Varieties of Caribbean Capitalism and Income Inequality: The cases of Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago

With Collin Constantine

This research looks at the cases of Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago – extreme examples of trade openness – and employs a mixed-methods approach to understand the drivers of their functional income distribution. We are especially interested in how trade openness, finance, remittances, ethnic and gender diversity affect their wage shares. This is an important departure from the existing literature, which largely focuses on advanced countries and the class dimension of income inequality. To this end, a burgeoning body of empirical work –pooled statistical analyses – provides compelling evidence on how broader economic liberalisation has contributed to rising income inequalities during the last four decades. However, this empirical approach of panel studies overlooks numerous cross and intra-regional institutional diversities that regulate functional income inequality.