependent on a fickle industry. Leakage runs as high as 80 percent on the smaller islands.

Here is the critics’ problem: The islands with the highest leakage and tourist dependence are all doing better, per capita, than the larger islands with more integrated economies. The Bahamas and Antigua have almost no unemployment and per-capita incomes three times that of Jamaica. And these islands have substantially higher human development indexes, the gold standard of how well a country is meeting a broad range of basic needs. Barbados’s index of .864 approaches European levels.

Patterson’s piece, unfortunately, resides in the subscriber-only TimesSelect section.

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