CARICOM nations have not achieved a high level of economic development, although they have been incorporated into the international economy almost four hundred years ago. It was believed that their low level of economic development was due to their economic smallness, but that theory has lost currency. CARICOM development has been circumscribed by external powers that have had little interest in promoting their economic development but, instead, in using them as global production platforms. This much has been admitted by the Moyne Commission that was sent out to the region in the late 1930s to investigate the causes of the social unrest and make recommendations. But global production platforms, as defined in this study, will not promote the growth of domestic inter-industry linkages, which are important to the development process. The now more developed nations used their resources to produce many manufactures or, if they did not have resources essential to the production of certain products within their boundaries, they were able to import them. Their industries became one another's customers. Sugar and bananas, however, CARICOM leading industries during colonial times, were never intended to become each other's customers; and, although some domestic industries—soft drinks, for example—use a small amount of sugar, the linkages established are insignificant. Some measure of agricultural diversification has taken place since political independence, but linkages between the agricultural and nonagricultural sectors remain weak. Industrialization, along with tourism, which metropolitan powers considered a way to make communism less attractive to the region, and which CARICOM governments viewed as necessary to reduce high levels of unemployment, to raise standards of living, to create inter-industry linkages and to earn much needed foreign exchange, failed to live up to expectations partly because most manufacturing activity consisted mainly of importing, assembling and reexporting products to metropolitan nations; and, when the region lost its wage advantage, many of the foreign manufacturing plants that spearheaded the industrialization effort left the region.

The inability of agriculture, manufacturing and tourism to deliver the expected economic benefits led CARICOM governments to integrate their economies; but, in promoting economic integration, they made no effort to change the extra-regional oriented production structure of regional economies—agricultural production geared mainly to metropolitan markets and a low-skilled manufacturing sector primarily assembling imported inputs for reexport to metropolitan markets.