Description
In this book, From State to Markets: Journey of the Jamaican Economy, the author has produced a comprehensive
and up-to-date work on the development of Jamaica’s modern economy from Independence to the present. This
journey of the Jamaican economy, described in magisterial style by Cezley Sampson, did not begin in 1962, but had
its antecedents in 300 years of British colonial rule, characterized by a dominant sugar monoculture, monopolistic
control of essential services and industries, dependence on imperial trading preferences and an underdeveloped
Public Service that was neglectful of the rural poor in particular.
Sampson traces the post-independence development of Jamaica’s public sector and public enterprises, in the areas
of competition policy, law and institutions and in the provision of essential services of health, education and water.
He outlines in meticulous detail, the reform processes undertaken by the different political administrations that
have resulted in the creation of executive agencies and the plethora of regulatory institutions that are today,
essential parts of Jamaica’s economic governance landscape.
But the work does more than that; it provides a sweeping history of the country’s economic experience of what the
author describes as the ‘socialist economic policy adventure of the 1970s’ and its replacement by a take-over of
Jamaica’s economic policymaking into a forcible clientelist relationship with the International Financial
Institutions in the period of the 1980s and beyond. However, starting in the decade of the 1990s, the country was
able to gradually free itself from the grip of the Washington Consensus with their advocacy of supply-side
economics and, through a process of privatisation, begin to transition into the market driven economy that we
know today.
The book tells the story of the privatisation of the Jamaican economy through case studies of six core sectors of the
economy namely Aviation (Air Jamaica and the two international airports); Agriculture (divestment of sugar-
producing enterprises); Telecommunications liberalisation; Financial sector liberalisation and the privatisation of
National Commercial Bank; Electricity sector liberalisation and regulation; and Public/Private partnership in the
Road Sector.
An outstanding feature of this work is the range of reference material the author has gleaned from published
works by the country’s leading economists as well as reports from state agencies Ministry Papers and other official
documents, supplemented by numerous maps, tables, graphs and other statistical material.
Cezley Sampson, CD is Director of Privatisation and Regulation at London Economic Ltd. He holds a PhD
in Public Affairs Economics from The University of the West Indies and an MA in Marketing from
Lancaster University, UK. Dr Sampson has served as policy advisor under four different Jamaican prime
ministers and five portfolio ministers and was the first Director of the Mona School of Business, UWI. He
is the author of over 60 consultancy publications, book chapters and Journal articles. He is married to
Faye Sampson an attorney-at-law and currently resides in the UK.
