The Power and the Money

Economic history is hard

Lyman Stone has a post up about population growth in the Caribbean. It’s interesting stuff; worth reading. But it suffers from a historical mistake.

I am hesitant to point out this mistake because Lyman has recently been beaten up by a bunch of rather rude people who appear to be deliberately distorting his argument about the recent American (and French!) fertility decline. So I will endeavor to be neither rude nor deliberately distorting. 

As part of a broader discussion of Caribbean population trends, Lyman uses British migration restrictions to test the effect of migration controls on West Indian population growth rates. He identifies two points where migration was restricted: the date of independence and the Nationality Act of 1981.*

The problem is that neither independence nor the 1981 act had any effect on the ability of West Indians to migrate to Great Britain. 

The U.K. first imposed migration restrictions on the West Indies in 1962. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act said that only U.K. citizens with passports issued in Great Britain or Ireland could freely enter the U.K. If you were a “Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies” but your passport had been issued by a Commonwealth government, even one still part of the British Empire, you were subject to restrictions. And those restrictions were pretty draconian: you needed either a work permit or the ability to show that you could support yourself without working.

The U.K. migration data is a mess, but taking the Home Office statistics for annual net migration (in thousands) at face value (page 10) indicates that it was pretty effective. The below chart puts a vertical line at 1962. Net migration from the West Indies surged in ‘61, as people rushed to beat the new law. It then collapsed in ‘62 and ‘63 and remained low thereafter.

Moreover, the Nationality Act of 1981 had no effect on the ability of West Indians to migrate to the United Kingdom! That freedom had been removed in 1962. Rather, all the 1981 act did was take the class of U.K. citizens who were not allowed to live in the U.K. and rename them British Dependent Territories citizens. They could not freely move to the U.K. before and they could not freely move after. (In 2002, the Blair government finally granted all Dependent Territories citizens full British citizenship.)

If you really want to see if migration restrictions affected population growth rates, then you want to use 1962 for your test, not independence or 1981. 

Don’t be too harsh on Trinidad; the U.S. is not doing much better

It’s tempting to dump on Trinidad for undergoing a resource boom that failed (AFAWK) to lift median incomes by any substantive amount. Nor did that boom go into an impressive increase in public infrastructure. In fact, most of what you can say about it is that it left the nation better-housed and with more cars.

Which does not really look all that different than the United States over the past four decades of economic growth:

In fact, there is some evidence that Trinidad has managed to reduce poverty substantially. As I mentioned, the shantytowns have disappeared. A more detailed study by Karl Theodore and Ewan Scott and the University of the West Indies shows poverty falling from 29% in 1997 to 23% in 2005 and 18% in 2008. (They checked their estimates using data from the Survey of Living Conditions, which showed a drop from 24% to 17% in 1997-2005.) The drop is due, in large part, to subsidies provided by the state: a household with two working adults and three children that earned less than TT$18,000 a year (poverty is defined as TT$9,780) would qualify for a bit more than TT$43,000 in subsidies. (The full paper is here.)

My son redistributed some wealth by winning at dominoes (somehow he won half the matches!) but that was regressive.

Trinidadian governments, in fact, have not done a terrible job of insuring that the poorest of the poor share in the boom, even if they have failed its middle class. And in that it does not look all that different from the United States under the Obama administration, despite the corruption and mismanagement.

So there is a case for not judging to harshly.

But judging harshly, of course, is what I fully intend to do as these posts continue! Any thoughts or requests for more information about T&T?

Some slightly heavier parts of Trinidad’s recent boom

In the last post, I presented evidence that Trinidad’s recent boom had no impact on median household incomes. To be clear, that data is highly inconclusive. Without the time to process the raw data, we have no way of knowing if the 2014 estimate measures the same thing as the 1997 estimate.

So what other data can we use to measure changes in Trini living standards? Well, I went to the census and pulled up the percentage of households with access to various durable goods in 2000 (Table 7.16) and 2011. Here are the results:

These figures show some increase in living standards, but not a revolution. Internet access soars, but that is unsurprising and easily explained by a fall in cost. Ownership of washing machines and microwaves jumps a lot; enjoyment of air conditioning rises a lot in percentage terms but remains fairly low. 

Other indicators show more impressive gains, albeit from an already-high base. The number of households with access to private toilet facilities went from 87% to 94%. Access to electric lighting went from 91% to 98%. Direct access to piped water went from 61% to 76%. 

These increases were due to a housing boom over the decade: by 2011, fully 23% of all houses on the island had been built in the 21st century. (This number is a lower-bound estimate.) That is good! In fact, I noticed the housing boom back in 2007. In total, around 74,000 new units hit the market in 2000-11.

So that is where some of the money went: new and better houses and mundane public investments in sewers and electric wires. That should be captured in the GDP figures (as an increase in investment followed by a increase in output). But it is easy to imagine that it might not be captured in the figures for median income, unless housing costs were very carefully adjusted for quality and imputed benefits. (They were in 1976 and 1997; for 2014, I have no idea.)

Still, the housing boom, while real, is not quite as dramatic as it migh appear. The country built about 7400 units per year in the booming 2000s, but it also managed to build 4800 units per year in the boring 1990s. So not nothing, but not as big as might have been expected in a country whose real GDP doubled between 2000 and 2008. 

In short, the boom saw some improvement in Trinidadian living standards. And the improvement is visible on the ground: in the new suburbs that have spread out to the south and east or the traffic-choked roads. (More on that later.) We therefore have two potential explanations of where the money went:

1. The one citation we have for median income in 2014 may not be properly adjusted for non-monetary income, poor reporting, and improvements in housing quality;
2. Plenty of money went into improving the housing stock and associated public investments.

Those do not quite seem to be enough; after all, we are talking about a full doubling of GDP in a low-population growth country. Any thoughts?

The unbelievable lightness of Trinidad’s recent boom

Trinidad experienced a massive boom between 2000 and 2008. That boom was reflected in government revenues. And you could smell the optimism when I first started travelling here around 2007. 

So what happened? We know that government revenues soared, as did GDP growth between 1994 and 2008. But how much have people’s lives improved?

Turns out that’s not as easy to answer as you would think. Trinidad has a very sophisticated statistical apparatus. They do good work. But the country has recently been going out of its way to make that work hard to access. The central bank has a statistical database that is okay; the Central Statistical Office is miserable. 

So with the caveat that it is not clear that the data is comparable, due to varying methodologies to adjust for unreported data, here are some snapshots of median household income.

In 1980, the World Bank carefully analyzed the 1975-76 Household Budgetary Survey. After adjusting for under-reporting, it found that 57% of Trini households earned less than TT$499 per month ... which comes out to TT$120,466 per year in 2014 TT dollars. 

Some time later, Shlomo Angel used the Continuous Sample Survey of Population to estimate incomes in 1997. He found a median income of $132,110 in 2014 TT dollars. So, some improvement over what is generally regarded to have been an awful two-decade period: the 50th percentile in 1997 earned about 10% more than the 57th percentile did back in 1976.

Finally, Charisse Griffith-Charles (UWI) and Robin Rajack (IADB) estimated that in 2014 the median household income was $126,700 ... slightly down on the level from before the boom. (The paper is here; scroll to find it, then go to page 8.) 

Now, I am not sure how Griffith and Rajack produced their estimate or how it accounts for unreported or non-monetary income. So it is quite possible that median incomes have in fact increased since 1997. (It is shameful that comparable data is not readily available. It exists, but you have to write the CSO; even then, you will get it in raw form.) 

But the indications are that the recent boom did not produce a great increase in middle class incomes. Nor did it result in a dramatic upgrading of the island’s physical infrastructure, despite the massive rise in the resources available to the government. 

So where did the money go? Where is it going? More anon as I think on this question.

Why did the Trini government stop paying salaries in 2015?

Front page headline in the Sunday T&T Newsday?  “Easter backpay for 16,000 health workers: $636M blessing.” Short version: 16,000 government employees are going to receive US$5,923 per person in unpaid salaries. This in a country where average annual government expenditure on wages and salaries per employee came to US$10,606 in 2015 and US$9,930 in 2016. The arrears are big.

Health workers were not the only ones to go without pay: when I was last here in April, the big news revolved around the way the previous government had randomly suspended salaries. You heard that right: in response to falling oil prices, the government stopped paying salaries.

At first glance, this does not seem unreasonable. Consider the below chart: total government revenues (in millions of U.S. dollars) fell 30% in 2016, from $8.8 billion to $6.1 billion. (Figures are only available through August 2016; data is annualized based on the first eight months of data.) That is one hell of a fiscal adjustment!

But at second glance, it’s crazy. First, in 2014 had Trinidad a debt-to-GDP ratio of only 51%; by 2016, that had risen to only 58%. There was plenty of scope for borrowing to ease the transition. Second, Trinidad could have let the exchange rate depreciate, spreading the pain. Third, the arrears started proliferating in 2015, before the big meltdown in revenue. 

Finally, and here is the kicker: expense on wages and salaries barely went down. The government spent US$1.6 billion in 2015 and US$1.4 billion in 2016. Public employment slid from 150,600 to 144,100. Per worker expenditures barely budged. 

So what the hell?? Tens of thousands of people without salaries in 2015? Where did the money go? 

Obviously, people think corruption. It does not help that Jack Warner (of FIFA scandal fame) said that he witnessed PM Persad-Bissessar accept TT$8.3 million in checks from ... wait for it ... Ishwar Galbaransingh. Now, I would not trust Jack Warner at all about anything ... but the atmosphere here is febrile, considering the apparent mismanagement of the Persad government. 

AFAICT, the new government is on track to meet its commitment of clearing the arrears by the end of this calendar year. But the whole episode is inexplicable. You cannot find much evidence of the arrears in the government accounts (which are putatively on a cash flow basis) and you cannot find much evidence in the audit accounts.

But you can find lots of evidence among the government workers who were not paid and the current politicians who seem to be moving heaven and Earth to make them whole! 

The new government could do a lot more to make its accounts transparent. It is not doing so. So while employees are getting paid (that I can confirm, although contractors are still SOL) there still seems to be no good understanding of just what happened last year. No wonder cynicism is higher than I have ever seen it, and this is not exactly an idealistic trusting place to begin with. 

Back to Trinidad

There is nothing remotely unusual about going back to Trinidad! But for reasons that have nothing to do with this blog, I noticed that I stopped travel blogging around 2012. Which is too bad, since I made some fascinating work-related trips to Colombia, Israel and Albania before I stopped taking such opportunities because I preferred to hang out with my bambinos. 

One day, I will say more about those places! But right now, let us discuss Trinidad, and later, Miami.

When you arrive at Trinidad, you arrive at Piarco International Airport, which encapsulates the country’s recent troubles. The new terminal, completed in 2001, isn’t terrible. It’s actually quite functional. But it’s barely functional. The security checks going out and the customs checks going in are easily overwhelmed. The terminal wait areas are spacious and nice, but that’s about it. For $1.6 billion, you’d expect a lot more. 

So why isn’t it nicer? Well, allegations of corruption surround the project. The government commissioned an inquiry, but didn’t publish it. Then the government lost the 2001, and the report came out. (Although, amusingly, it is currently embargoed in Trinidad.) Charges were filed and wound through the local courts. In 2006, the United States filed charges against two contractors, Steve Ferguson and Ishwar Galbaransingh, alleging that they had defrauded the airport authority of US$150 million. The T&T government agreed to extradition. Allegations then crawled up the political food chain: former finance minister Brian Kuei-Tung; former Works minister Sadiq Baksh; former chairmen of the Airports Authority Tyrone Gopee and Ameer Edoo; former client representative in the Ministry of Works at the airport project Peter Cateau; and financial director Amrith Maharaj. By the time all was done, the fraud allegations exceeded US$245 million.

But then the UNC wins the 2010 election. (The United National Congress was in power between 1995 and 2001, when the new terminal project was implemented.) And what happens?

1. A high court judge stays the extradition. Now, it is plausible that said decision had nothing to do with politics (note that the Florida indictment had been four years previous). But then we get ...
2. The Administration of Justice Act of 2011 sweeps all the accused under a new statute of limitations, sending US$10 million in government legal expenses down the tubes. More details here.

Agh. That is not good. But hey, the UNC got trounced in the 2015 elections. Surely that means the PNM will clean house? Even if there are no new trials or extraditions, things will be better going ahead.

Although, well, it seems a little perturbing that one Ishwar Galbaransingh was a guest at the new transport ministers 50th birthday party. 

Trinidad is not a basket case by any means. But it is underachieving. And the reason seems to be that voters are not yet angry enough to force change through.

Alabama is not Mississippi

OK, that is clearly true. I just spent a big chunk of time in Alabama, I know this to be true. 

But John Marshall at Talking Points Memo is understandably surprised that a recent poll shows the Fat Crybaby only 2 points ahead in Mississippi while 21 points ahead in “the fairly politically and demographically similar state of Alabama next door.”

That cannot be right, can it?

Well, yes, it can! 

According to the Census Bureau, eligible voters in Mississippi are 60% white and 35% black. In next door, Alabama they are 68% white and 25% black. Also according to the census bureau, black people in both states turn out to vote at rates around six points higher than whites. (2012 turnout in both states was around 60%; 2008 turnout was 63% in Mississippi and 64% in Alabama.) That shakes out to an electorate that is 59% white and 38% black in Mississippi but 68% white and 28% black in Alabama.

Now assume that Hillary Clinton will get 95% of the black vote, 80% of the Latino vote, and 75% of the other vote in both states. (These assumptions do not really matter, but they make exposition easier.) What then needs to be true about the white vote for Clinton to receive 46% of the total vote in Mississippi but only 36% in Alabama?

Well, she would have to get 13% of white vote in Mississippi and 10% in Alabama. That is only a three-point difference. It is totally believable and certainly within the margin of error in the crosstabs. I can certainly believe it. If you give her 13% of the white vote in Alabama, her share there rises only two points; give her 10% of whites in Mississippi and her share there falls by only one point. 

Let’s check this with the 2012 results. Romney won 55% in Mississippi, but 61% in Alabama Obama got only 38% of the vote in Alabama, versus 44% in Mississippi. The six point difference in the 2012 election is less than the ten point difference in the 2016 polls, but ten points is not so great as to be unbelievable. 

Now, Mississippi is far from a swing state. To win there, Clinton needs to get 20% of the white vote, which ain’t gonna be easy. But that is a lower bar than in Alabama, where getting 20% of the white vote would get her only 43% of the total. In Alabama, she needs to pull in 31% of the white vote to win. 

Having been in Alabama, getting to 20% (let alone 31%) feels impossible. There is some deep-seated identity voting going on, more like political parties in Trinidad and Tobago than what most would consider normal American politics. (See here for more on ethnic politics in Trinidad.)

Many white people in Alabama were super nice. Think the amused gentleman in the pink shirt. But in picking the photos for this post, I noticed a lot of photos like the second one above, where people in the background are staring at us, especially if my wife was taking the picture. (Look at the father and son directly behind us. My wife takes pictures like a fashion photographer, so we have 15 full seconds of frames: they were staring the whole time.) That does not happen in family photo albums from the northeast or Florida. 

Yes, it is anecdotal, but I just do not think that it will be easy for any Democratic candidate to break the 20% barrier among white voters in Alabama (or culturally, albeit not demographically) state of Mississippi for some time to come. The WaPo-SurveyMonkey poll results are plausible. They may even hold until November. But they are not a sign that Mississippi is turning purple any time soon. 

But to repeat the punchline: given the very different demographics in the two states, it is quite reasonable to believe that Clinton is only two points behind in Mississippi while being 21 points down in Alabama. 

No, a British victory in the Revolutionary War would not have ended slavery early

July 4th is upon us, and here we go again with a bunch of “The American Revolution was a mistake” posts. Now it’s Dylan Matthews at Vox, giving us three reasons why 1776 and all that was a “monumental mistake.”

Reason number one? “Abolition would have come faster without independence.” His evidence for this? Well, only that Parliament in fact abolished slavery in 1833. 

