Christopher Burgess | Education for economic growth

Jamaica’s ease of registering a business is often praised and mistakenly equated with growth. But growth is much more than ease of entry and is constrained by the limited available technical skills and the incentives that shape firm behaviour.

Mismatched education outcomes, outdated manufacturing capacity, and an investment framework that rewards firms with preferential access, fail to generate sustained growth that averages around 1% for over five decades.

The next phase of growth requires efficient institutions to produce at least three times more STEM-skilled graduates, manufacturing firms to adopt automation, and investment policies to enforce productivity targets. In successful economies such as Singapore, South Korea, Ireland, and Vietnam, these are highly coordinated by accountable governments.

Education and Skills

Jamaica’s education and vocational training systems remain misaligned with the country’s needs and weakly accountable for outcomes.

The 2009 Training and Workforce Development Plan aspired to build a workforce for a knowledge-based economy, noting that “present trends are clearly in favour of highly skilled technicians” .The plan acknowledged the challenges of low literacy and numeracy levels. Fewer than half of high-school students pass mathematics (typically 30–50 per cent). Unsurprisingly, of the more than 13,000 tertiary graduates annually, only about 11 per cent are in technical disciplines, reflecting a clear mismatch with the needs of the new global technology-driven economy. Meanwhile, 35–46 per cent of cohorts in Vietnam, South Korea, Singapore and Ireland pursue STEM courses, based on the OECD and World Bank. Jamaica is effectively training a non-technical society for a technical world.

The 2021 Patterson Report confirms that Jamaica’s education system funding is in line with peers, but outcomes are undermined by inefficiency, weak alignment, and limited accountability. It identifies weak mathematics performance at the secondary level and low participation in STEM at the tertiary level as binding constraints on development. The issue is accountability for the poor outcomes.

In a learning economy, training is driven by the supply from schools and vocational institutions and industry demand. South Korea and Ireland have restructured education in the classrooms and training in the workplace from the 1970s. Singapore introduced primary-school expansion (1960s), vocational and industrial training alignment (1970s), Primary Math Project (1980s) to support STEM-oriented students from Grade 6 and mandated at least 10 years of schooling (1990s) to produce a skills-based workforce. Vietnam strengthened industrial linkages by supporting skills training in automation and AI. Jamaica has made efforts through HEART but, with fewer than 10% of the enrollment in work-based programmes, these outcomes remain limited and insufficiently linked to industry.

To align with the global economy, Jamaica must address the poor outcomes from early childhood to tertiary level. Curricula must facilitate identification and streaming of those students geared towards technical subjects, and accountability in educational outcome must be addressed. Vocational training must focus on automation and applied technology linked directly to manufacturing, construction, agriculture, logistics, and ICT. The consequences of this skills misalignment are evident in manufacturing.

Manufacturing

Jamaica’s 2009 Manufacturing Sector Plan failed to improve competitiveness. Despite almost two decades of incentives, performance has stagnated, with Jamaica ranking 79 globally, placing the country behind regional peers.

Fortunately, Jamaica’s 2020 National Five-year Manufacturing Strategy represents an improvement. It places productivity and competitiveness at its centre. However, it still relies on incentives without enforcing export performance targets as conditions for maintaining benefits.

For Jamaica, meaningful gains in productivity will depend on transitioning from labour-intensive processes to automation and AI-driven production. At a 2025 cable manufacturing conference in Atlanta, manufacturers demonstrated AI-monitored machines where off-site operators receive predictive alerts. The need for technicians to manage automation and AI systems is rising. Similarly, a Europe-based client in Jamaica replaced a production and pallet-wrapping line, reducing the labour input from 21 workers to less than five and quadrupling the output. Manufacturing will have to upgrade to increase productivity, as the reliance on cheap labour has eroded.

While Jamaica has strengthened its incentive framework, it has not transitioned to a performance-based system where firms are required to deliver measurable outcomes in exchange for benefits. Current incentives, including export facilitation and SEZ benefits, have improved in supporting investment and efficiency but are not tied to enforceable export or productivity targets. In contrast, Singapore, South Korea, Ireland, and Vietnam condition incentives on measurable outcomes such as jobs and technological upgrading, with monitoring and withdrawal for non-performance through enforceable agreements.

Investment

The government, in clarifying Jamaica’s investment policy, developed the 2022 National Investment Policy. Broadly, it prioritised investment over productivity – through regulatory facilitation and investment promotion – rather than building productive capacity. Productivity is treated in the policy as an outcome of investment, not a requirement, and incentives are offered without measurable performance targets.

Growth depends on human capital, productivity, institutional quality, and competitiveness – not just attracting investment. The Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, and South Korea have achieved sustained growth of 4–8 per cent by aligning and enforcing these factors. In contrast to Jamaica, Vietnam and Ireland condition investment incentives secured through contractual clawback provisions and, in some instances, financial guarantees. These filter out firms seeking preferential access without performance and reward measurable outcomes. Without aligning incentives to outcomes, new investments risk reinforcing low growth.

Jamaica is not short of ideas – it is short on accountability and execution. Michael Lee-Chin correctly identified that, without accountability, even the best strategies will fail. Education outcomes remain misaligned with modern needs, despite significant public investment, manufacturing is not upgrading fast enough, and investment incentives are not tied to performance.

Jamaica must rewrite its education and training, investment, and manufacturing policies to align with a modern, productivity-driven economy, with performance targets, enforcement mechanisms, and accountability for outcomes. This must begin with education, recognising that transformation is a 20-to-30-year effort.

Building a productive society will require tripling STEM capacity from primary schools through tertiary levels, aligned directly with industry demand. In successful economies, these activities are coordinated and enforced. Until accountability is embedded across institutions and incentives are aligned with productivity targets, growth will remain aspirational.

Dr Christopher Burgess is a registered civil engineer, climate scientist, land developer, and the managing director of CEAC Solutions. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.