CAPRI Commentaries

When USAID closed its mission in Jamaica earlier this year, many civil society organisations—such as NGOs, advocacy groups, and service providers—faced an uncertain future. Similarly, many think tanks and policy research institutes worldwide share this view, as aid budgets shrink and political priorities shift. At CAPRI, however, we were not affected. Not because we never received USAID funding, but because even if one of our foreign donors were to pull out suddenly, our work would continue uninterrupted. Why? Because we have a source of untied core funding from the Jamaican private sector.

The question of financial sustainability…

The Minister of National Security's recent budget presentation was largely focused on the ongoing decline in Jamaica’s murder rate and the role of the Jamaica Constabulary Force (JCF) in targeting gangs, the main perpetrators of armed violence in Jamaica. The Minister highlighted the considerable increase in investment in the JCF, as well as the force’s evolving approaches to gang elimination. He mentioned that the JCF is employing “Lattice Theory” to gain insights into the dynamics of criminal networks to inform gang eradication efforts.  

The Prime Minister recently announced that his administration’s economic policy focus will “pivot” from stabilisation to driving economic growth through boosting labour productivity. Productivity is a widely misunderstood concept that warrants clarification, if we are to better understand what policy efforts might improve it.  

Productivity neither “drives” nor “causes” economic growth: rising productivity is economic growth. They are two ways of describing the same phenomenon. The…

Amid Jamaica’s record-low unemployment and a tightening labour market, the 411,000 working-age individuals currently classified as “outside the labour force” seem to represent a source of untapped productive potential. CAPRI’s latest report, “Outside In,” examines the 35 percent of the working-age population, aged 18 to 70, who are neither employed nor seeking work, exploring the factors that contribute to their disengagement from the labour market. While the temptation exists to view this large group of non-participants as a potential labour pool ready to be…

Ask ChatGPT to analyse any policy problem and it will invariably identify multiple possible “root causes” and recommend a “comprehensive”, “holistic”, or “multifaceted” cocktail of policy solutions. The AI’s training data reflects the bias of contemporary policy discourse: we tend to reason that policy problems that appear complex warrant commensurately layered solutions. However, this logic is flawed, and often employed to dismiss targeted policy proposals as mythical “…

The 10th Biennial Jamaica Diaspora Conference recently convened over 1,200 attendees in Montego Bay to discuss strengthening engagement between Jamaica and its diaspora. Key stakeholders, including government officials, private sector leaders, local Jamaicans, and Jamaicans living abroad, emphasized the call for diaspora members to "come home". This call raises two critical questions: …