Yaneek Page | Extraordinary wealth in a small economy – a confession

Every extraordinary fortune tells a story, especially in a small economy where wealth is easier to see than to understand. The question then is whether we have the collective courage to read it.

In Jamaica, wealth is discussed constantly but examined rarely. We whisper about it on verandahs, speculate over dinner tables, and dissect it in boardrooms after the meeting ends. Yet, beneath those conversations sits a harder question: What, economically, created it?

I have sat in enough rooms with entrepreneurs, economists, and policymakers to notice this pattern. And this silence may do more damage to an economy than any single bad actor ever could.

Here is, in my view, one of the most consequential economic questions of our generation:

Can a small, import-dependent island economy legitimately produce extraordinary concentrations of wealth without a corresponding expansion in exports, productivity, innovation, or foreign exchange earnings?

The answer must be grounded in empirical economics rather than opinion.

If the answer is yes, our think tanks, universities, and analytical institutions owe the public a map of the exact mechanism. If the answer is no, the public is owed an honest accounting of what is producing the outcomes we are seeing.

Either answer moves the country forward. What keeps us back is whispering, or worse, silence.

Accounting Is Not the Argument

Let’s deal with the numbers first because while vague outrage is easy to dismiss, mathematical calculation is not.

Jamaica’s economy runs on roughly J$3-plus trillion in nominal output, built by a labour force of approximately 1.5 million people, with GDP growth that has been cooling in recent years. Against that backdrop, a person accumulating over J$1 billion in wealth is not mathematically stunning. Any economy and population our size can produce a fortune like that through entirely ordinary commerce.

So the math is not, and was never, the argument. The issue is one layer under that:

What specific economic activity generated that fortune?

Broadly speaking, there are two economic models worth examining, and I want to state them in a way that is difficult to contort.

The Generative Model – The wealth traces back to export earnings, regional expansion, globally competitive services, technology, or sustained productive investment. Activity that grows the pie for everyone, not just the person holding the fork.

The Extractive Model – The wealth traces back to protected domestic distribution, state procurement, land banking, licensing advantage, or market concentration. Activity that redistributes an existing pie without growing it.

It is important to note what this framework does because it is intentional. It purposefully doesn’t accuse anyone of anything. It simply says that every fortune sits somewhere on this spectrum, and the spectrum is recognisable because every economic activity leaves evidence in the form of export receipts, tax filings, procurement records, land registries, and other public records.

Ultimately, this is exactly what makes my central questions above difficult to ignore.

This article rests on a simple proposition: Every extraordinary fortune has an identifiable economic pathway.

Understanding such pathways becomes a matter of public importance. Also, good governance makes it non-negotiable.

Now, let us peel back another layer, and it must be applied with zero regard for political colour.

Every mature democracy should be capable of explaining how politically exposed persons accumulate wealth while in public life.

If our independent institutions struggle to answer this cleanly, then we have found a conundrum that must be fixed. If it can be answered clearly, then confidence in the economy is further strengthened. I believe either outcome is progress.

Again, this isn’t accusatory. It is the same logic international financial institutions already apply through Enhanced Due Diligence on politically exposed persons (PEPs). They do not presume that every official is guilty. They recognise that public office structurally creates opportunities for conflicts of interest whether or not anyone acts on them. Removing that scrutiny doesn’t remove the opportunity. It simply removes our ability to see it.

There are some who may argue that this is purely an academic exercise, but it is not. Public perception drives behaviour, and behaviour drives capital.

Entrepreneurs calibrate effort against how they believe the game is scored.

Investors act based on how transparent and competitive they believe a market truly is.

Young professionals, like Samantha from my last column, decide whether to build here or leave based on where they can see real, merit-based opportunity and mobility.

These decisions rest on the same assumption that Jamaica’s economy runs on rules that can be audited, not merely defined.

If human capital, innovation, and risk-taking are truly driving our biggest fortunes, that is a national capability worth studying and replicating at scale. But if proximity to the State or to captured markets is doing the driving instead, we need to know that with equal clarity. We can’t fix an engine if we refuse to break down how it works.

Evidence Is Currency

There is surprisingly little publicly visible work attempting to map these pathways in a comprehensive way, which is precisely the point. We have a glaring gap. Whoever decides to pick up the pen first would likely begin by examining the following:

Export share of major fortunes – What percentage of large-scale wealth in Jamaica is traceable to foreign exchange earnings versus purely domestic distribution?

Procurement concentration – Among the country’s largest fortunes with any state-linked revenue, how much of that revenue came through competitive bidding versus direct awards?

Land and asset appreciation versus production – How much wealth growth comes from asset appreciation, land, and real estate compared with the sale of goods, services, or exports?

PEP wealth trajectory – Independent, apolitical tracking of net worth growth for public officials relative to declared income, published as a matter of routine rather than scandal.

New entrant mobility – How often do genuinely new players break into the top tier of wealth versus the same names simply compounding?

None of these indicators require naming a single individual. All of them can be built from records that already exist, so we move beyond a debate about personalities and engage economic design, which is the only debate that changes a country.

Every extraordinary fortune leaves clues. They confess how an economy rewards effort, allocates opportunity, and compounds advantage. Countries that refuse to read those clues eventually become prisoners of the systems they create.

Jamaica needs the courage to read the story its own economy is writing because we cannot build the economy we aspire to become until we understand, with evidence rather than assumption, the economy we already have.

One love,

Yaneek Page is the program lead for Market Entry USA and a certified trainer in Entrepreneurship.