So lets look at that abolition for a moment. The British parliament voted to raise £20 million in bonds to compensate slaveowners in the West Indies and South Africa. The Abolition Act valued slaves at their average price in 1822-30, using a database of 74,000 transactions. They then divvied up the £20 million among all the colonies according to their proportion of total slave value. Across all the islands of the West Indies, that came to 780,993 enslaved people valued at £58 each, for whose freedom slaveowners received £26 per person. (Actual valuations varied from £115 in British Guiana to £27 in Bermuda.)

This brings us to the first problem facing a hypothetical British Empire contemplating abolition: using the same methodology, North America possessed 2.1 million slaves in 1833. Using the same methodology as the Abolition Act, that would have cost British taxpayers an additional £53 million pounds, on top of the £20 million for the West Indies. 

How much was £73 million? Well, the entire nominal GDP of the United Kingdom came to only £440 million in 1833. More relevantly, perhaps, total public spending came to only £51 million. Financing an additional £50 million in bonds at 3.4% would have cost £1.8 million per year ... almost 4% of all public spending. In the abstract, that was easily affordable ... in the concrete, the additional expense could have sunk the bill.

But there is a second problem. Slave prices in the West Indies were sinking in the 1820s along with the price of sugar, which dropped (net of shipping costs) from 2.3p per pound in 1818 to 0.8p per pound in 1829. (Prices are contemporary, but expressed in modern decimal values. Data from Robert Martin, Statistics of the Colonies of the British Empire, 1839, Appendix p. 3.) There were exceptions, of course: slavery was booming in Trinidad and British Guiana. But in general slave prices were declining across the West Indies and British policy prevented slaves in declining areas (like Jamaica) from being sold on to booming places. Barbadian slave prices, for example, fell by half between 1823 and 1831. (Table 5.)

That is not to say that the British planters supported abolition: slavery was obviously more profitable to them than free labor would be. (J. R. Ward looked into that back in 1978.) It is to say that they were willing to accept compensation at 44% of the average market price because market prices were falling fast.

Contrast that with the southern United States, where the cotton boom was just getting started. By 1833, the South was starting a prolonged cotton boom driven by exploding British demand for cotton textiles. In addition, American slave populations were growing fast. Combine the two and you have rapidly growing wealth tied up in slaves:, expressed below as a percentage of the U.K. GDP:

It doesn’t take a political scientist to realize that the politics of abolition are going to look very different in the above world. West Indian interests reluctantly capitulated to compensated abolition; North American slaveowners are going to fight a lot harder. Any compromise is going to result in a much higher compensation per slave than the West Indian slaveowners received. 

We then add the third problem: in the 1830s, cotton is a strategic crop. Sugar is nice; cotton drives the U.K. economy. It is the oil of the day. Politicians could contemplate a disruption of sugar production in the West Indies with equanimity. After all, the product is available from elsewhere and who cares if it comes from within the Empire or outside? Those same politicians could not easily contemplate a reform that might disrupt the flow of cotton to British textile mills. 

Fourth, we have to think about how American independence was avoided. There are basically two scenarios: (1) British diplomacy avoids conflict, and (2) Britain wins on the battlefield. Scenario (1) implies that the British government accepted that it could not tax the American colonies. Scenario (2) implies that the U.K. repeals most or all of its exactions on the American colonies. Both make it unlikely that the U.K. would impose taxes on North America to pay for the freeing of North American slaves.

An abolitionist U.K. government will face a Hobson’s choice. They can abolish with insufficient compensation, even if it could get such a bill through Parliament — which is unlikely — they would risk triggering a revolt by Southern planters. The British Empire could probably win such a revolt (strangling Southern commerce and trying to mobilize Northern armies), but no government would take such a threat lightly. They can abolish with sufficient compensation — which would be extremely expensive and risk triggering a planters’ revolt regardless. Or they can ignore public opinion (10% of the British population signed an anti-slavery petition) and hope the problem goes away.

The problem is that the longer Parliament waits, the less tractable the problem becomes. 

 

It is certainly possible that the British Empire would have abolished slavery earlier than the United States. Johnny Pez has a post showing the roots of how that might happen in a world where Britain defeats the Continental Army. (He is currently engaged in a magisterial project of re-writing For Want of A Nail, by Robert Sobel. It promises to be awesome.) 

But the British Empire was ruled by human beings. And those human beings would have faced a situation where their medium-term political and economic self-interest conflicted with their morals and long-term interests. The result, I suspect, would be delay and half-measures, with a high likelihood of ending in a war. 

The American Revolution might have been a mistake. But it is probably not because the horror of slavery would have ended much sooner. 

A modest proposal: reparations for Jamaica

 Prime Minister Cameron has rightfully faced questions about reparations for slavery during his recent trip to Jamaica.

How much is owed? Well, that gets controversial, but let’s take a stab at it. Slavery seized the wages otherwise due the slaves, minus the cost of keeping the slaves alive. Since slaves were considered an investment, the price of slaves reflected the value of that stolen income. 

One rough estimate of the value of Jamaica’s slaves in the late 1820s, before Parliament started seriously debating abolition, comes to £14.0 million. 

There is a problem with this method, which is that slaves were tortured into working far more hours at far higher effort than any free worker would have agreed to. (The best work on this comes from Roger Ransom and Richard Sutch on the American South.) This measure only captures the damage inflicted by that torture inasmuch as it created higher value for the torturers. It does not capture the damage the torture inflicted on the tortured.

It also captures only the value of the wages to be stolen from enslaved Jamaicans who were alive in the 1820s. It does not take into account the value of the wages stolen from enslaved people who had the bad luck to die before abolition. In fact, it does not account for wages already stolen from the people alive at abolition. 

But let us start with the number we have. How do we convert that into a 2015 value? One possibility is to simply adjust for inflation. That would give us £1.3 billion.

Wow! That is not a lot of money. Add in the rest of the West Indies and you get only £4.3 billion. In 2013, the U.K. spent £11.5 billion on overseas aid. Come on, Cameron! Cut a check and go home. 

Or at least that is what a reasonable government would do if it believed that the above was the correct and unassailable calculation. Of course, it is not. The value extracted from the slaves was invested in other things. One quick-and-dirty assumption is that the value of those investments increased with the value of the United Kingdom’s GDP. Use that assumption, and you get a current value of £53.3 billion, which is a substantial amount of money ... and still does not account for all the costs of slavery. 

If you think that £53.3 billion is the correct amount (or possibly something even higher) then I can see why you might be reluctant to admit to even £4.3 billion in damages. At current long-term rates, it would cost the U.K. about £1.5 billion per year to compensate Jamaica for that. 

Maybe the Jamaicans should demand to become part of the United Kingdom. Why not? Let Scotland go and replace it with Jamaica! Consider that in 2014 the United Kingdom subsidized the Scottish budget to the tune of £10.9 billion. (That figure allocates North Sea oil and gas revenues to Scotland.) Jamaica would be much cheaper! Public spending per person in England is about £8500. The price level in the U.K. is 2.2 times higher than in Jamaica, so equalized real spending would cost the exchequer only £3900 per person; roughly £10.6 billion per year. 

But Jamaica already generates tax revenues around £2.3 billion. And helpful people at the IMF (see pages 16 and 26 here and page 44 here) have calculated how much could be collected with better enforcement brought to you courtesy of the good people of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, which would up the amount to £3.1 billion. Add in the £300 million collected by brining Jamaican VAT rates up to U.K. levels, and you have  £3.4 billion, for a net cost to the Exchequer of only £7.0 billion! (Rounding explains the discrepancy.) 

Take off the part of that due as reparations for slavery, and Jamaica requires only £5.5 billion to join the U.K! Moreover, considering that Jamaica has a GDP of only £8.6 billion, you would need to phase that subsidy in over at least two decades. Include the phase-in, and you get a net present cost of bringing Jamaica into the U.K. of only £66.7 billion over 20 years, scarcely more than the £53.3 billion reparations bill! 

Plus savings if Scotland walks out in the meantime. 

And then there are the growth effects on Jamaica. If Jamaica became as rich as French Guiana (the poorest overseas department of France), its nominal GDP would increase to £36 billion. 

What is not to like about that? Sure, it would still be a net drain on U.K. coffers, generating taxes of £14 billion against expenditures of £23 billion, but now you are quibbling. It is still cheaper than Scotland! 

So the solution is obvious. Cameron should offer membership in the United Kingdom to Jamaica.

Boston has monsters, which is a reason to dislike New Jersey

 Found scribbled on a notepad in my backpack (at least the parts in quotes):

“I was born in Brooklyn!”

You were?

“I was born in Boston and there were monsters in Boston. Mommy and Daddy had to protect me from the monsters in Boston.”

So you must not like Boston.

“I don’t like New Jersey.”

Why not?

“When I was in Boston I saw a monster coming to eat Tima and me.”

That sounds scary, but I don’t see the connection to New Jersey. Which state is your favorite?

“My favorite states are Trinidad and New York and Aper. Aper is a big city with a lot of people it doesn’t have no train. It has a train track. Trains drive on that train track. And it doesn’t have no station. And it doesn’t have no subway! You can go on the train tracks to New York. It just drives outside.”

Apparently, I did not follow up. Or I ran out of paper. This Aper sounds like an interesting place. (Unless he means Delaware.) And what is wrong with New Jersey? He must have overheard his parents complaining about the endless quality of the eponymous turnpike when we thought he was asleep. 

He is completely correct that Trinidad really should be a state.

Venezuela tries a Russian strategy without being, well, Russia

 Russia has a strategy for reclaiming key territories that it wants, even without formal annexation. Part of that strategy is passport distribution. This has a number of advantages. First, it gives you a plausible pretext to intervene: hey, it isn’t a 19th-century-style land grab, you’re just protecting your citizens! Second, it makes it easy to run a detached territory without formal annexation. Just erase the border without incorporation; with your citizens on both sides formal territorial sovereignty becomes a distinction without a difference. Third, the mere distribution gives you a propaganda windfall: they residents of the place-in-question prefer being part of us to being part of them!

It is so obviously successful a formula that now Venezuela is trying it in Guyana. Colonel Pompeyo Torrealba is now the man in charge of the Special Essequibo Unit inside the Essequibo Reclamation Office. According to the Venezuelan press, “He proposed to start granting identity cards to the 200,000 estimated residents of the Essequibo, in addition to an educational campaign intended to make the population of Guyana understand that this territory is Venezuelan.”

Except here’s the rub: the residents of the territory in question need to want your citizenship for the strategy to work. Five years ago, the Bolivarian Republic might have been able to pull this off. Right now, not so much. 

Worthy Jamaican experiment

 Before pulling out for personal reasons, I was involved in a consulting job in Albania. The goal was to reduce electricity theft. One of our recommendations was kind of obvious: to reduce theft, you need to make it hard for people to steal. You need to get out and yank illegal connections and keep yanking them.

Would that it were so easy. The tricky part is twofold: (1) Getting the money to pay the people who need to check and yank; and (2) getting the political will to cut people’s electricity. 

But now it seems as though Jamaica’s utility is doing just that! 

Jamaica’s sole electricity provider says crews have pulled down nearly 10,000 illegal connections to the power grid and police have arrested over 300 people for theft so far this year. In a Sunday statement, the Jamaica Public Service Co. says it is “relentlessly pursuing” electricity thieves in neighborhoods where a tangle of illegal wires can often be seen tapping into power lines. In one town in Jamaica’s St. Catherine parish, residents fled their homes last week to avoid arrest as power crews removed about 850 illegal connections.

Now, to be fair, total losses in Jamaica are just 26%, way less than in Albania. But still, the experiment bears watching. 

The Philippines move right!

 Carlos Yu and I have a long-term plan to write a book on the Philippines under American rule. But it won’t be done until 2018 at the earliest.

One thing that we discovered while writing our book on the Panama Canal was that Panamanians drove on the left until April 15, 1943. The reasons for the changeover are obvious; less so is why Panama started out on the left. The influx from the British West Indies is often cited. (Colombia did not start to regularize its traffic codes until Panama had already seceded but appears to have always driven on the right.) Argentina drove on the left between 1889 and 1945. The first traffic code, from 1872, mandated driving on the right but the country switched to the left in emulation of the British-built railroads. (You can still see this in the Buenos Aires subway.) It moved back to the right on June 10, 1945.

But neither of us had any idea that the Philippines also drove on the left until March 10, 1945! That is more than slightly amazing. The vast majority of cars were imported from the United States. So how did the rule survive so long? Even more amazing, the reason for the shift given in the text of the executive order implies that imported cars had been physically reconfigured to right-hand-drive before the switch:

EXECUTIVE ORDER NO. 34: AMENDING TRAFFIC REGULATIONS FOR VEHICLES

WHEREAS it is deemed advisable to change the existing regulations providing for the driving of vehicles on the left side of the road so that the vehicle traffic in the Philippines shall conform with the practice of driving on the right side of the road obtaining in most countries of the world;

WHEREAS such a change would bring about certain economic advantages to the people of the Philippines in that it would reduce the price of motor vehicles imported into the Philippines from the United States;

WHEREAS during the present emergency the great majority of the motor vehicles of the United States Army used on the roadways in the Philippines are right-hand driven and the drivers thereof are accustomed to driving on the right side of the road; and

WHEREAS the present affords the most propitious opportunity to effect this desired change;

NOW, THEREFORE, by virtue of the powers vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, particularly Commonwealth Act No. 671, I, Sergio Osmeña, President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, do hereby order;

1. That section 60 of the Revised Motor Vehicle Law, Act No. 3992, be amended, as it is hereby amended, to read as follows:

“SEC. 60. Drive on right side of road.—Unless a different course of action is required in the interest of the safety and security of life, person, or property, or because of unreasonable difficulty of operation in compliance herewith, every person operating a motor vehicle or guiding an animal drawn vehicle on a highway shall pass to the right when meeting persons or vehicles coming toward him, and to the left when overtaking persons or vehicles going the same direction, and, when turning to the left, in going from one highway into another, every vehicle shall be conducted to the right of the center of the intersection of the highway.”

2. That all other sections or parts of the said Revised Motor Vehicle Law and amendments thereof shall be considered as amended or modified as they are hereby amended or modified accordingly so as to conform with the provisions of the Executive Order; and all other provisions of law inconsistent with or contrary to the provisions of this Executive Order shall be considered repealed as they are hereby repealed.

Done at the City of Manila, this tenth day of March, in the year of Our Lord, nineteen hundred and forty-five, and of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, the tenth.

SERGIO OSMEÑA
President of the Philippines

Unless most American imports had been reconfigured before sale in the Philippines, then there is no reason why switching the side you drive on would make imports cheaper. Today the Bahamas drives on the left but enforces no such rule; neither does the U.S. Virgin Islands. Was there a mechanics lobby group in the Philippine Islands that insisted on reconfiguring imports before 1945? 

There has got to be a story here.

A cultural exchange

 Courtesy of Emiliana Duarte, I give you the Venezuelan ambassador to the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago:

She is very good at all parts of her job. Trini-Venezuelan relations are better than they have been for years. 

Heterodox Friday: Panamanian price controls

 This blog has long taken the position that Hugo Chávez was uniquely incompetent. There was a time, back in 2008, where we gave him political props for building an effective machine. That admiration began to fade with the electricity crisis. Then some of this blog’s old readers (where have you gone?) made good arguments that the Chávez boom wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, although we remained on the positive side of neutral. Sure, there were some shortages caused by price controls. But other than the insanity in the electricity sector, the controls could be justified as a means of income redistribution in a country that lacked the administrative ability to impose punishing income taxes. (This gets to a question from Randy that I will try to get back to.) 

Unfortunately, the Socialists proceeded to run completely off the rails. Their cardinal sin was keeping the bolívar pegged at 6.3 to the dollar. The resulting capital controls have led to massive shortages of imported goods. Had the exchange rate regime been liberalized after the 2013 elections, living standards would have been hit, but the economy would be in better shape now. As importantly, the Maduro administration would have the space to engineer a mini-boom before the midterm elections. As it stands, however, Venezuelan exchange rate policy stands as an incredible example of economic and political incompetence. 

