Small Caribbean Community economies keep turning in weak performance — low productivity, low competitiveness, too little diversification. Persaud-Ready examines that problem through Jamaica and Haiti, asking what migrant remittances, foreign direct investment and national competitiveness scores have to do with growth across the thirty years from 1987 to 2017.

The conceptual frame draws on several propositions: that remittances lift GDP growth in less financially developed countries, that the gain shrinks when the money goes to consumption, that foreign direct investment raises growth, and that competitiveness and growth are linked. Secondary data are analysed with inferential statistics. Tests show a strong relationship between growth and all three variables in both countries, with trade openness, financial development, productivity and economic freedom emerging as important determinants too.

Recommendations follow for both countries: engage the diaspora to draw more remittances and channel them into productive investment, strengthen democratic institutions to build investor confidence, and act to attract and keep skilled people.

Liberalization has been among the most widely prescribed growth strategies in the developing world for three decades, and Haiti, like many of the least developed countries, has been applying it for twenty years. The condition Haitians live in now is reason enough, in Despeignes's view, to ask whether the neoliberal plan worked.

Agriculture is the test case, chosen because the sector is central to the Haitian economy, and the evaluation asks what opening trade did to farm output.

The answer is unfavourable on both counts. Trade liberalization has damaged Haitian agriculture rather than helped it, and the harm fell hardest on food crops — the portion of output that supplies income to the rural poor and underwrites food security. Nor did the anticipated offsetting gain appear: production of cash crops did not rise under liberalization either.