In September, a Jamaican delegation will travel to Britain to place a petition in the hands of King Charles III. The request is quite specific: that the King, in his capacity as Jamaica’s head of state, refer three questions to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council on whether the transatlantic slave trade was unlawful, whether it amounted to a crime against humanity, and whether Britain owes a remedy for it. The petition is the work of Jamaica’s National Council on Reparations, and is taken seriously by the Jamaican government. Reparations has been formal government policy in Jamaica for over a decade, coordinated through a standing national commission and backed by the wider CARICOM Reparations Commission, which published an updated reparations manifesto earlier this year. The Culture Minister has called it a new legal phase of a campaign that enhances the work of Caricom.
In reality, however, it is a demand for foreign aid. Strip away the moral language and the mechanism is the same as any transfer scheme: a claim on another country’s treasury, justified by past injustice rather than present productivity, disbursed without any requirement that the receiving state alter the domestic conditions that limit its own growth. Jamaica does not need to relitigate the ethics of slavery to see the economic problem here. Six decades of development economics have already run this experiment. Aid transfers, even large ones, have a dismal record of converting into sustained growth in the recipient country, because money alone does not build the institutions, skills, or infrastructure that make capital productive.
The contrast with East Asia is instructive precisely because those countries were considered to be economic backwaters in the 60s. What separated South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore was not the scale of external transfers they received. It was technology transfer, pursued deliberately and bidirectionally. Governments sent bureaucrats and engineers abroad to study Western industrial and administrative practice and brought firms into licensing and joint-venture arrangements that facilitated the absorption of foreign know-how. Private firms did the same on their own initiative, sending managers to Western factories, reverse-engineering machinery, and building corporate structures modeled on the firms they were competing against. East Asians did not simply wait for capital to arrive. They worked with foreign experts to build absorptive capacity. That is the difference between an inflow of money and an inflow of the capacity to use money productively, and it is the difference reparations proponents consistently skip over.
Jamaica has direct experience of what happens when capital arrives without that absorptive capacity. For years the country ran into the paradox of high foreign direct investment alongside low growth. Money came in, but growth stayed flat, because it ran into a wall of binding constraints: inadequate infrastructure, a weak energy grid, low levels of human capital, bureaucratic friction, and a business environment that made it hard for capital to translate into productivity. The lesson is not that Jamaica needs more capital. It is that Jamaica needs to fix the constraints that keep existing and incoming capital from compounding. A reparations payment, even a large one, walks into the same wall. It does not build a port, train an engineer, or rewire a grid on its own; it merely repeats the FDI paradox at a different scale and with worse incentives, since aid dependent on grievance narratives has even weaker accountability mechanisms than commercial investment does.
What makes the reparations push especially wasteful is that Jamaica is sitting on a genuinely good story it is failing to sell. Its IMF-supported reform program has been one of the more credible fiscal turnarounds in the developing world. The IMF’s own assessments describe a decade of falling public debt, anchored inflation, record-low unemployment, and a financial system that has weathered repeated shocks, including hurricanes, without losing credibility. This performance was significant enough that the Financial Times ran a glowing account of Jamaica’s transformation, describing it as a genuine economic renaissance built on debt reduction and macroeconomic discipline. Public debt is on a credible path approaching below percent of GDP, a level most G7 finance ministries would envy.
This is the asset Jamaica should be exporting, not petitions. The Prime Minister ought to be on stages at the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies, laying out for a British audience of all places what a small, historically over-indebted state did to bring its fiscal house into order. Britain’s own debt load has been drifting upward for years, and a country lecturing London on fiscal discipline while London’s own debt-to-GDP ratio climbs would be a far more interesting message than another round of Privy Council petitions.
It would also do more for Jamaica’s investment brand than any reparations settlement ever could. Sovereign credibility is difficult to build and easy to squander, and Jamaica has built more of it than it currently knows what to do with. Rebranding the country as a serious, rule-following investment destination, on the back of a fiscal record the IMF and the FT are both willing to praise, is the kind of soft power Jamaica should be maximizing. Instead, the government is spending its diplomatic energy performing grievances for a domestic and Caribbean audience while the real asset, its credibility with international capital markets, goes unmarketed.
None of this is a case against Andrew Holness’s government, which has not governed badly. The debt numbers are real, the macroeconomic stability is real, and the reform program is a genuine institutional achievement. But governing well also means recognising opportunity cost. Every hour a minister spends drafting reparations manifestos, every diplomatic favor spent lining up CARICOM support for a Privy Council reference, is an hour not spent on the two things that would actually move Jamaica’s growth rate: bringing down the cost of energy, which remains one of the most binding constraints on Jamaican competitiveness, and building an international business court that could let Jamaica compete with London and Singapore as a seat for international business litigation.
Both projects would use the country’s hard-won credibility to compound future growth. Reparations diplomacy, by contrast, is a claim on the past that consumes present-day state capacity for a payoff that, even in the best case, would arrive as an unconditional transfer into the same absorptive-capacity constraints that already blunt Jamaica’s FDI. Jamaica has spent a decade learning the discipline of not asking for money it hasn’t earned the capacity to use. It would be a strange time to forget that lesson.