After all, in a another world the people lined up to buy cheap goods at a state-owned supermarket would be grateful to the government which got it for them. But in this world they are quite angry at the government. Here is a good article by David Smilde of Tulane University that argues that it is too late to effectively reform. The Socialists are going to (a) lose the next election; (b) pull some sort of hat-trick involving Chinese money and a short-election season; or (c) actually turn Venezuela into a dictatorship. (The link goes to an earlier post here that argues that the Polity IV score ranking Venezuela as already dictatorial is bullshit. But we were would agree that it is not far-fetched to imagine Maduro abandoning democracy, possibly via unconstitutionally postponing the midterm elections. That Polity IV ranker may have been prescient.) 

Or maybe Trinidad will come to the rescue? On Wednesday, the Trini prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, offered to swap tissue paper for bitumen. “The government of Trinidad and Tobago will purchase goods identified by the government of Venezuela from T&T’s manufacturers, such as tissue paper, gasoline, and parts for machinery.” It is part of the Trinidadian charm offensive that just enabled a deal for joint exploration for natural gas in the Gulf of Paria.

But as strange as it is to see T&T riding to the of the Bolivarian Republic, I would argue that it is probably too late for (b). The government certainly has started to throw a lot of opposition leaders in jail. That is more (c) than (b), even if they manage to pull off a win without election fraud. (Stealing elections, we have to add, is hard to do in Venezuela. Some things Chávez did right.)

So what does all this have to do with Panama? Well, mainly a demonstration that I am not an orthodox right-wing buzzword-of-the-day. 

When President Juan Carlos Varela took office on July 1st, 2014, Panama faced an inflationary spiral. (See page 4.)To some extent, the idea of inflation in Panama sounds odd: the country uses the U.S. dollar. There has been no sign of inflation in the United States, so why were prices escalating in Panama? Simple: Panama was in the middle of a huge economic boom. (See page 19.) Incomes were rising fast and pulling up prices.

The traditional diagnosis in such a situation is that supply bottlenecks are the cause of the inflation. In that view, the right answers are (a) wait it out; or (b) slow economic growth via austerity. There were two problems with (a). First, the inflation hit the poor hard. In Panama, unlike the United States, overall turnout tops 75% and most people are still relatively poor ... governments cannot safely ignore them the way they do in North America. Second, prices are sticky. Increases in the price of food will translate into wage increases. In a dollarized economy, that means a loss of competitiveness and a serious adjustment problem ahead. (To some extent, that is what happened to Spain during the early years of the euro.) If you can keep inflation from escalating, you should.

The problem with solution (b), of course, is that austerity is painful. And there is a diagnosis in which austerity is unnecessary. What if the bottlenecks aren’t physical? Rather, what if they are caused by an uncompetitive wholesale sector? In that world, rising demand leads to rising prices not because goods are scarce but because wholesalers and retailers are using the opportunity to take profits. If that view is correct, a big if, then the government can use price controls to break the inflationary spiral. Merchants will have lower profits, but there will be no shortages: it will still pay for them to provide goods. 

My esteemed colleague in what remains of the blogosphere, Fausta, confidently predicted that shortages would result if Panama imposed price controls. (She is correct in pointing out that former-president Martinelli was a supermarket magnate!) Economists were more divided (the headline of the article is misleading) although they did universally insist that the controls should be temporary. 

President Varela went ahead with his campaign promise and imposed controls. The decree with the list of the prices can be found here. The ones I recognize are lower but not that different from the price in D.C.: frex, we buy chicken breasts for about 90¢ a pound. 

So what happened? No shortages. Lots of fines. A dramatic fall in inflation. The Varela administration has decided to extend the controls until July 2015. For more details you can find an August 2014 analysis from the Economics and Finance Ministry here. 

In short, a victory for economic heterodoxy, hooray! (FWIW, President Varela is from the conservative party in Panama.)

Of course, with no independent monetary policy, nobody in Panama has any incentive to take advantage of the controls to, say, print money and engineer an electoral boom. But still.

So there. I am against the Chavistas because they are incompetent and authoritarian, not because they are left-wing or heterodox. May there be an election in Venezuela and may the Socialist Party lose.

The British Commonwealth lives on

 The British Privy Council just handed the opposition in St. Kitts and Nevis (SKN) a huge victory. Basically, the Labour government altered electoral boundaries on January 16, one month before the next general election. The fragmented opposition cried foul. (There is something quite amazing about the idea of a “fragmented opposition” in a country of only 55,000 people.) So they sued.

A judge immediately granted an injunction. The problem was that she granted it too late. Governor-General Edmund Lawrence signed the redistricting law at 6:20pm, whereas the judge issued her order at 7:38pm. Since you aren’t supposed to be able to injunct an action that’s already been taken, the injunction was discharged on January 27th.

But that was not the end of that!  SKN, you see, is a part of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States. The OECS has a common judicial system, so the SKN opposition took the case to the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court in St. Lucia. The opposition argued that Section 119, Article 1 of the Constitution of the Federation of SKN defined “proclamation” as “a proclamation published in the Gazette.” Since the law had not been published in the Gazette, they argued, the injunction was valid.

The Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court found for the government. “The Constituency Boundaries Commission reviewed the boundaries of the constituencies in the Federation and recommended alterations to the constituency boundaries; a draft proclamation giving effect to the recommendations of the Commission was thereafter approved by the National Assembly; the Governor General then signed a proclamation which (according to the evidence of the Attorney General) was published in the Official Gazette. All of this happened on Friday, 16th January 2015, and though one may say that the process was hurried through by the relevant authorities to gain an unfair political advantage, that is an issue of political morality and not constitutional validity, which is not suitable for judicial enquiry.”

But that was still not the end of that! SKN, like most of the Commonwealth Realms of the Caribbean (save Barbabos but including Trinidad), still uses the British Privy Council as its highest court of appeal. And so, the case went to London. Where the opposition won! 

I can’t wait to read the final decision.

Anyway, this is not a huge piece of news. After all, SKN is just a small group of islands with only 55,000 people. But it is a striking example of how the microstates of the Caribbean survive by contracting out so many state functions to other polities and organizations, be it the OECS, the CSME, or the United Kingdom.

Long live united Britain

 So far, we feel pretty confident in our long-standing prediction that the Kingdom will remain United. Hooray!

Now, can we get some more unifications up around here? I mean, seriously. All this country-splitting is getting a bit boring. Bring back Czecho-Slovakia! Unite the West Indies! Heck, unite the West Indies as part of Canada!

If we must get rid of the United Kingdom, why not have it join Canada? I would get behind that.

And why not have Iceland join the United States?

Bahamian wages, the limits of small-country Keynesianism, and the Chinese not-empire really is not (yet) an empire

 The Bahamas are not rich by the standards of the United States and Canada. But they are not poor by the standards of the world. There is no desperate poverty, and there are few people cut out of the modern economy altogether. Rather, the country feels like a relatively poor part of the United States. The poor areas are poor, but they are no worse than what you can see all over Florida.

The country’s minimum wage is $4.00 an hour. That’s low by American standards, but high by regional ones: Trinidad’s average wage is only a little higher than the Bahamian legal minimum. “Kitchen helpers” in the hotel industry, one of the lowest-paid categories, average $6.16 per hour. Shop sales assistants make $7.37 an hour. Gas station attendants make $8.00; cashiers $8.40, and housekeepers $10.53. The average hourly wage for all production workers was $13.00, and the average work week was 38 hours. These wages are not low. In fact, average nominal wages in the Bahamas ($13.00) are on a par with Mississippi ($12.83), Puerto Rico ($12.92), and West Virginia ($13.19).

The Great Recession has badly wounded the Bahamian economy, but no worse than several parts of the United States.  Bahamian unemployment remains high at 13.7%. That said, unemployment in Minnesota (14.1%), Nevada (13.7%) and Puerto Rico (16.3%) exceeds the Bahamian level, while the other low-wage jurisdictions in the United States don’t show low unemployment: Mississippi with 11.1% and West Virginia with 9.0%.

What is the Free National Movement (FNM) government doing about the economy? Monetary policy, of course, is mostly out of their hands. Capital controls mean that the government also has some room to use monetary policy — it recently slashed the discount rate from 5.25% to 4.50% — but the peg to the dollar limits its freedom of action. The government has some scope for a Keynesian boost — the budget deficit is only 3.0% of GDP, and they recently sold the Bahamian Telecommunications Company for $210 million — but it is unlikely to be effective. Why? Simply put, the Bahamas is too small and too open. Imports come to 35% of GDP. Much of any stimulus, therefore, is likely to “leak” away in increased imports.

What’s left, then, besides praying for the United States to get out of the doldrums? Well, Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham has decided to try attracting as much Chinese investment as possible. The Chinese government has taken a $2.75 billion equity stake in the giant Baha Mar resort development. It also provided loans to finance stadium and road construction.

The problem? Well, the economic problem is the same as with Keynesian spending: leakage. The Bahamas is a pretty small economy. It doesn’t produce a whole lot of construction material, and while unemployment is high, it doesn’t have that many skilled construction workers. The Baha Mar construction project will bring in 6,150 Chinese construction workers, while the $70 million new airport road has involved another 200. Not all the construction labor force will be Chinese, of course, but construction is estimated to employ only 4,000 Bahamians. The developers have pledged only $200 million in contracts to Bahamian firms although that might ultimately rise higher.

The China State Construction Engineering Corporation (CSCEC) will get $1.9 billion, or 53% of the total value of the project. Some of that may stay in the Bahamas, of course, but probably not a whole lot: Chinese workers are estimated to remit roughly $12,000 per year. They do, of course, eat and drink — but the Bahamas is a large agricultural importer, and so those expenditures will like benefit American agriculturalists. The government estimates about $80 million or so in tax payments from the CSCEC but that isn’t a lot. The highest estimate is that Bahamian contractors will receive no more than $400 million, or 11% of the total project value — and they will, of course, spend a large chunk of that revenue on imported inputs. In short, at least half the stimulus will leak away and possibly as much as 90%.

The Nassau Guardian summed it up: “"The Bahamas has fallen fully into the embrace of China. And the rising empire has been kind with its gifts … What Bahamians must understand is that when China lends, and it contracts its own workers to do the job, a significant amount of the money borrowed goes back to China with the workers who build the project. They pay their workers with money we borrow … The Chinese also keep their workers in self-contained on-site camps when they are sent abroad. We barely get them to visit our stores to spend the money we borrowed when they are working in our countries.”

This is not to say that the project is a bad deal! Once it’s done, it will provide a solid boost to the Bahamian economy. Even if the U.S. economy stays flat, it should be able to attract business away from other Caribbean resorts. It is to say that a tiny country like the Bahamas can’t really do a whole lot to use countercyclical fiscal policy to boost its economy, regardless of whether the stimulus comes from government borrowing or foreign investment.

The U.S. government worried that China might be “using this investment solely to establish a relationship of patronage with a U.S. trading partner less than 190 miles from the United States.” I don’t see it. Sure, the Chinese government will have a big stake in a giant resort development. If there was some evidence that China had used its state power to unfairly obtain contracts from American firms, then there might be cause for concern, but there isn’t. Nor is there evidence that China bribed or otherwise influenced Bahamian officials.

As for Chinese “patronage,” well, patronage in exchange for what? The U.S. already controls large spheres of Bahamian public policy. The Chinese government isn’t about to force the Bahamas to suspend OPBAT, expel the Coast Guard, sever the link to the dollar, seize American property, restrict American imports, replace the Privy Council with a Chinese court, or station nuclear weapons off the coast of Florida. Given the overwhelming dominance of the United States, and its long-standing and multiple links with the Bahamas, I can’t for the life of me figure out what a “patronage relationship” with Beijing would even mean. In point of fact, “Senior GCOB officials privately expressed that China is not their preferred partner and acknowledge that negotiations are difficult.” Moreover, the Chinese government told the Americans that they were unhappy about the need to take the financial lead on the project: “Chinese embassy officials privately told [a U.S. official] the China Ex-Im bank would prefer another investor in the mix to diminish the financial risk.” E.g., Americans just weren’t interested. So much for the rising empire muscling out the declining one.

The only realistic worry I can see is that the Bahamas might serve a pathway for illegal Chinese immigration, a fear shared by the U.S. Embassy in Nassau:  “The continuous arrival of thousands of low-wage Chinese workers in the Bahamas will likely lead to a significant increase in illegal migration of Chinese from the Bahamas to the United States. The GCOB (Government of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas) does not have the institutional capacity to effectively monitor the movements of the Chinese workers nor effectively detect inauthentic travel documents.” But still, that is minor ... and that worry involves the fact that China is still a poor country unable to retain its own people when given opportunities elsewhere.

In short: the Bahamas is rich, small countries have serious economic limitations, and China is still both poor and very far away. Okay, not the deepest conclusions ever, but hey. I am on vacation. And really, any opportunity to reduce the latent China-hysteria in the United States is probably worth taking.

Murder in the Bahamas

 Crime in the Caribbean has risen dramatically in the past decade. The Bahamas is no exception — but there are two major differences between the archipelago and the most of the rest of the West Indies: first, the Bahamas has been there before; and second, the Bahamas has well-functioning police institutions. In that sense, there is much room for optimism (assuming that the world economy holds up) to predict a significant fall in violence in the near future — if certain fairly simple reforms are undertaken.

We’ll start with the history. From the late 1960s through the mid-1980s, the murder rate (measured per 100,000 people) steadily spiraled upwards as the islands became a center for drug trafficking into South Florida. (The data come from U.N. crime surveys and the Royal Bahamian Police Force, abbreviated RBPF.) Unfortunately, uniform data is not available for 1987 through 1990 (the Bahamas did not take part in the U.N. survey for those years) but the time series agrees with the general impression of that era: once the United States took an active role in suppressing the drug traffic through the archipelago, violent crime fell rapidly. It did not, however, fall all the way back to pre-1970 levels: most accounts pin the continuing level of background violence on the establishment of youth gangs on the islands and the arrival of large numbers of Haitian immigrants.

In the last decade (after a brief spike in 1999-2000) homicide has climbed back up to near its historic high. The reason for the climb is not undocumented immigration from Haiti and Jamaica: between 2005 and 2009, only 12% of homicide victims were Haitian-origin, with another 1% from Jamaica. That is not far off historic norms, and certainly not enough to explain the rise.

Rather, like elsewhere, the cause is probably drug-related, albeit this time for control of local markets, rather than export to the United States. Between 2007 and 2009, the percentage of drug-related killings jumped from 8% to 16%. Put another way, the increase in drug killing accounted for all of the post-2007 increases in homicide. Unfortunately, drug-related crime accounts for precisely none of the 2004-07 jump. (Actually, drug-related killing fell from 9 per year to 6 over that period; their contribution was actually negative.)

The Bahamian police, however, use a very exacting definition of drug-related. There is, however, a looser classification for what are called “retaliation” homicides: “Killing in response or reaction to prior confrontations, altercations, crimes or other issues.” Between 2005 and 2007, retaliation killings rose from 2% to 18% of all homicides, and accounted for 65% of the rise in murders. They since stabilized, but as noted before, murders carried out at the site of drug transactions continued to increase. Since the majority (it isn’t clear how many) of retaliation killings are in fact related to previous narcotics-related crimes, it seems likely that increasing conflict for retail drug sales explains most of the Bahamas’ crime spike.

This pattern provides grounds for optimism. First and foremost, the Bahamas is not a particularly corrupt country. Oh, rumors and complaints abound, but there is little evidence of serious rot. The Wikileaks cables, for example, amply criticized Bahamian officials and they had a field day with the scandals surrounding Anna Nicole Smith, which included a torrid affair with the immigration minister who expedited her residence permit ... but the State Department made no mention of serious corruption impacting American business or security interests. And the scandals that have been mentioned, whether by State Department or the Bahamian press, are pretty small potatoes by American standards ... let alone compared to standard operating procedure in, say, the Mexican prison system.

