How did we miss this?
Reuters AlertNet – Caribbean murder rates hurting growth – World Bank
MIAMI, May 3 (Reuters) – The tourism-dependent Caribbean may now have the world’s highest murder rate as a region, severely affecting potential economic growth, the World Bank and a U.N. agency said in a report on Thursday.
Blaming most of the violent crime in countries like Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago on the trafficking of Colombian cocaine to Europe and the United States, the report said the region’s homicide rate of 30 per 100,000 inhabitants a year was higher even than troubled southern and western Africa.
Probably because we were too busy navel-gazing and trying to decide who won the election.
Prophetic, though, isn’t it?
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The World Bank is totally correct.Definitely, there is a stong correlation between economic growth and crime (murder rate).Thirty murders per one hundred thousand inhabitants each year for the region is just mind boggling.At this rate both local and foreign investors are reluctant to invest capital and other resources in such states.It is extremely difficult to fathom that the regions murder rate exceeds even troubled areas in Africa.
You have found the report now, which is more important. Jamaica sitting at some 50 murders per 100,000 is being chased and The Bahamas is catching fast, with 25 per 100,000 so far in 2007. Many of the conditions that support the high urder rate in Jamaica are also present in Bahamas (eg, access to firearms, drug transit and large proportions of disaffected men from dysfunctional families where only one parent at best is present) and I would be concerned that in neither country has there been a good recognition yet of what the root causes are and that criminals are the result of social failings, especially to do with disintegrated families.
Adding to the trouble in The Bahamas is that large numbers of these young men are stateless individuals, and we continue to refuse to recognize or address this problem. The children of illegal immigrants are Bahamian in culture and thinking but are not Bahamian citizens. It’s a travesty that has to be addressed, our xenophobia notwithstanding.
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