The Tribune

EDITOR, The Tribune,

The World Bank classifies The Bahamas as a “high income, developed country”, while the International Monetary Fund places our nominal wealth per capita as slightly higher than that of Japan. We have, in our independent history, never been a “middle income” country or even close.

If that comes as some surprise to both foreigners and Bahamians, it is because (in the case of the former) of persistent stereotypes about black people and their ability to govern themselves and, in the case of the latter, of our own politicians routinely (either by default, “regional comity” or plain ignorance) accepting and repeating a narrative about us that is self-evidently false. It also helps that most Bahamians have never visited a genuine “developing” country.

As a visiting United Nations official recently noted, this is the wealthiest majority black country in world history and the only one that, using standard indicators, does not qualify for any kind of international assistance.

Yet successive Bahamian governments have colluded with international agencies in a determined effort to redefine the entire way the world measures development in order to permit us and a few others to remain viewed as intrinsically and permanently backward and underdeveloped – and to suggest that no internal solution to these conditions is possible.

While no sensible Bahamian government realistically expects that anyone is going to actually give the rich Bahamas anything other than symbolic “aid”, they nevertheless pay repeated lip service to the idea in international forums.

The irony is that, rather than somehow benefiting us in the global arena, these symbolic efforts actually damage our international relations in tangible ways.

At present, Bahamians enjoy visa free travel to almost all “developed” countries. In this we stand out from the vast majority of countries worldwide. Much of that is down to the hard efforts of the once-and-present Minister of Foreign Affairs, Fred Mitchell, making the obvious case to individual countries that Bahamians are not high risk economic migrants because of our living standards.

The facts that we are a huge net destination of migrants and an even bigger net sender of remittances (including to the USA) speak for themselves in making that case. But the case surely took longer and harder to make because of the very kind of stereotypes about black countries that we promote when we go around pretending to be on the poor side of world development, notwithstanding our obvious wealth.

On the other hand, we also spend considerable sums promoting our jurisdiction as a stable, advanced and sophisticated destination for international financial services.

How do we square such efforts with our government officials then going around the world telling people (falsely) that the figures depicting high national development are inaccurate and we are actually quite underdeveloped, backward and in need of assistance?

We got some answer to that question last year in the predictably skewed and stereotyped approach taken by most US-based publications in their coverage of the FTX episode. Sadly, by constantly portraying ourselves as less developed than we are, we helped them construct the “why The Bahamas?” narrative, with its obvious racist subtext.

But probably worst of all, this fallacy harms this country by providing politicians with a convenient but false explanation for the many areas where we lag and fail relative to our actual wealth - creating an escape route for the real culprit: bad policy choices.

The most cringeworthy recent example of this was when the same UN official alluded to above tried (with great difficulty and awkwardness) to single out features of the Bahamian experience that would justify a new classification of nations to help keep us on the victim side, despite our wealth.

The two that she settled upon were interesting. Firstly, she noted (correctly) that, in the context of The Bahamas’ high cost structure, the minimum wage of $260.00 weekly is very low. And secondly, as a general matter, she noted (again, correctly) that our Human Development rating (though high) lags far less wealthy countries.

Yet both these matters are entirely within the power of the same politicians with whom she came here to mix and help find external excuses for our lagging outcomes.

Bahamian leaders continuously base their wage policies on the opinions of organizations representing business interests, rather than simply on the cost and wealth profile of the economy. The result is a ratio of wages to prices and profits that not only keeps our income gap artificially high, but suppresses economic growth by keeping money disproportionately in the hands of employers (who spend little), rather than employees (who spend everything they earn).

When you discount the dollar denominations and distortions posed by our high cost economic structure, and see the matter of wages in The Bahamas in comparative value terms, the reality is alarming.

A food store that charges two dollars for a banana pays employees the equivalent of 30 bananas a day. A hotel that charges $800.00 per room night pays employees the equivalent of less than half a room night weekly, despite often having more rooms than employees.

That is a situation that we maintain for no reason other than bad policy choices. Certainly no country that we would customarily call “developed” would make or maintain such choices.

On the bigger question of overall Human Development, our lag relates entirely and directly to our political choice to spend an almost world-beating low proportion of our national wealth on the needs of our population (18 percent, as against a 35 percent average) and to do so primarily at the expense of the poorest, since we also choose to exempt the wealthier among us from a near-universal world norm of income tax.

From these and other bad political choices we derive no economic benefit and nobody is forcing us to make them. But they are the principal reasons for the lags and failings that we then try to sell to the world as some innate condition of dark-skinned people from little islands.

ANDREW ALLEN

Nassau,

September 19, 2023.