More systematically, the classifications used by the IMF rank the Bahamas fairly high in terms of control of corruption. The Bahamas’ rating of 1.4 on a scale from −2.5 to +2.5 ranks it with places like Belgium and Chile and far above Jamaica and Trinidad, both of which have negative scores. In short, Bahamian institutions work, and that is a necessary but not sufficient condition for controlling violent crime.

Reports by the Bahamian police make it fairly clear that the criminal justice system suffers from three shortcomings. First, the RBPF is undermanned — a situation made worse by its reluctance to adopt the common American tactic of flooding “hotspots” with police officers when violent crime spikes. Here is a quote from a high-ranking Bahamian police officer: “For policing purposes, the identification of an ellipse defining a hot spot is, alone, useless. The question then becomes: what does a police officer do after finding him or herself in the middle of a designated hotspot. Experts stress that as long as nobody knows what is heating the hotspot, responses may be futile.”

This reluctance to simply flood “hotspots” with officers sounds commonsensical, but it flies in the face of the evidence from American cities that stamping out violence in one area in does not displace it to others: if the opportunity is lost, most killings simply don’t happen. Such tactics would be particularly effective in the Bahamas, where 23% of homicides occur between pedestrians out on the street, and an additional 21% take place inside commercial establishments. Of course, the RBPF might need more officers (it currently numbers about 3,000, which is not small for a country of 330,000) — but the Bahamas is not poor, and it is ridiculously undertaxed.

The second issue is twofold. First, the RBPF is great (on paper) at solving murders, but extremely lousy at managing to convict those it accuses. Its clear-up rate is 73%, which is higher than the 62% rate in the United States, albeit lower than the 78% rate in Barbados, the 82% rate in the U.K. and the 86% rate in Australia. It certainly beats the hell out of the 32% clear-up rate in Jamaica and the 18% rate in Trinidad.

The problem is that murder arrests in the U.S., U.K., Barbados, and Oz overwhelmingly result in conviction, whereas in the Bahamas they do not. Of the 231 homicide charges filed in 2005-09, only 63 had gone to trial by the end of 2009. Worse yet, of those 63, only 18 resulted in conviction. The former is a sign that the court system is overwhelmed, and needs more judges and bailiffs and jails and money. The latter is a sign that the Bahamian police are pretty bad at following through on the second part of a good Law & Order episode, and casts doubt on the veracity of that much-touted clear-up rate.

Still, the Bahamas doesn’t need to massively increase the rate at which it arrests and convict murderers to reduce its incidence, although that would help. They simply need to disrupt open criminal activity (which is highly clustered) and detain people for other crimes. The Bahamas is not at all like Trinidad or Mexico; it’s much more like a high-crime area of the United States. If its voters don’t like the level of criminal activity on the islands, then the solution is pretty straightforward — all it will take is money.

Is the Commonwealth of the Bahamas an independent state?

 Is the Commonwealth of the Bahamas a sovereign nation? It has a seat in the United Nations, so it a technical legal sense the answer is clearly yes. And it has a very cool flag.

But in any other sense of the world, the Bahamas isn’t sovereign. Like many (perhaps most) microstates, the Bahamas has only managed to survive by a combination of outsourcing some state functions to bigger more powerful countries and giving control to powerful neighbors when their interests are at stake. 

Let’s start with the obvious: the Bahamas is fully dollarized. Technically there is a separate Bahamian dollar, maintained at parity with U.S. money — in reality the U.S. dollar circulates to the point where you have to go out of your way to receive Bahamian banknotes. Unlike Argentina during the days of the currency board, nobody bothers to hoard dead presidents. Still, the Bahamas hasn’t completely outsourced monetary policy to the United States: under the Exchange Control Act of 1956, the Central Bank retains the right to restrict foreign exchange dealings. In practice, this has worked as a tax on capital outflows, although there are also some restrictions on current transactions. Still, it’s telling that the act enabling the controls predates official sovereignty by 17 years — and yes, it applied to Great Britain as well.

Moreover, monetary policy is a poor test of sovereignty, even ignoring Bahamian capital controls. After all, many sovereign states outsource monetary policy. Zimbabwe is about as sovereign a country as you are likely to find, and even it adopted the U.S. dollar in the wake of a ruinous hyperinflation. So let’s turn to something more fundamental: law enforcement. Sovereign countries do not allow foreign courts to make decisions or foreign law enforcement agencies to make arrests. The United States, for example, is perfectly willing to help out the RCMP, and the links between the RCMP and the FBI are so profound that the agencies can be indistinguishable — but the Mounties don’t fly helicopters over Montana, and FBI agents don’t make arrests in Ontario. And while American and Canadian courts respect each other’s decisions, you can’t appeal an adverse outcome in Newfoundland to a court in Washington, D.C.

This is not true in the Bahamas, although, confusingly, the foreign power with judicial power and the foreign power with police power happen to be different. The Bahamas’ supreme court is the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. In 2006, 2007, and 2009 the Privy Council held its sessions in the Bahamas — the only country to have that privilege outside the U.K. itself — but at the end of the day, it’s still a British court.  It creates some controversy, particularly over death penalty cases. Nonehteless, the Bahamas shows no sign of wanting to cut its links to it.

Meanwhile, with some caveats, U.S. law enforcement operates in the Bahamas almost as freely as it does in Florida. In the late Seventies and early Eighties, drug traffic through the islands into Greater Miami steadily escalated, and the Reagan Administration put more and more pressure on the Bahamas to do something about it. In November 1983, the Pindling government gave into the pressure and convened a commission of inquiry “To inquire into the illegal use of the Bahamas for the transshipment of dangerous drugs intended for the United States of America.” The commission was made up two Bahamians, an Australian, and a Canadian, and after 146 days it uncovered what everyone knew: the Colombians moved narcotics with impunity through the islands.

And I mean impunity. Aircraft from Colombia would land in Bimini or drop cargo to waiting boatmen, who would put them in speedboats for the 50-mile into Broward and Palm Beach counties. The chief local distributor on Bimini received $90,000 for each run, with local schoolchildren received $500 for a night’s work. A December 1979 raid by the Royal Bahamian Police ended with rocks being thrown at the cops “by children, adults and elderly.” It also uncovered corruption, which had not yet escalated to the upper channels of Bahamian law enforcement … but was clearly getting there.

The result was OPBAT: Operation Bahamas and Turks and Caicos. It started in 1984, but in 1987 the Bahamian government granted the U.S. Coast Guard the right to stop any and all ships and aircraft entering or leaving Bahamian territory. The USCG couldn’t officially make arrests without a Bahamian sign-off, but that was a distinction without a difference. In 2004, the Comprehensive Maritime Agreement between the U.S. and the GCOB (Government of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas) replaced the grab-bag of unofficial conventions and understanding, but had the effect of strengthening the U.S. position in the islands: now the Royal Bahamian Defence Force would regularly station “ship-riders” on U.S. vessels and helicopters, giving the full rights of arrest in Bahamian waters. This authority has proven useful not only in combatting the drug traffic, but also in preventing Haitian migration to either the Bahamas or the U.S. Of course, stopping emigration is not good for Haiti — and OPBAT’s success in curbing the Caribbean drug trade has been awful for Mexico. (I’m heading to Monterrey on Wednesday.) But it has prevented any chance that the Bahamas might become a narco-state.

(You can read Wikileaks’ rather anticlimactic revelations about Bahamian thoughts regarding Haiti and the CMA here. In 2007, the U.S. Army pulled out of OPBAT, and its helicopters were replaced by DEA aircraft, a distinction without a difference. All that happened were that Army UH-60s were replaced at Georgetown by three DEA Bell 212s and a fixed wing aircraft.)

To recap: Bahamian monetary policy is set by the Fed, the supreme court is in Britain, and American law enforcement freely operates in its national territory. Does that make for a sovereign country?  I report, you decide ... but if you pushed me, I would have to say not.

Fear of a black Canada

 Trinidad almost became an American territory in 1931. It didn’t because the British government was perfectly willing to default on its debts to the U.S. government. The Hoover Administration, sensibly, didn’t push the issue.

The Bahamas, it turns out, almost became a Canadian province in 1911. The colonial assembly in Nassau, backed by prominent Canadian investors in the islands, pushed hard to join. The population of the islands was only 56,000, but there was plenty of money to be made investing in infrastructure: the first telephones were only installed in 1906, and electricity arrived in the archipelago in 1909. The Royal Bank of Canada set up shop in 1908.

Canada’s share of Bahamian imports, however, remained small: $28,392 in 1911, compared to $1.3 million in American imports to the archipelago. Moreover, the fiscal cost of taking over the islands would have been minimal: the federal government spent only 6.1% of GDP in 1911, and transfers to provincial governments amounted to only 0.4% of GDP. (Federal infrastructure spending in the Bahamas would have contributed to economic growth in the islands and likely been a wash for the treasury. It also would have been negligible on the scale of the Confederation.)

So why didn’t it happen? Simply put, Canadian racism ... triggered by a wave of American political refugees. Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier (a Liberal) seemed open to the idea of letting the Bahamas join until, in 1911, a strange wave of racial fear arose from Manitoba. A group of about 1,000 wealthy black Americans from Oklahoma — fleeing the 1907 passage of Jim Crow laws after statehood — arrived at the Emerson border crossing. The result was panic on the prairies.

I’ll turn the floor over to William Thoburn, a Conservative MP from Ontario: “As long as we give the free homesteads in Canada’s northwest, they will come by the tens of thousands. I would like to ask the government if they think it is in the interests of Canada that we should have Negro colonization in the Canadian northwest. Would it not be preferable to preserve for Canada the land they propose to give to Negroes?”

The hysteria soon spread to Alberta. A group of prominent Albertans wrote to the federal interior minister, Frank Oliver, with a series of complaints straight out of an American inner suburb, circa 1970. First, they worried that “Negro immigration” would create white flight and drive down property values. (The idea of rural white flight on the Albertan prairies boggles the mind.) They then went on to worry about their women. “We do not wish that the fair fame of Western Canada should be sullied with the shadow of Lynch Law but we have no guarantee that our women will be safer in their scattered homesteads than other white women in other countries with a Negro population.” To his credit, Premier Arthur Sifton refused to block black immigration.

The panic was especially crazy because Canadian law required immigrants to have on them at least $50 per man, woman, and child. In 2010 dollars, that’s $1,185 — but that figure doesn’t take into account the fact that people were poorer a century ago. When adjusted for increases in average wages, each immigrant was required to have the 2010 equivalent of $7,425. In other words, these were not the huddled masses; these were well-heeled political refugees fleeing the sudden imposition of racial tyranny in their home state.

From the Toronto Mail and Empire of April 27, 1911: “If Negroes and white people cannot live in accord in the South, they cannot live in accord in the north. Our western population is being largely settled by white people from the United States. If we freely admit black people from that country, we should have race troubles that are a blot on the civilization of our neighbours ... The Negro question is of the United States’ own making and Canada cannot allow any part of her territory to be used as a relief colony on that account.”

The Canadian government ordered their agent in Kansas City “to refuse certificates or any encouragement to migration of this class” and “take immediate measures to check this class of immigrants.” It then limited black immigrants to Emerson and North Portal, where it subjected them to degrading medical examinations. It went so far as to hire a black doctor from Chicago to travel to Oklahoma and give lectures about how terrible the Canadian climate was for black people. Finally, in August 1911, with a federal election coming up fast, came this order-in-Council, pursuant to the Immigration Act of 1910, which allowed the government to ban “immigrants belonging to any race deemed unsuited to the climate or requirements of Canada”:

In this atmosphere — with the Liberals under fire for their support of the Reciprocity Treaty with the United States — it should come as no surprise that Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier (a Liberal) would decide against expanding Confederation to the Bahamas on grounds of, in his own words, incompatible “ethnical origin.” Laurier was willing to take West Indian islands as purely colonial concerns, with no representation in Ottawa and no right of immigration, but that wasn’t acceptable to West Indian elites which already enjoyed a modicum of self-government. The Bahamas, for example, possessed a parliament elected by a property-restricted suffrage. (The restrictions meant that white people held 26 out of the 29 parliamentary seats, even though they made up only a quarter of the population.)

When Laurier lost the September 1911 election to Robert Borden, the Bahamians tried once again. The big issue in the election was a proposed tariff-reducing Reciprocity Treaty with the United States. The Conservative Party opposed the agreement, and it used imperial rhetoric as part of its appeal. With pro-Empire Borden as Prime Minister, the (unelected) Governor of the Bahamas, William Grey-Wilson, travelled to Toronto. Among other things, he gave a speech before the Empire Club. In it, Grey-Wilson extolled the wonders of trade and tourism — which were, in fact, the biggest gain from Confederation. The Bahamas would win a secure market for its tropical products, and Canadian companies would gain control of that trade. (They would also cement their domination of Bahamian finance and services.) Grey-Wilson, of course, felt the need to assure Canadians that the absorption of the Bahamas would not lead to black members of parliament sitting in Ottawa:

Now, the constitution of the Bahamas, like the other three B’s of that portion of the Empire, is on a suffrage that is almost equivalent to yours in Canada. I have examined them. Separately and I think they are very much the same. That is to say, any member of a community who is in possession of a house of the value of $10 a year is entitled to vote. That, of course, is practically manhood suffrage. That vote is common to the blacks and to the whites. The inhabitants of the Bahamas are one quarter white and three quarters black.

The result of our elections has been for many years past — and I would remind you that the Bahamas have a constitution almost as old as Newfoundland — that the black man almost invariably elects a white man to represent him. And why is that, gentlemen? You here are conversant with the horrors of the situation in the Southern States of America. In the Bahamas we have no such position. (Applause.) I say that a white woman in the Bahamas, in the most isolated position, is as secure today as if she were in this room now. (Applause.) I defy anyone to say that about the Southern States of America.

Now, gentlemen, why is that? It is not because we have treated the black man as the equal of the white; no. He admits himself — the most intelligent of them with whom I have spoken — he admits himself that he is the white man’s inferior. He admits that he is of a child race, undeveloped; but it is because, being a child race, we have extended to him, as we have to all the other races of the Empire, that universal unswerving British justice.

Unfortunately, Governor Grey’s arguments failed to assuage Prime Minister Borden. In a meeting between Grey and Borden on October 18th, 1911, the Prime Minister rejected the possibility of taking the Bahamas into the Canadian confederation. His reasoning was that the events of the past year had proved that Canadian public opinion would not countenance the admission of a majority-black province, no matter how small or how far away. (The refusal of Toronto hotels to give rooms to black Bahamian visitors only reinforced his point.) The Colonial Office concurred. Worried by the hysteria engendered by the emigrants from Oklahoma, the C.O. reported the following about the possibility of a Bahamian province: “No doubt for the moment the Dominion government would safeguard their interests, but there are signs of the rise of a colour question in Canada and in any case it cannot be long before U.S. opinion gives the tone to Canada in regard the Negro.”

Ultimately, all that came out of the talks was a reciprocity treaty with several West Indian jurisdictions. Reciprocity entailed a 20% tariff cut; it was far from the free trade entailed in political union. It barely dented American domination of Bahamian commerce. And so, much as racism derailed an 1867 attempt by the United States to annex the Dominican Republic, racism derailed what should have been a simple, easy, and mutually-beneficial extension of the Canadian confederation into the Caribbean. Canada eventually absorbed poorer, less strategic, and more troubled Newfoundland, but those islanders had pale skins.

As for the Bahamas, it became part of the United States ... okay, not officially, but watch this space.

Really bad war propaganda

  Look, I’ll cop to supporting the invasion of Grenada. It is true that the New Jewel Movement consisted of a bunch of authoritarian thugs. It is true that they became even more authoritarian when they ousted Maurice Bishop. It is true that they signed secret military agreements with the Soviet Union and Cuba and received $24 million in military equipment from Moscow, including 10,000 assault rifles, 4,500 submachine guns, 11.5 million rounds of ammunition, 294 portable rocket launchers, 16,000 rockets for said launchers, 84 mortars with 8,400 shells, twelve 75mm cannon with 600 shells, 60 crew-served AA weapons with 600,000 rounds of ammunition, 15,000 hand grenades, 7,000 land mines, thirty 76mm field guns with 10,000 rounds, fifty howitzers with 1,800 projectiles, sixty APCs, four coastal patrol boats, and 20,000 uniforms.

