Holness cites Dubai and Singapore as models for Jamaica’s development push

Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness has held up Dubai and Singapore as development models for Jamaica, arguing the island must shift from attracting visitors to becoming a place where people choose to live, work, and invest permanently.

But he warned that the transformation would require a fundamental change in attitudes toward productivity, wages, and labour.

Dubai, a city-state in the United Arab Emirates, and Singapore, the Southeast Asian financial hub, are among the most celebrated examples of rapid economic transformation this century.  They have leveraged strategic location, institutional discipline, and openness to foreign talent and capital to become global centres of commerce, finance, and high-end living within a matter of decades.

"Jamaica could become Dubai or Singapore," Holness told the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce 41st Annual Awards Banquet on Thursday night. “…where we are today, it is totally different from the 70s.”

He added: "If our economy grows, we might have to bring people in to keep the economy turning over. And, can you imagine that Jamaica has reached that stage?"

The Prime Minister pointed to Cayman Islands and Antigua and Barbuda as closer regional examples of small economies that had drawn on imported labour to sustain growth and a economies, he noted, t “have taken our labour to build their industries”. 

"We must not see ourselves as closed, insulated, xenophobic, isolated. We have to see ourselves as a country where people want to come and live. And we must embrace them," he said.

Holness said the island's traditional tourism model, built around short-stay visitors, needed to be fundamentally reimagined. Tourism is a primary driver of Jamaica's economy 

"The model of development and growth for many years has been how many visitors can we have in tourism. That model needs to shift. It has to be how many people can we get to come and live in Jamaica," he said. "It's not just the one-off five-day tourism dollar that gets circulated out of the country. We want people to come here and live and spend and hire and create and do business."

He linked that vision directly to Vision 2030, Jamaica's national development plan launched in October 2007, describing its goal as making Jamaica "the place of choice to live, work, do business, raise family, and retire in paradise."

But Holness identified crime, poor infrastructure, and a national productivity problem as the core obstacles to realising that vision.

"Get the crime down, get the efficiency up, clean up the streets, start the reinvestment, you won't have a hard time to sell Jamaica," he said.

On productivity, Holness argued that Jamaica was trapped in a vicious cycle in which wage increases divorced from productivity gains simply drove inflation. 

"If wages don't match productivity and you increase wages, it's inflationary. It means you're going to come back again next year, ask for more wage increases because prices have increased, and you come back again the following year, and you're caught in this vicious cycle which we have been caught in for the last 40 years," he said.

Jamaica, he noted, ranks third lowest in the region for productivity, a fact he described as central to the country's inability to grow wages sustainably or compete effectively with its peers.

"Productivity is the heart of growth. It is how we turn effort into value. It is how wages rise without pushing prices out of control," he said, adding that improving productivity "must become a national habit" for both government and business.

During his Budget Debate presentation in March, Holness told lawmakers that Jamaican workers contribute an average of US$8.81 to GDP per hour worked, less than half the Caribbean regional average of US$20.50, roughly a fifth of what prevails in the United States, and barely a quarter of the output of a worker in Trinidad and Tobago.

"This is not a judgement on Jamaican workers," he said. "It is a diagnosis of our economic structure."

During his speech on Thursday, the prime minister also flagged a paradox emerging in the labour market, one that he said was becoming a constraint on growth. Despite record low unemployment, business leaders were telling him they could not find workers.

"Every day a business person said to me, 'Listen, Prime Minister, I cannot find people to work. But when I go out into the field, I see a lot of people not working,'" Holness said.

He called for a “new labour policy” suited to an economy approaching full employment, and urged the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce to become stronger advocates on the issue. 

He said they were to move beyond lobbying to engaging workers and customers directly in a broader national conversation about the relationship between work, wages, and economic growth. 

Jamaica’s unemployment rate stood at 3.6 per cent in January 2026, the Statistical Institute of Jamaica reporter in March, down slightly from 3.7 per cent recorded in January 2025.

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