scot47

All over the media in Britain today

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-new...ested-12792676

Is Jamaica a dangerous place ?

uk_grenada

scot47

I am not in the WI, Just curious. I wonder why people choose to live in places with a "reputation".

uk_grenada

scot47

Indeed Why are people still living there ?

Gordon Barlow

Nice response from UK_Grenada! (Incidentally, Scot, I presume you meant "expats" or maybe "expat retirees" when you wrote "people".) But as with every place in the world, there are safe areas and unsafe ones. My wife and I still have in mind to move to Mexico if our present home gets too expensive for us - and Mexico has a terrible reputation. Naturally enough, we have looked into where in Mexico would be safe, and where not. Any expat living and/or working in any Caribbean island has probably chosen his locality carefully. And sometimes one can be just plain unlucky, like that English couple was..

When one is working for a living, one is inclined to take a few risks. Back in the early '90s I applied for a job in the tax-haven department of the government in Liberia, and if the wage had been high enough I would have taken it. Liberia is run by the CIA, but I was a bit desperate at the time - though not desperate enough to do it for US$70K a year! (The job went to a Scotsman living in Jamaica at the time. I spoke with him a few years later and asked how it was for him. It was OK, he said, "except for the civil war...")

uk_grenada

Gordon Barlow

When I first got to Nassau in 1967, all the British banks' expats were employed on the African model: three months' home leave every two years (airfares paid), and three weeks' local leave in between, and bank-provided car and accommodation. I was locally hired (and actually on my way back to Australia from Canada), but a bank's subsidiary Trust Company hired me on the same terms. Tim Somebody and his family were away on their "long leave", so my new bride and I were moved into Tim's house until he came back - and we were allowed to use Tim's car as well! The same year that I arrived, the banks abandoned the African system and moved to something more modern - housing allowance, car allowance, a month's vacation every year, and cash instead of airfares. A friend of mine who worked for Barclay's thought he'd died and gone to heaven, receiving the same "hardship" perks in the Caribbean as he had in Nigeria!

scot47

Gordon "Expats" are people too. Well, most of them.

jean1947

Yes it is. We are our own worst enemy. 1600 murdered last year. Everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. The day they got Independence was the beginning of the end for Jamaica, they would vote to be under British rule again if asked. hahahaha.

Gordon Barlow

When Jamaica became independent in 1962, its "Dependency" of the Cayman Islands was allowed to remain a colony of Britain. Cayman continued to use the Jamaican Dollar until 1972, when it (Cayman) initiated its own dollar - a coupon-currency only, since it had no Central Bank, just a currency-issuing "Monetary Authority". At the time, the J$ and the CI$ were each worth ten shillings sterling, I think, which was then US$1.20. The CI$ is still worth US$1.20 (to the annoyance of US visitors in Cayman!), but the J$ is worth less than a cent US. That illustrates clearly how badly Jamaica has been governed since independence - especially during the '70s when socialism was running wild. (Jean, please correct me if I'm wrong anywhere there! I haven't studied the history.)

It's a beautiful country, with (mostly) fine and charming people, but... I don't think the voters would ever go back to being a colony, but they could certainly do with a few more honest and competent politicians, and a decent long-term economic plan.

scot47

Gordon if you find a supply of those "clean and honest politicians", let us know

Pistolpete2

The problem is that in developed economies, the smart guys run successful businesses that make money, pay taxes and export in spite of the crummy politicians who say they help business but only hinder it.

In the Caribbean, you can offer tourism - easy, so long as you keep your island safe, but in terms of trading and exporting into the broader world you need political leaders who have some sort of business acumen and vision - to facilitate international trade - and since most are typically lawyers or losers they are clueless about business and so the island economies never diversify. Money can only circulate for so long when you are sucking in imports of just about everything and not exporting much or otherwise earning foreign exchange. Also, foreigners own pretty much everything but wouldn't want to own it if they had to pay even fair taxes. Ring any bells?

Like here in Weymouth, there are no meaningful jobs particularly for males, because there is nobody of influence - most certainly not the useless local MP - who could come up with some sort of long-term vision so that the building blocks are in place to create local employment opportunities.

Gordon Barlow

Nobody minds paying what they consider "fair taxes", Pete; but there is quite a difference between what those clueless politicians reckon is "fair" and what foreign investors reckon. The latter tend to get a bit p'd off when asked to pay taxes that didn't exist when they made their investments. Tax-rates on income or profits or land tend to be raised according to the wants of politicians - and "fair" is too flexible a term to mean anything.

Definitions of "fair" differ among the territories. Here in Cayman, everybody dismisses taxes on incomes, profits and land as "not fair", and our politicians dare not argue too strongly against that opinion. So we don't have any of those taxes (although we do have others, e.g. all imports are heavily taxes . Cayman is what's called an "offshore tax-haven", and our "offshore" clients provide our politicians with more money than they can sensibly spend. Lucky old us - except that any of the other islands could do the same, if their pollies had any imagination.