Moreover, the Barbadian prime minister, Grantley Adams, tried to persuade the U.S. to intervene on October 19, six days before the invasion. Military casualties ran to only 24 Cubans, 21 Grenadians, and 18 Americans, and the invasion killed only 24 civilians (21 of which in a tragic attack on what turned out to be a mental hospital). The intervention was and remains popular among Grenadians. Plus, it really honestly did restore democracy. Heck, considering the nature of the Gairy regime, it wouldn’t be unfair to say that it introduced democracy.

Would standing aside and letting Grenada collapse into civil war (or be intervened by Soviet-backed Cubans) have cost less in lives and resources? Probably not. Veterans of Operation Urgent Fury should hold their heads up high; you would have to go back to World War 2 to find a case of a more just war. 

That said, the CIA went on to distribute comic books across the island that would have turned me into a gibbering opponent of the intervention:

 
Clicking on the picture will take you to the full comic book. It only gets worse. Christ, man, I worked with psy ops production people ... this is just terrible.

The Commonwealth Realms of the Caribbean and the end of the British Empire

 This post has been substantially expanded. It was about nothing; now it’s about the slow withering of the British Empire, Margaret Thatcher notwithstanding.

Trinidad and Tobago was the first member of the Commonwealth Caribbean to become a republic, in 1976. After the Black Power disturbances of 1970, the government set up the Wooding Commission to review the clauses of the 1962 constitution. All sides of the political spectrum supported constitutional revision: some thought that its conservatism contributed to the instability; others worried in the aftermath of the Williams government’s powerful response to the riots that the pure Westminster system didn’t provide enough checks on the Prime Minister’s power. One solution to that problem was to strengthen the position of Governor-General ... but that caused a problem, since the Governor-General served officially as the Queen’s representative, and “among young people in particular the British Sovereign has no symbolic meaning.” The report did state some advantages of the monarchy — namely, a head of state “above the clash of race and class and ideology which makes up politics” — but they rejected them as inappropriate in the context of a head-of-state with actual executive authority, no matter how weak.* Williams did not accept all the recommendations of the Wooding Commission, but Trinidad got a new constitution ... and an elected President replaced the Queen as head-of-state.

Dominica followed Trinidad into republican status in 1978. One would have expected Grenada to follow.

In 1979, the New Jewel Movement shot its way into office. That came a surprise to nobody: the man who had ruled Grenada for the previous 12 years, Eric Gairy, was little more than a slightly more colorful version of Fulgencio Batista. His opposition knew this; they went so far as to unsuccessfully try to annex the island to Trinidad in order to prevent him from coming to power. (Unfortunately, Indo-Trinidadians were not particularly keen on bringing more African voters into the polity, so the idea failed.) After 12 years of increasingly corrupt Gairyismo (including a bizarre attempt to steal a Miss World competition) nobody was surprised when a small group of Marxist revolutionaries overthrew what was left of his government while Gairy was out of the country.

The rebels proceeded to issue a number of “people’s orders.” They mostly read like something out of an old Monty Python skit. People’s Order Number 1 declared, “The People’s Revolutionary Government now formerly enacts the Constitution of Grenada as hereby, has been suspended.” People’s Order Number 2 said that the People’s Revolutionary Government “shall be vested of executive and legislative power and the People’s Revolutionary Government shall appoint a Prime Minister.” People’s Order Number 4 went on to end all appeals to West Indian or British courts, People’s Order Number 7 established the People’s Revolutionary Army, People’s Order Number 8 created “preventative detention,” and People’s Order Number 10 reiterated the fact that the PRG was, in fact, issuing people’s orders: “For the time being, all People’s Laws shall become effective upon oral declaration and/or on publication of Radio Free Grenada by the Prime Minister or in the official Gazette under the hand of the Prime Minister.”

The weird thing was People’s Order Number 3. “The Head of State shall remain Her Majesty The Queen, and her representative in this country shall continue to be the Governor General who shall perform such functions as the People’s Revolutionary Government may from time to time advise.”

This became a problem when the U.S. was groping around for a legal rationale to intervene. They found a Governor-General, Paul Scoon, ready and waiting to provide them with one. In one of the stranger episodes in the long slow replacement of Britain’s empire with America’s not-empire, the British high commissioner to Grenada carried messages to the Governor-General on behalf of the United States and OECS, without London’s knowledge.

David Montgomery met Scoon on the Sunday before the invasion and asked him, “Would you welcome intervention?” Scoon replied that he saw it as the only thing that could prevent a civil war. He then agreed to issue an oral request for intervention, followed by a written order as soon as it was safe. A written letter to the Prime Minister of Barbados followed on Monday, October 24, 1983.

You are aware that there is a vacuum of authority in Grenada following the killing of the Prime Minister ... I am requesting your help to assist me in stabilizing this grave and dangerous situation. It is my desire that a peacekeeping force should be established in Grenada to facilitate a rapid return to peace and tranquility and also a return to democratic rule. In this connexion I am also seeking assistance from the United States, from Jamaica, and from the OECS through its current chairman the honorable Eugenia Charles (Prime Minister of Dominica) in the spirit of the treaty establishing that organization to which my country is a signatory.**

The Marines’ helicopter assault began at 5:00am on Tuesday.

The story gets stranger when you take into account Margaret Thatcher’s uncharacteristic reaction:

If you are pronouncing a new law that wherever Communism reigns against the will of the people, even though it's happened internally, there the United States shall enter, then we are going to have some really terrible wars in the world.

Who knew?

Why would a self-proclaimed socialist government, willing to ally itself with the Soviet Bloc, keep the Queen as its head of state? Especially when two nearby Commonwealth states had shown themselves completely willing to chuck her out? My guess would be that attachment to the monarchy must run very deep in the smaller islands. But that deep? Or perhaps they only played out two steps along the game tree. They knew that Britain almost certainly would not intervene under any circumstances, but it never occurred to them that the United States could as easily take advantage of the fact that the personal representative of Grenada’s head-of-state was not an appointee of the People’s Revolutionary Government.

Maybe so. I honestly do not know. The evidence is confusing. What is the role of the monarchy in the Commonwealth Caribbean? What should be its role? Does it persist out of popular sentiment, or simple inertia? 

1.6 percent!

  Happy 2010, all!

 
It turns out that over the past five years, we have earned an annual return of precisely 1.6% on our savings and investments.  Hooray! 

Coincidently, that number is how much the IMF believes the Caribbean’s economy to expanded in 2009. Hopefully 2010 will be better. The Eastern Caribbean countries have just taken a proactive step forward, strengthening the OECS with the new Treaty of Bassaterre.  The treaty basically does three things.  First, it gives the OECS the authority to legislate on the creation of a full common market.  Right now, the OECS is a customs and currency union, but there are barriers to internal factor mobility between the islands.  Second, it gives the OECS the authority to enforce the legislation ... basically via national courts and, ultimately, the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court.  Third, it creates a quasi-executive  E.U.-style Commission headed by a Director-General to run the organization.  I say “quasi,” because the Director-General won’t have the ability to directly issue orders to the executive agencies of the various OECS governments, let alone act directly upon the citizenry, but he or she will have the ability to use the courts to take governments to task.  So as long as the OECS governments are in fact under the rule of law, the head of the OECS will indeed have quite a bit of de jure authority.

(Some time ago, Doug Muir and I had a debate about the E.U. that ran along these lines.  I think I convinced him, but it can be very hard to know.) 

So it isn’t quite a federation.  And the new OECS Authority (basically, an assembly of heads of government) will make legislative decisions only by unanimity.  But it takes the Organization about as close as you can get without crossing that line.  (Their security forces also bump up against the same limit, sharing training and commands.)  But it is a step forward for a group of islands that were already rather strongly united.

In theory, Trinidad is supposed to join in 2013.  Or maybe 2011.  It isn’t clear. I also doubt that it will happen.  Although it would be interesting if it did!

Thoughts on integration?

The friendly society

 Governor Carter refused to limit emigration because the remittances sent back to Barbados from the Panama workers had markedly improved the economy, especially for poorer tenant farmers.  In a country that had recently been on the brink of collapse, he was not going to tinker with that.

 
The direct impact of the remittances was not that large.  In 1906, when Carter declared their importance, they came to 73¢ (U.S.) per inhabitant per year; call it three days wages.  That is not nothing, but it is also not an economic revolution.  Over time remittances grew, peaking at $2.39 per person in 1913 — a bit more than a week’s labor for a male worker at 1910 wage rates.  Not nothing, but not the millenium, either.

But the indirect impact was huge.  First, it bolstered the growth of smallholders.  In 1897, an estimated 8,500 small proprietors held a bit less than 10,000 acres.  By 1912, 13,152 smallholders owned plots.   Assuming that the average size of holding remained constant, this represented an increase in smallholder ownership of 5500 acres, or over 22 square kilometers, five percent of the land area of Barbados.  By 1929, the number of smallholding households had further increased to 17,731.  Land ownership on the island remained astoundingly concentrated, but the percentage of Barbadians who owned property rose from 18% in 1897 to 40% by 1929.* 

Second, it supercharged the Barbadian banking system.  Barbadians opened 16,094 new accounts in government savings banks between 1906 and 1913, and deposits increased 88%.  In 1920, deposits per person surpassed $11.  That was a level of financial penetration about half of contemporary Spain and two-thirds of Italy; very high for a country as poor as Barbados.  It prefigured the island’s emergence as a regional banking center a half-century later. 

Third, it prompted the emergence of a Barbadian social insurance state.  The “friendly society” served as a form of insurance pool.  For a weekly fee of 10 to 12 pence, the societies provided their members with sickness insurance, unemployment insurance, death benefits, free scholarships to household members, and an annual “bonus.”  In 1901, there were 101 societies; between 1907 and 1910 a further 110 were founded, peaking at 260 in 1920.  Their membership grew from 13,933 in 1904 to 46,207 in 1920.  The 1921 census found that 156,312 people lived in households belonging to a friendly society.  That was 94 percent of the population.  Alongside the friendlies were the “landships,” which provided similar services along with ceremonial drills and uniforms modeled on the Royal Navy. Infant mortality continued to lag the rest of the Caribbean until the 1950s, but the societies aided a huge increase in literacy, to 93 percent by 1946. 

In the Zone

  The Panama Canal Agency took charge of picking the workers and getting them to from Barbados to the Canal Zone. Recruiting took place in Trafalgar Square, in Bridgetown, conveniently near the main police station.  Today the place is called National Heroes Square (although a lot of people use the old name) right outside the Parliament building. 

 
Agents went out into the crowd to interview and select potential workers. A doctor then checked the potential workers, selecting those who would receive a contract.  In 1907, Arthur Bullard described the scene as follows:

Several policemen kept the crowd in order and sent them up into the recruiting station in batches of 100 at a time.  As the men came up, they were formed in a line around the wall.  First, all those who looked too old, or too young, or too weakly, were picked out and sent away.  Then they were told that no man who had previously worked on the canal would be taken again.  Then the doctor told them all to roll up their left sleeves and began a mysterious examination of their forearms.  He saw that a few men had been vaccinated by him already, and these were sent away.  One protested that a dog had bitten him there.  Then, he went over the whole line gain for trachoma, rolling back their eyelids and looking for inflammation.  Seven or eight fell at this test.  Then he made them strip, and went over them round after round for tuberculosis, heart trouble, and rupture. About 20 of 100 were left at the end.

The selected migrants reported back to the docks a few days later.  After a second medical examination and a check to insure that every emigrant had a number that matched the one on their contract, they boarded the steamers, where they had to find deck space and food for themselves during the 12 day voyage to Colón.  According to a report presented to the Barbados Legislative Council, the atmosphere on the docks was fairly hostile towards the ruling class.  The crowds would “abuse whites and aggressively denounce them” before boarding. 

 
The anger was understandable, given the situation the emigrants were leaving.  Ironically, the departure of so many angry young men gave plenty of leverage to those who stayed behind.  One prospective emigrant was heard telling his co-workers, “Why you don’t hit the manager in the head and come along with we?”  His co-workers refrained from assaulting the manager, but there was a wave of plantation labor disputes, and the following song became fairly common:

We want more wages, we want it now
And if we don’t get it, we’re going to Panama
Yankees say they want we down there
We want more wages, we want it now

And what do you know?  Wages went up.  By 1910, the American consul in Bridgetown reported that agricultural workers received 30¢ per day, a 25% rise in nominal wages over the 1900 level.   More importantly, unpaid labor — remember the located labor laws? — basically disappeared.  Planters reacted to the new environment.  First, they started to employ tenant women in the fields.  Second, they modernized production.  In 1910 there were no modern sugar centrals on the island — intead, windmill-powered presses wasted upwards of 30% of the raw material.   By 1921, in contrast, 19 modern sugar centrals had entered operation.  Third, they mobilized politically to halt emigration.

Barbados had seen the emigration movie in the 1870s, when Guyanese and Trinidadian labor brokers began recruiting on the island.  That time around, it ended with the Emigration Act of 1873, which effectively prevented labor recruiters from operating in Barbados.  (My wife’s grandfather is from Barbados, but he left for Trinidad in the early 20th century.)  Emigration fell from 2,676 in 1873 to only 613 by 1876. 

This time the movie ended differently.  In 1906, the Barbadian parliament passed a bill giving Governor Gilbert Carter the power to halt emigration.  Two angry public demonstrations convinced the Governor to take the then-extraordinary measure of publicly proclaiming that he had no intention of using his new powers.   The parliament then demanded that he appoint a commission of inquiry into emigration; he refused.  Five years later, in 1911, Carter retired and returned to Britain.  The new Governor, Leslie Probyn, appeared to bow to planter pressure by declaring a ban on labor recruiting for Panama ... but he took no action to enforce it.  Barbadians continued to leave for Panama. 

Emigration, then, had palpable economic effects on Barbados.  It raised wages (albeit to still-low levels) and prompted the renewal of the sugar industry.  That is not nothing.  But there was another effect.  In fact, that other effect was why Governor Carter refused to appoint a commission of inquiry ...

Teddy Roosevelt and Spanish labor unions save Barbados, hate Barbadians!

  I don’t have a whole lot of emotional attachment to the madre patria, not where it counts.  After all, the parliament has passed a law giving the descendents of Civil War refugees the option to apply for a passport.  Yet I have zero desire to do it.  No, I have a negative reaction to doing it.  In other words, at the level where it counts, my people are the people of the United States of America.

But sometimes I can’t resist borrowing a phrase from my good friend (and great American) Carlos Yu:  “Oh, my peoples.” The story of the labor troubles on the Panama Canal is one of those times.

 
In 1904, the United States began construction of the Panama Canal in earnest.  Problem was, it needed laborers.  Lots of laborers.  Preferably cheap laborers, which ruled out hiring Panamanians.  (The Canal labor force would peak at more than a quarter of Panama’s economically active population.  Wage rates would have skyrocketed, even had that many people been interested in killing themselves to dig a big ditch ... which they were not.)  So the U.S. turned to the same place from which the earlier French canal effort had got its workers:  Jamaica.  Problem was, the Jamaican government remembered the disaster that was the repatriation of Jamaican workers after the French canal effort collapsed in 1889.  The Crown Colony government insisted that the Americans guarantee repatriation costs for any and all workers.  That ended the idea of using Jamaican labor; ultimately, only 47 worked on the Canal.

At this point the Barbadians, and later the Spanish, enter the story.

With Jamaica out, the Isthmian Canal Commission began recruiting in Barbados.  The first groups of Barbadians to arrive, however, proved too malnourished to accomplish their assigned tasks. “Not only do they seem to be disqualified by lack of actual vitality, but their disposition to labor seems to be as frail as their bodily strength.”   Governor Stevens himself wrote, “I have no hesitancy in saying that the West Indian Negro is about the poorest excuse for a laborer I have ever been up against in thirty-five years of experience.”  This should not have been surprising to anyone who knew about conditions on the island at the time, but we’re talking about Americans.  (Insert the first “oh, my people.”)  After bringing in almost 10,000 Barbadians, the Canal Zone management was disappointed with the results.

The Isthmian Canal Commission now decided to turn to, in the words of a Commission official, the “semi-white foreigner (Dago).”  Between 1906 and 1908, the Isthmian Canal Commission hired 8,000 Spanish workers.  It paid them twice what it paid Barbadians.  Now, it would be entirely reasonable to conclude that this was due to racism, but the Americans running the show weren’t particularly enamored of “dagoes.”  Rather, the higher salary was what they needed to offer to get people to leave the madre patria for Panama, and the Americans were willing to pay it because the Spanish were physically stronger and more robust than the half-starved Barbadians. 

The Spanish, however, were also the heirs to Spain’s militant labor tradition.  (Here is where the second “oh, my people” comes in.)  Spanish workers started the first major strike on the Canal in 1907.  The United States tried to use Italians to break the strike, but it didn’t work; they could only attract a total of 1,941 in 1906-07, after which they received no more.  So the American managers used the Barbadians to restrain the Spanish.  As one foreman wrote, “I could keep them both on their metal by rivalry between the two.”  The result, unsurprisingly, was an all-out riot between Spanish and Barbadian workers in 1909.  

Spanish militancy led the Canal Zone to replace Spanish workers by any means necessary.  The Americans pretty quickly figured out that Barbadian productivity rapidly rose to Spanish levels with access to enough calories.  The head of the Canal effort, a racist Brooklynite named George Goethals, reduced the work day from ten hours to nine in 1907, which lowered exhaustion, and required all workers to purchase three full meal tickets every day.  Previously, many Barbadian workers had chosen to subsist on sugar cane in order to save more money to send home — understandable, considering that meal tickets cost 9¢ ($1.98 in today’s money) and they earned only 68¢ for a nine-hour day, but terrible for their health and energy levels.  Add to that the fact that American foremen (with some head-banging from higher management, regardless of their own retrograde racial attitudes) learned to treat the Barbadians with some modicum of respect, and you can predict the result:  by 1909, the Americans were able to get the same work for less cash from the Barbadians, and stopped hiring Spaniards. 

The Spanish did not go quietly.  A violent wave of strikes rocked the Canal Zone in 1911 and 1912.  But the result was predictable.  (Oh, my peoples.)  The strikes ended with the complete replacement of Spanish labor by West Indians, mostly from Barbados.   By 1913, the Isthmian Canal Commission had brought in 19,900 Barbadians, not including the many women who followed their husbands and a continuing (if less well-recorded) migration as construction work continued after the Panama Canal’s offical opening in 1914.  In fact, the Canal would not be fully open to commercial traffic until 1920.

The ultimate migration turned out to be much bigger than 19,900.  In 1901, Barbados had a population of 195,558.  In 1921, it had a population of only 156,744.  Extrapolating from existing birth and death rates, the population of the island should have been 220,412 in 1921, implying a net outmigration of 64,000 people.  This obviously had massive effects on Panama (which had a population of only 450,000 in 1921, not including the Canal Zone) ... but what did it do to Barbados? 

Truth be told, I do not know for sure, but I have a strong guess, which will have to wait for a later post.  While we’re waiting, what do you think?

Why is Barbados such a nice place?

   Barbados is a very nice place.  The water is wonderful, of course:  the limestone makes it a turquoise color that simply doesn’t look real.  But it isn’t just the water that makes it so nice:  Quintana Roo and Yucatán also have very nice limestone-saturated water.  No, what makes Barbados especially nice is the society inhabiting the island.  Crime is low, human development is high, institutions seem to work.  It terms of ex-colonies, it is the anti-Congo.  The question is why the place is so nice.  

 
One answer, which I find unsatisfactory, is good macroeconomic policy.  In that view, Barbadian governments managed the economy particularly well after independence, and thus the island grew (relatively) rich.  The problem with that view is that many of Barbados’ unique qualities emerged well before 1966.  In 1960, for example, real primary school teacher salaries in Barbados were 31% higher than in Jamaica, educational spending as a % of GDP was 52% higher and real per student primary school spending was 2.3 times higher.  In 1950, its GDP per capita was the third-highest in the British Caribbean, after an off-the-charts already-developed Bahamas and oil-rich Trinidad.  It was a full 60% higher than Jamaica’s.   Barbados and Trinidad were the only two countries in which less than 40 percent of the labor force worked in agriculture.  (32% in both countries; the Jamaican number was 57%.)  Lifespans at birth were five years higher than elsewhere in the Caribbean (except Trinidad) if still only 56 years.   Other statistics are hard to come by, but the general impression is that for all the poverty — and it was widespread — Barbados had already diverged from the rest of the West Indies.

Except here’s the thing:  if you jump backwards from 1950 to 1900, Barbados doesn’t look so special.  In fact, the place was a disaster, close to becoming what we’d today call a failed state.  In 1902, facing riots, assassinations and economic collapse, the U.K. would take the unprecedented step of approving the 2008 equivalent of a £164 million relief grant (measured as a percent of Britain’s GDP) ... or in purchasing-power terms the modern equivalent £125 per man, woman, and child in Barbados. 

What had gone wrong?   

At the turn of the century, Barbados was not a pleasant place.  Subsidized European beet sugar caused sugar prices to crash during the “bounty depression” of the late nineteenth century.  As a result, the financial system of the British West Indies essentially collapsed between 1884 and 1899, as the merchant houses that had provided both working and long-term capital to the sugar industry disappeared.  The sugar price and resulting financial collapse drove down living standards, as plantation jobs dried up and imports (especially of food) became scarce.  Reports of hardship overwhelmed the Colonial Office.

The vast majority of the black population consisted of tenants who rented small plots from nearby plantations and also worked the main estate under the “located labor” laws that required labor from tenant farmers as a condition of tenancy.  Overpopulation and the located-labor laws resulted in very low wage rates.  In 1900, a male Barbadian agricultural worker on the open market earned 24¢ (U.S.) per day, at a time when farm laborers in the South Atlantic region of the United States — the poorest part — earned 36¢.   A craftsman in Barbados might earn twice that; a female agricultural worker less.   Child labor was common, at an average wage of 3¢ per day. 

Low and falling wages, not surprisingly, had a lot of bad consequences.  Death rates rose from 22 per 1000 in the 1860s to 29 in 1891-95.  An 1897 royal commission reported that falling wages meant that “the effort to keep the children at school is not so great as it was years ago.”  Low wages also meant that undernourishment ran rampant. Barbados operated on a food deficit, growing sugar to buy food, and the small gardens of its tenants failed to make up for the lack.  As a result, infant mortality was shockingly high, even by the standards of the British West Indies.  In 1900-04, for example, Barbados registered an average of 282 infant deaths per 1,000.  In comparison, Jamaica registered 171 and Trinidad only 162.  

In fact, despite its orderly appearance and reputation, Barbados appeared to be on the brink of collapse by the turn of the century.  Its revenues chiefly came from import duties on food.  The colonial government, facing bankruptcy, raised tariffs in 1896, which had the result of worsening the problem of undernourishment.   Unrest boiled over in 1898, when the outbreak of war between Spain and the United States sent the price of bread in Bridgetown up 20 percent.  Hundreds of people organized a “potato raid” against a plantation.  Three weeks later, someone shot and killed the speaker of the Barbadian assembly (and a major planter) as he rode home in his buggy from the capital.  The island might have erupted had a hurricane not struck a week later, “wash[ing] away all concerns except those of immediate survival.”  

London eventually approved the aforementioned relief grant.  In a desperate attempt to rescue the Barbadian economy, even at the cost of weakening the island’s imperial links, the British government also entered into hurried negotiations with the United States for a treaty that would cut U.S. tariffs on Barbadian sugar to 88 percent of the prevailing rate.   Unfortunately, in May 1902 the United States allowed the tariff-free entry of Puerto Rican sugar, and the following year Congress signed a treaty permitting Cuban sugar to enter at 20 percent below the prevailing rate.  Not surprisingly, Barbadian sugar exports took another hit. 

The Barbadian government (the Barbados parliament dates to 1639) also responded to the accelerating chaos.  In 1901, the Representation of the People Act changed the franchise qualification to £50 annually from all sources or £5 in rental income from land, which allowed (very few) blacks to enter.  In 1902, it established the Barbados Volunteer Force to supplement British troops.  The year 1903 was relatively tranquil in Barbados, with only the usual amount of potato raids, but the outbreak of the Water Riots in Trinidad made it very clear that fragility characterized what social peace that Barbados might enjoy. 

It is extremely unlikely that the British would have allowed Barbados to collapse.  After all, 9% of the population was “white” and a further 24% of “mixed race,” giving parliamentarians back home strong reasons to keep the place afloat.  Moreover, even had there not been a large population of self-identified “Englishmen,” neither domestic nor international politics would have made it easy for a British government walk away from its commitment to its West Indian dependency.  Nor is it clear that Britain would have wanted to walk away — the number of troops needed to restore order was relatively small, as were metropolitan relief expenditures. 

On the other hand, there wasn’t a lot to show that Barbados would overtake the other islands within a few decades.  Yet it did.  So what happened? 

Greater Trinidad?

  This is a strange story.  Sometime in 2007, the prime minister of Grenada tried to “associate” his country with the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, in order to get access to “Trinidad and Tobago's education system, health system, transportation system, et cetera.”

Prime Minister Patrick Manning loved the idea; he's been trying to annex his neig ... unite the Caribbean for some time now.  His cabinet, however, was less than thrilled.  “The only thing that the letter didn't speak of having access to was the Trinidad and Tobago treasury. But, of course that was an unspoken word. But clearly we would have been in effect minding Grenada,” said one former minister.  Another more colorfully said that the Grenadian PM was trying to get Trinidad “to pay his bills” and was “mamaguying” — mocking — Trinidad and Tobago.

As you might expect from reactions like those, it didn't happen.  But now there is another union proposal on the table.  The intention is to unite the OECS and Trinidad in something slightly more than the European Union but less than straightforward annexation.

I'll be honest and say that I suspect nothing will come of it.  Which is, I think, too bad. 

Barbados, Jamaica, institutions, and a great reason for a research trip

  There is a debate inside the economics profession about the importance of institutions, broadly defined.  One side of the battle holds that institutions are everything.  Countries can institute all sorts of bad policies and still prosper over the long run if they have “good” institutions — France is a common example.  A subset of this group likes to argue that a particular set of legal institutions is very important.  You can sum their argument up as “Common law good, civil law bad.” 

The “institutions as epiphenomena” side of the debate has mostly given up, with the valiant exception of Greg Clark.  That said, strong opposition still exists in the form of two arguments: “institutions aren't everything” and its subset, “legal origin theory is total [email protected]$#/t.”

One obvious experimental laboratory is the British West Indies.  Not a whole lot of good came out of the collapse of the West Indian Federation, but one bit of lemonade coming out of that lemon was that it left us with a collection of independent and quasi-independent states with a similar institutional background.  Now come two authors with a comparative paper on Barbados and Jamaica, arguing that it is macroeconomic policy, not the legacy of history, that explains the different paths of the two nations since independence. 

Are their arguments convincing?  More below the fold.

Reason to fear

I worry about Venezuelan government spending.  I just don't believe that oil prices are going to stay this high for long.

I could be wrong, but one of the things I learned in Venezuela was that Belize started producing oil in 2006.  They quite literally found oil on some dude's farm.  Production is now up to 3,000 barrels per day.  That's about 15 trips per day for a typical tanker truck.

Even more strangely, Venezuela gives Belize money through Petrocaribe.  Chávez, I would think, gets even less out of his spending there than in the rest of the Caribbean. He is, in essence, giving away money to up global oil production with only a very small claim on the corresponding returns. 

So, nothing in the global scheme.  But when prices are so high that Belize gets into the oil industry, you've got a tidal wave of other producers waiting in the wings.  They'll be high-cost, of course, so given the increase in global demand the days of $20-per-barrel oil are over.  In fact, I'd bet that the days of $40 oil are over.  But I wouldn't bet on triple-digit prices being with us for much longer.

Strangely enough, I'd like to be wrong.  For the planet.   

Big day

My father and I (along with a slew of other friends and relatives) are in Trinidad at the moment for some very very very important business, after which I'll be travelling for a bit and posting only sporadically, if at all.

For those of you who don't know him --- and I plan to start posting a bit about his experiences when I return to the States --- here's a picture of the grand old man and myself:

See y'all later!

In a Free State

Did you know that Trinidad almost became part of the United States?

OK, that’s not quite true.  What happened was that at a summit at Camp Rapidan in October 1929, President Herbert Hoover told Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald that the U.S. would cancel Britain’s war debt in exchange for Trinidad, Bermuda, and British Honduras.  Hoover only wanted Belize in order to split it up between Guatemala and Mexico, and nobody expected London to part with Bermuda.  (Strangely, MacDonald drew the opposite line at the summit, insisting on retaining Belize but showing no objection to giving up Bermuda.) 

The real prize was, of course, Trinidad. Hoover had worked there, the place had oil, and its location was perfect.  Between Trinidad and Puerto Rico U.S. planes could overfly the entire Lesser Antilles (and Venezuela), pretty much turning the Caribbean into an American lake.

How much did Hoover offer, you ask?  Well, in nominal terms, a little less than £1.0 billion.  In 2006 terms, £44 billion.  And as a percentage of Britain’s GDP, the equivalent of £254 billion today.  Not a bad deal for the U.K. 

MacDonald, of course, eventually said no.  Hoover later wrote that MacDonald knew that Hoover had previously suggested a moratorium on war debts, and therefore the perfidious British saw no reason to pay off what they owed. 

But what if MacDonald had said yes?

Newsflash: a most excellent election result

Well, I must say that this is good news, if it holds up.  But before I get to that, a picture of the suburban sprawl of the east-west corridor from a mountaintop monastery:

And now, the news:

PORT OF SPAIN, Nov 5 (Reuters) - Trinidad and Tobago's ruling party looked set to hold onto power after winning Monday's election for a new government in the energy-rich Caribbean country, preliminary results showed.  The results from the Election and Boundaries Commission showed Prime Minister Patrick Manning's People's National Movement winning 26 seats for control of the newly expanded 41-seat parliament.

In other words, the PNM won, but not by too much.  The magic number for most (but not all) constitutional amendments is 31, although it's nice to stay below 27, just to be sure. 

Of course, it isn't all good.  The UNC won the remaining 15 seats, wiping out the COP, which I think is not a good thing.  Mr. Panday's rhetoric, meanwhile, has ... well ... see for yourself:  “The people have lost and the 'mafia' has won. Crime has won, high prices have won and other problems in T&T have won since all of those things will continue. If that is what people want, well they will have it.” 

But what do you want, Canada?  Some sour grapes are understandable. I'll take the results.

A Million Mutinies Now

Trinidad goes to the polls tomorrow.  (Yeah, yeah, Tobago too.  Nobody who isn’t either from Tobago or employed by a multilateral lending institution could care less.)

The constitution has turned out to be an unexpected campaign issue.  The preamble, pictured above, is not the issue.  Rather, the issue is about the rest of the constitution — should Trinidad become more American, or stay British?  The government wants to adopt an elected executive presidency; the opposition accuses the government of trying to establish a dictatorship.  Ironically, the push for a U.S.-style presidency — and the American example is the one bandied about — came from groups worried that the current Westminster system gave the Prime Minister and ruling party too much power.  I won’t say whether events in the United Kingdom had anything to do with that conclusion in the (probably forelorn) hope of attracting commentary from our British readers. 

There wasn’t much evidence that the government took reform seriously — about all you could hear about the topic was from a goo-goo group at the University of the West Indies and two draft constitutions posted here.  But one of the opposition parties knew a good issue when it saw it.  One day, nothing, the next, accusations of “secret drafts” and cries of “dictatorship!” Much more fun than boring debates about the management of the Heritage and Stabilization Fund, or which highways should be widened, or whether it is better to hire lots more cops or lots and lots more cops. 

The irony, of course, is that by declaring that they’re against it, the opposition has made it more likely that it’ll happen.  Now if Patrick Manning wins the election he will — assuming his party gets enough votes — have a popular mandate to reform the country’s charter, something he never planned on until the opposition figured that it had an issue. 

The battle is between three parties:  the People’s National Movement (PNM), the opposition United National Congress (UNC), and the upstart Congress of the People (COP).  The big issue is crime, with taxes and constitutional reform coming up behind. 

Who are these parties?  Well, there’s the ruling PNM, created by Eric Williams in 1955.  Williams gathered a following based on a series of wildly-popular lectures he gave in downtown Port-of-Spain’s Woodford Square; his party united middle-class Afro-Trinidadians with the union movement.  Williams didn’t intend for the PNM to become the Afro-Trinidadian party, but considering as it was a group of Indo-Trinidadian politicians that he knocked out of power, that’s effectively what it became.  The PNM managed to survive the 1970 riots and strikes known as the Black Power Movement, and held on to power until 1986, by which point Eric Williams was five years dead. 

The Indo-Trinidadians, however, have had some trouble getting their act together.  Maybe not a million mutinies, but at least nine since 1956 — and that’s being conservative.  The first Indo-Trinidadian party, the Democratic Labour Party, suffered from continual internal splits.  It finally committed suicide by boycotting the 1971 election. 

Democratic Labour split into the Organisation for National Reconstruction (ONR) and the United Labour Front (ULF).  In 1981 the two managed to collectively win 37 percent of the vote — but because T&T uses first-past-the-post, the ONR managed to translate a 22% vote share into precisely zero seats.  (The ULF picked up 22% of the seats with only 15% of the votes.)  Realizing the problem, the two parties united as the National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR) and won the 1986 election — helped by the fact that the economy was in free-fall by then, and it was clear to all that the PNM had clearly frittered away the fruits of the oil boom. 

You’d think that would be that, but the NAR government’s decision to pardon the organizers of the 1990 attempted putsch caused the Caucus for Love, Unity and Brotherhood to bolt the ruling party.  The CLUB renamed itself the United National Congress — I have expressed before and will again my admiration for the political brilliance of that name — and won the 1995 election. 

The new Prime Minister, Basdeo Panday, was many things, but a uniter was not one of them (I’m not sure he was all that much of a deciderer either) and widespread corruption caused the attorney-general to walk out of the party and  contest the next election under the Team Unity banner.  (I won’t.  I want to make the joke, but I won’t.  It’s too obvious.)  Team Unity won only 3% of the vote in the 2001 election, but that was enough to produce a hung parliament.  And so the PNM shimmied back into power in the 2002 election, just in time to enjoy the fruits of the second oil boom—which they do not, I must say, appear to be frittering away this time. 

You’d think that the Team Unity experience might have gotten the UNC to hang together, but you’d be underestimating Mr. Panday’s stubborness — and legal troubles.  Despite a series of corruption indictments, in Port-of-Spain and in London, Panday stuck with his party ... and that led William Dookeran (the former central bank head) to join the Team Unity mutineers and form the Congress of the People, which has tried to position itself as a cross-racial middle-class party. 

Except, of course, Team Unity’s leader, Ramesh Maharaj, has now decided to reunite with the UNC under Mr. Panday.  Why his corruption now is less intolerable than his corruption then is not clear to me.  You gotta love it.

So you’ve got a three-way election between the PNM, the UNC, and the COP.  There aren’t a whole lot of substantive differences between the parties.  The PNM’s platform is, basically, “Don’t mess with success.  Plus, we made higher education free.”  The UNC, conversely, is running under, “We made mistakes, but you really can’t trust the black people, and crime!”  The COP’s platform, meanwhile, seems to be, “In your heart, you know they both suck.” 

The COP would probably fritter away more oil revenues in other tax cuts (except for gasoline) while the PNM would build more stuff — Flyovers!  Railroads! Houses! — and the UNC would hire a lot of cops.  “The government is in league with the criminals,” says Panday, with ... ah ... not a whole lot of evidence to back that up.

Me, I suspect I’d vote for the PNM ... but that may be because pretty much everyone in Amma’s family intends to vote for the PNM.   

There’s been some violence—especially against COP candidates, one of whom was badly beaten in Laventille.  (“What was he doing in Laventille?” asks Amma.  “Uh, that was the constituency he was running in, baby,” I respond.  “I repeat,” says Amma, “What was he doing in Laventille?”)  There have also been some accusations of fraud, none of which are serious by American standards, but which the PNM government has taken seriously enough to invite in a 27-person Caricom observer team.  Caricom observation, in fact, seems to be becoming standard in the West Indies formerly known as British (plus Suriname), which underscores Doug Muir’s point that anyone who believes that international relations are anarchical is an idiot. 

I predict that the PNM will win Monday’s election.  While Trinidad’s poor performance in Transparency International’s corruption survey has become an issue, the government has done a pretty decent job of managing the oil boom and setting the country up for the post-petrochem future.  (Assuming, that is, that the Bolivarian Republic doesn’t make such a botch of things that there is no Venezuelan gas for Trinidad to use.)  Crime is a problem — watch this space — but the opposition has been pretty short on magic bullets, and the government has gained credit by making solid headway against the one violent crime that it’s actually fairly easy for an even quarterway competent government to fight:  kidnapping for ransom.    Finally, free higher education will get you a lot of middle-class votes who might have otherwise gone the other way.  Combine that play for the “agency brown” constituency with the PNM machine’s lock on poor Afro-Trinidadian votes and the UNC-COP split for Indo-Trinidadian ones, and you’ve got the potential for a landslide. 

The real problem is that a PNM victory, as mentioned above, will have the side-effect of making constitutional reform far more likely.  Trinidad gained independence under a 1961 Order-in-Council intended to give the “territory” self-government under the West Indies Federation.  Other than a few cosmetic changes in 1962 — changing “premier” to “prime minister” and the like — Trinidad remained under the 1961 order until 1976. 

The 1976 constitution replaced the Governor-General with an elected president, and created a wide range of executive officers independent of the Prime Minister.  The reason was the Black Power Revolution.  In the wake of the events of 1970, there was a widespread feeling that the executive’s power needed to be curbed.  A 1974 committee recommended that a President elected by a two-thirds majority of an electoral college consisting of Parliament and all local government councillors sitting together and voting by secret ballot replace the Governor-General.  The idea was that the President would both select the Prime Minister and appoint the heads of various independent organs, in order to reduce the prime minister’s overwhelming authority.  (Cutting ties with the Queen was a side-effect, but not the cause of the change.) 

It says something about Eric Williams, I think, that he pushed through reforms that limited his own powers.  Now, not all of them — the 1976 constitution created a presidency elected by a majority of both houses of parliament, not a separate electoral college.  And the new presidency proved to be more partisan than intended:  frex, the PNM president appointed a PNM government after the 2001 hung parliament.  But the new constitution successfully weakened the Trinidadian prime minister by quite a bit compared to his or her British counterpart without paralyzing the government.  (Lib Dems, y’all might wanna take a look at the Trini constitution, I think.) 

But now there’s the executive president proposal.  Two drafts are in circulation.  To be fair, I prefer Trinidad’s current system to a more American-style one.  (Canadian readers, feel free to express smug satisfaction, but note that we here in the great United States have better weather, better roads, and better hockey players.  Plus, your flag looks like a badly-designed corporate logo.  So go take your health care and your sane politics and your lower crime and all that and ... express smug satisfaction.)  That noted, the two drafts differ on whether the executive president would be elected by popular vote or by the parliament, and the government seems to favor the latter.  So regardless of your opinion about a fixed-term executive president, the idea of an executive president elected by the parliament seems like a disaster all around, the worst of all worlds, and I hope that it doesn’t come to that. 

In other words, the PNM deserves to win — but not by too much.

Miguel Street

Or the Maracas Royal Road, as the case may be. This is where Amma and I are going to get married next June.

Welcome to suburbia, Caribbean-style.  Amma didn't grow up out there:  her family lived in the Belmont section of Port-of-Spain when she was growing up.  This house is a product of upward mobility and economic growth, not Latin American-style intergenerational economic aristocracy.  One sign of that (not visible in the picture) is that there is a chicken coop right off to the left outside the frame.  Yes, with actual chickens.  That lay eggs.  And occasionally get eaten themselves.

Amma was very disappointed to discover that most American suburbs will not let you keep chickens in your backyard. 

Here's a view of the neighborhood from ground level:

 

The above is really for you, Claudia, per your request in Washington. 

The Middle Passage

Is a nation more like a business or a family?

OK, now that I’ve got your attention, I’ll point out the obvious and confirm that the above picture is not from Trinidad.  It is, however, one zip code over from the old stomping grounds of Vincent Chase and the boys.  More relevantly, it’s in the middle of one of the largest Trinidadian communities in North America.

So, yeah, this post is about emigration.  The World Bank estimates that 361,596 Trinidadians live outside the two islands.  That number is so precise as to be obviously false, but it’s what we got.  Anyway, of that number, 55 percent live in the U.S. of A. (another 14 percent live in Canada), and of those who live in the United States, 13 percent live in Queens.  (Another 26 percent, of course, live in Brooklyn.  Yeah, Brooklyn!)

What can I say about the Trinidadian-born population of the United States?  68 percent of them are Afro-Trinidadian, 9 percent Indo-Trinidadian, and 4 percent Euro-Trinidadian, with the rest “mixed.”  The median household income is $40,168, or 90.4% of the median for the white native-born population.  Median full-time male wages are $33,000, or 90.0% of the U.S. median, while the same number for Trini females is $28,933 . . . or 108.3 percent of their native-born sistern.  Only 18 percent of Trini-Americans over age 25 have a bachelor’s degree or higher.   

Man, that bored even myself.  A (slightly) more interesting discussion below the fold.

A Flag on the Island

I had three more posts planned, but since the rightful owners are back, this will be the last one.  Interest in Trinidad and the West Indies seems limited, anyway. 

To an American unfamiliar with West Indian history, it seems strange that they aren’t one country.  The cultural differences are relatively small, the economic advantages obvious, and the geographic distances (save isolated little Belize, and to a rather lesser extent Jamaica) easily manageable. 

To an American unfamiliar with West Indian history, it seems equally strange that the islands aren’t part of the United Kingdom.  After all, their inhabitants wouldn’t have been there at all without Britain, their political traditions and institutions stem from the U.K., and both France and the Netherlands integrated their Caribbean colonies.  Hell, even the United States integrated its Caribbean colonies, giving Puerto Ricans citizenship in 1917 and Virgin Islanders the same thing in 1927.   

(The singular shameful non-British exception is Suriname, which the Social Democrats gleefully shoved out of the Netherlands on the basis of a one vote margin in the Surinamese parliament, against the wishes of 74 percent of the population.  A few violent strikes in Paramaribo provided a pretext, but the real reason was too many brown people moving to Holland.  By that “logic,” Dwight Eisenhower would have been perfectly justified in throwing Alabama out of the Union.  Ironically enough, foisting independence on the place managed to precipitate the very flood of migrants that the Dutch had hoped to avoid.  But I digress.) 

So what’s going on?  And what’s it got to do with the picture of the flags and the pretty lady? 

As with so many things, it turns out that it’s hard to say when the West Indies became independent.  The superficial story goes like this:  Great Britain created the West Indies Federation in 1958.  In 1962 the Jamaicans voted to secede, for reasons which had little to do with the Federation and everything to do with internal island politics.  After Jamaica pulled out, Chief Minister Eric Williams of Trinidad decided that he didn’t want a federation where Trinidad would pay more than two-thirds of the bills and possess more than two-thirds of the population but enjoy less than 40 percent of the seats.  Since Eric Williams was, in fact, Eric Williams, he summed it up with far more pithy arithmetic:  “Ten minus one equals zero.”  As a result Trinidad and Jamaica received independence separately, with Barbados and the smaller islands following along later. 

Except that the short version leaves out a key point:  Barbados, Jamaica, and Trinidad all gained de facto independence in 1944-49.   Britain kept some residual authority — although it’s not clear what — but in every way other than a seat at the U.N. all three islands (OK, Tobago makes four) were free countries by 1949. 

In other words, Britain decolonized and then tried to federate islands that barely traded with each other, shared no political institutions, and were ethnically distinct.  Political cultures also varied:  Trinidad had been deeply influenced by an invasion of tens of thousands of Americans, whereas Barbados was very self-conciously British and Jamaica possessed a long history of popular rebellion.

Eric Williams wasn’t against Caribbean union; he was just against Caribbean federation.  The reason was that a federation sans Jamaica would unacceptably compromise the rights of voters on Trinidad.  A Caribbean unitary state, on the other hand, he thought would be a fine idea.  To that end, Williams made an abortive attempt to annex Grenada in the late 1960s.  The attempt failed because it took a ¾ths parliamentary supermajority to change the T&T constitution, and few Indo-Trinidadian MPs were prepared to vote more blacks into the polity. 

Britain succeeded in shoving most of the smaller islands into independence under the rubric of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States, which took over such minor functions as foreign relations, trade policy, the currency, the judiciary, and most business regulation. (The OECS flag looks like a record cover from 1973.)  About all the national governments retained was a seat at the U.N.—except for one brief inglorious flowering of left-wing Grenadian nationalism that ended in a somewhat urgent fury. 

The scattered islands that remained "British Overseas Territories" in name gained independence in fact.  Britain finally got around to granting its overseas subjects the right to U.K. citizenship in 2002, but in an ironic turnaround, that didn't work in reverse.  Frex, the Caymans continue to restrict British immigration.  Even more dramatically, Bermuda not only continues to restrict British immigration; it continues to maintain its own conscript army.  It makes you wonder why any of the islands even bothered to declare independence, other than continual British nagging.  (Did the British know that they would eventually have to extend the "right of abode" to the citizens of their dependencies, or was it some form of misplaced idealism?)  

A broader Caribbean Community (Caricom) linked the islands in what they claimed to be a common market, except that it was so shot through with holes and exceptions to be meaningless. 

And so, both the British Empire and Caribbean unity faded away.  Except that they didn’t. 

The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council remained the supreme court of appeals for all the West Indian nations.  That is, a panel of British judges enjoyed the power to overturn local decisions, issue judicial orders to elected governments, and interpret constitutions. 

I’ve never seen a study that tried to determine if the West Indies gained from this additional judicial certainty—I’m not sure how you could design such a study.  (Ideas?)  But it seems like it should matter, somehow.

For the longest time no one questioned the costs of keeping a supreme court in Britain.  The Privy Council could adjudicate election disputes, pension problems, and key constitutional questions with nary a nationalist natter.  Even when Trinidad got rid of the Queen in 1976, in the wake of the Black Power Revolution, it left the power of the Privy Council untouched. 

That is, until 1999.  In that year the Law Lords had the temerity to delay the execution of eight Trinidadian criminals convicted of massacring a family in their own home.  That got people angry.  Did Singapore put up with some bewigged British do-gooding liberals telling them who they could and could not flog?  No!  So why should Trinidad?  Prime Minister Basdeo Panday (UNC) began campaigning to replace the Privy Council with a Caribbean Court of Justice. 

In point of fact, the Privy Council did not abolish capital punishment.  Rather, it ruled that Caribbean states must abide by their own constitutions, legal precedents, and international agreements—no more signing on to human-rights bodies because they sound nice, not in the Commonwealth Realms, not!  The murderers of 1999 were, in fact, eventually executed.  (Trinidadians will tell you — usually in a self-disparaging tone — that they were executed in defiance of the Privy Council’s orders, but that turns out not to be true.)  But that didn’t stop PM Panday.

Which brings us to the flag-bedecked Caribbean Court of Justice building in the photograph.  It’s quite ugly, actually, a carbuncle in the northeastern reaches of downtown Port-of-Spain.  It’s ugliness is relieved only by its festive pink paintjob and the banners of the Caribbean states, plus Caricom’s colorful new flag. 

 

The comatose chimera of Caribbean unity lurched upwards from its long slumber with the signing of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas in 2001.  The Revised Treaty transformed Caricom from a sentiment into a common market:  the so-called Caribbean Single Market and Economy. 

“So-called” because the CSME isn’t quite “Caribbean,” even if you accept that Caribbean = Caricom:  the Bahamas stayed out and Haiti was kept out.  It’s also not quite a single market:  unskilled labor cannot move freely.  Nor is it really a single economy:  the 12 members retain 7 different currencies, three of which float against the U.S. dollar and one of which (Trinidad’s) is pegged only informally. 

The above aside, the degree of economic integration mandated by the CSME is nonetheless impressive:  free mobility of skilled labor, capital, goods, and services.  A common market, unlike a customs union, can’t work without some sort of judicial process.  It requires common rules on product standards, bank transfers, educational and professional qualifications, and a range of other issues.  Common rules, however, are only really common rules when they’re judged in a common way.

Thus, Panday’s dream of a Caribbean Court of Justice manifested in 2005.  The CCJ’s first function, however, was not to replace the Privy Council.  Rather, it was to adjudicate and enforce the CSME. 

That is not to say that the goal of replacing those crazy liberal judges in London with a panel of good God(s)-fearing Caribbeans was forgotten.  It wasn’t.  In fact, the reason that Amma and I ran into a group of young American lawyers eating mariscos and fliring with each other at a roadside restaurant out past Arima, almost all the way to Toco, is that they were in Trinidad working to broaden the CCJ’s remit and turn it into the Caribbean’s supreme court of appeals. 

The catch is that uniting the West Indies is a bit like herding cats.  The CSME and common passport may be up-and-running, but the CCJ shows no sign of replacing the Privy Council.  Only Barbados and Guyana have passed legislation making it their supreme court.

There is a pattern here.  Barbados has possibly the strongest rule-of-law in the region:  it doesn’t need a right of appeal to a British court.  Guyana, conversely, is so screwed up on so many levels that the Privy Council probably provides about as much extra confidence as a rubber duckie on the Titanic.  It’s the intermediate countries, the ones that maybe gain from having ties to Britain but maybe don’t, that seem to be holding back on severing the last concrete imperial link. 

Jamaica provides an example.  Its former prime minister, Edward Seaga, went so far as to call the Privy Council “the best court in the world.” Seaga’s party, the Jamaican Labour Party, remains opposed to ending its jurisdiction.  The JLP, I should add, narrowly won the 2007 election.

Ironically, the Privy Council struck down a Jamaican bill in 2005 that would have transfered the power of the Privy Council to the CCJ—the Council ruled that the change required a constitutional amendment.  That puts a big hurdle on any government wanting to junk the Council in favor of the CCJ:  it’ll need either a two-thirds supermajority in Parliament or it will need to call a popular referendum.   

Even more ironically, Basdeo Panday — the fellow who got the ball rolling — now screamingly opposes the elimination of the right of appeal to London.  Why?  He faces corruption charges in T&T over an undeclared British bank account, and he thinks he’ll get a fairer hearing in Brooklyn London.  All of a sudden the imperial link doesn’t seem so bad. 

I’m undecided.  On the one hand, why mess with success?  On the other hand, there’s something strange about needing a visa to visit your nation’s supreme judicial authority. 

I’m also undecided about Caricom.  Caribbean unity is a good idea — but I’m not sure that there are that many benefits to be had from economic unity without political unity in the context of such small countries.  They’re all far more tied to the United States than they are to each other.

I don’t really expect much commentary here; there aren’t a lot of West Indians in our readership, and I’m not sure any of this is interesting.  Still if anyone has any thoughts on the Commonwealth formerly known as British, or the odd phenomenon euphemistically called “regional integration,” I’d like to read them . . . and I’d still like somebody to explain to me how Trinidadian courts can read American cases as precedent.

P.S.  I really did accidently write "Brooklyn" instead of "London" the first time I posted this and none of my West Indian draft-readers noticed.  (Neither did I.) I’m sure there’s some sort of deeper significance to that. 

Beyond Belief

Hinduism isn't the only religion India brought to Trinidad, of course.  Twenty-thousand Muslims (20,007, to be precise) arrived in the great migration.   

For reasons that I don't know, the Muslim population grew slowly at first, numbering only 26,000 as late as 1922.  (Conversion to Christianity?  Reverse migration?  Undercounting?)  After that, though, it began to swell.  It's now about 68,000.

Most of the growth came from natural increase, but conversion played a role.  In 1922, Indo-Trinidadians made up the overwhelming majority of Muslims.  Today, they make up only about 85%, according to the Guardian newspaper.  The remaining 10,000 are Afro-Trinidadian converts or their children. 

And that's caused trouble.  Trouble worthy of the phrase "beyond belief," trouble that would be downright hilarious in a comic opera way if it hadn't gotten 40 people killed.  More below the fold.

Among the Believers

Trinidad is a very religious country.  It's also very British.  These two things interact in strange ways that I'm only beginning to understand.

I didn't think this was a particularly British country at first.  In fact, I made the mistake of telling that to a proudly patriotic and most un-British middle-aged Trini individual. 

Oh boy did I get a talking-to.  First, the proper term here is "English."  You can refer to "Britain" and "British" until you're blue in the face, and they'll come back with "England" and "English."  This is especially true of the Hewitt family, who have traced their last name back to a Scotsman who came to Barbados in the 1840s and married a local woman. (His children moved to Trinidad.)  "We were both colonized by wankers," explained a film buff who also shared Scottish ancestry.

Second, it was pointed out to me—at great length and with no small amount of passion—that the "English" heritage lives on.  The school system.  The uniformed kids.  The parliamentary government.  The Privy Council.  The driving on the wrong side of the road.  The architecture.  Cricket.  Soccer.  (Although by that last count, Bolivia has a strong English heritage.)  And the blurry line between the churches and the state. 

Consider the Hindu temple in Waterloo, on a pier extending into the Gulf of Paria.  It's at the end of a road that passes by suburban bungalows on one side and an abandoned sugar fields—probably slated to become future bungalows—on the other.  The entrance to the temple's parking lot is marked by a modest statue of Sewdass Sadhu, the grocery-store owner who in 1947 built the original temple on the site of what's now a parking lot. 

More below the fold.

A House for Mr Biswas

That’s it.  That’s Mr. Biswas’s house.  Right behind the white car.  The street now resembles Union Turnpike more than anything in the novel, but the house is still there. 

Between San Fernando and Port-of-Spain lie the towns of Chaguanas, Waterloo, and Couva, the demographic center of the country’s East Indian population. 

When the British finally got around to abolishing slavery, the sugar plantations decided to import Chinese and East Indian indentured servants instead.  The Chinese soon stopped coming, because their government insisted on free return passage for its nationals.  Only 1500 arrived, mostly from Guangdong.  They now form an influential but small community of about 15,000 — a fellow named Dereck Chin built the island’s first multiplex, and as already-mentioned the NGC is led by one Frank Look Kin.  The white population — mostly Syrian Christian, with a few Portuguese and the strangely-named French Creoles, who are neither French nor Creole — is about the same size.   

The Indians, though, arrived in massive numbers.  By the time all was said and done, 150,000 of them had made a one-way trip to Trinidad.  Their descendents make up 40.3% of the population, as against a Afro-Trinidadian share of 39.5%.

Racial divisions shape Trinidadian politics.  The Afro-Trinidadian party is the People’s National Movement, founded by Eric Williams in 1956.  The main Indo-Trinidadian party currently is the United National Congress, founded in 1988 amid splits in then-ruling National Alliance for Reconstruction (NAR).  I think it’s a brilliant name, enough to hint at its ethnic base without ruling out the possibility of gaining support across the racial divide.

That said, the racial divide isn’t as stark as it could be.  21% of the population is mixed, up from 18% in 1990 and 15% in 1980.  Unlike the Guyana formerly known as British, communal violence is unheard of in Trinidad.  You see Hindu flags outside houses in mostly African suburbs—did you know that Hindus mark various family and religious events by flying colored flags?  I didn’t—and you can spot Afro-Trinidadians liming in most Indo-Trinidadian neighborhoods. 

It helps that most Indo-Trinidadian links to India have faded away.  Nobody knows what village their ancestors came from—hell, they don’t even know the state.  The Bhojpuri language is pretty close to dead, and spoken accents in English don’t appreciably vary between racial groups.  (I’ll admit it: it’s kinda cool when you hear a white guy or a Chinese fellow bust out in pure Trini.) 

Last year I found myself watching the Ukraine-Tunisia World Cup match in a run-down little bar in the town of Waterloo.  Most of the people in the place were Indo-Trinidadian, and the (Indo-Trinidadian) female propietor had hung a Union Jack over the counter.  When I asked her about it, she said, misunderstanding my question, "Oh, that’s the English flag.  Meh daughter and grandchildren live there, and we get a lot of English visitors out this way." 

Alerted, I began to spot "English" and Canadian paraphenalia in the area:  bumper stickers, posters, ads for cheap flights.  But links to India?  Nobody even seemed to know that Mittal was an Indian company.  One fellow sensibly-enough guessed it to be German.   

Migration has brought Trinidad many things, but special ties to one of the 21st-century’s emerging superpowers doesn’t seem to be one of them.

A Turn in the South

Point Lisas isn't the only must-see that Trinis will point you to.

Southern Trinidad’s central tourist attraction is a few miles south of San Fernando, in the suburb of La Brea, which is called that for the exact same reason as the eponymous neighborhood of Los Angeles.  It’s the "famous" Pitch Lake, the planet’s largest source of high-quality asphalt, what Trinidadians call the "eighth wonder of the world." 

If so, I wonder about the other seven, because Pitch Lake really resembles nothing so much as a badly-paved parking lot.  What’s the seventh wonder?  Newark? 

Hype aside, Pitch Lake is really neat, and worth visiting.  The surface is soft and warm, with tar right underneath a fragile skin and methane bubbling up.  Local kids bathe in the surphurous puddles—in fact, "swim" is a better word than "bathe," because some of the puddles are pretty damn deep—and workers dig up about US$50 million worth of asphalt every year. 

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that China buys half the output.

Finding the Centre

In a parallel universe San Fernando—"Sando"—is a cute beachfront town.  We don’t live in that universe.  It has nice enough suburbs, if a little ragged around the edges.  The city center though, not so much.  Downtown seems designed by a strip-mall developer told to worry about neither parking nor pedestrians.  But it’s certainly lively. Maybe a little too full of life, like an algae bloom.  Call it the anti-Ponce.

San Fernando, in the southwest part of the island, is Trinidad's second city.  As early as the 1950s, approximately half the city's workers worked in petroleum extraction or refining.  It's still booming.

So I suppose the city center is exactly what you’d expect from a boomtown that advertises a patch of boiling asphalt as its number-one tourist attraction.  I don’t know why I expected something more charming.  A modern air-conditioned bus runs there from downtown Port-of-Spain (for only 95¢!), down a modern highway, through modern sprawl.  Why wouldn’t downtown be equally modern?   

We were in San Fernando to visit Trinidad’s best Chinese restaurant.  To get to the restaurant from downtown we had to take a taxi.  

Taxis in Trinidad don’t work like taxis in most countries.  Instead of cruising for fares, they follow a fixed route, with passengers hopping in and out.  Something similar exists in Venezuela, called a por puesto. The difference is that in Trinidad all the street taxis follow fixed routes.  Look for the license plates beginning with a capital "H" for "hire," as opposed to "P" for "private."

Crowding into a car with total strangers is more intimate than packing into a minibus—here called a "maxi taxi"—or other form of public conveyance.  It makes for either extremely uncomfortable silences or great conversation, depending on everyone’s mood. 

In this case, it was great conversation.  The Chinese-Trinidadian driver was a garrulous fellow, and the three female passengers equally so.  When Amma told them that we were down visiting from the north, they reacted like we had just gotten off a jumbo jet from Canada instead of an articulated bus from Port-of-Spain. 

The south of Trinidad is rather more Indian than the north, and the Chinese minority is also much more visible.  The south also looks more prosperous, on average, but not significantly.  To  be honest, the differences aren’t that marked to an outside observer.  Perhaps the most notable, to me, was the prevalence of mixed-race groups of schoolboys. 

The "best Chinese restaurant in Trinidad" was all right.  Not great, but not authentic.  Which is to say, rather good.  Authentic Chinese food is an acquired taste that I have little urge to acquire ... something I share with, it seems, the population of southern Trinidad. 

I have thrice eaten authentic genuine Chinese food, once in New York, once in Hong Kong, and once in Philadelphia.  It was not fun.  Admittedly, ordering pigeon in Hong Kong was probably a mistake, but I've got no explanation for Philly other than that real Chinese food just doesn't taste very good to a Western Hemisphere palate. 

This does not apply to other Asian cuisine, although it may explain the Philippines.  Carlos? 

To conclude, I myself happen to prefer the second-best Chinese restaurant in Trinidad, which is located in a shopping mall right to the west of downtown Port-of-Spain, near the stadium.  If you’re ever in Trinidad, you can’t miss it:  it’s right next to a giant multiplex—the island’s first—and a Ruby Tuesday.  The food is exactly what you’d expect, and I’m not ashamed to say that I like it. 

Ah, Caribbean charm.   

The Loss of El Dorado

This post is dedicated to Bernard Guerrero.  And Carlos's aunt.

Trinidad is the sort of place when you ask somebody to show you the sights, they go out of their way to show you the industrial park.  "Point Lisas, mon.  Gotta see Point Lisas."  So we saw Point Lisas. 

It is quite impressive.  The place employs more than 11,000 people (about one out of every 50 working Trinidadians, not including ancilliary operations in the surrounding area) in a urea manufacturer, a chlorine producer, a lube-oil blending installation, a natural gas fractionation facility, 4 methanol factories, 10 ammonia plants, and one giant honking steel mill. 

The Point Lisas Industrial Estate (related to, but not quite the same as the eponymous port) started under the administration of Eric Williams, Trinidad’s first prime minister.  It could have been a poster child for the failure of 20th-century socialism.  The place took two decades to get running, and once it did its heavy industries managed to lose money at such a prodigious rate that the industrial park managed to play a large role in Trinidad’s debt-led economic collapse in the 1980s.

Past failure is not what makes Point Lisas interesting; certainly less interesting than its equivalents in (to pick two countries completely at random) Romania or Armenia.  What makes Point Lisas interesting is the place's present success, and what that says about Trinidad's economic and political future.

More below the fold.

The Enigma of Arrival

Let's turn to a different island. 

Trinidad!  This majestic isle, this historic land, this place of wonders, it grips the Western imagination with images of … of … of … uh … ah.

Isn’t Trinidad a city in Cuba?

No, Trinidad doesn’t occupy much of a place in the collective imagination of the English-speaking world.  Nor the Spanish-speaking one.  And while the plucky performance of the T&T team in the first round of the World Cup certainly changed my opinion of soccer, I really doubt that it changed too many people’s (lack of) opinion about Trinidad.

In recent travels I’ve tried to see how economic statistics translate into how things feel on the ground.  In the Philippines, for example, you could see the undervalued exchange rate in the low low prices, you could feel the screwed-up labor market in the prevalence of overmanned service businesses, and you couldn’t miss the impact of remittances in the form of giant McMansions sitting in the middle of otherwise impoverished slums. 

In Trinidad, the headline statistic would be economic growth.  Since 1995, the place has grown at an average annual rate of 8 percent—last year, in 2006, it grew twelve.  And this isn’t merely the dead-cat bounce of a once-rich petroeconomy:  GDP matched its 1982 high in 1999, only the fourth year of the boom.  The numbers are awesome.  They amaze.  They inspire.  Are they real?

An answer below the fold.