This study attempts to explain why CARICOM (Caribbean Community) nations, despite their incorporation into the international economy almost four hundred years ago when all nations were at a relatively low level of development, have attained little meaningful economic transformation. Rejecting the theory that economic smallness determines a nation's economic development, the study examines some leading sectors that are common to all CARICOM nations and tries to determine why they have had minimal spread effects to the rest of regional economies and put them on a path to self-sustained growth. It also tries to determine why the agricultural and manufacturing sectors have not had the impact on the integration movement by generating the dynamic gains predicted by economic theory. Furthermore, it argues that the economic and social structures formed during colonialism, which have become so deep-rooted that regional governments have had great difficulty changing them, also contribute to the low level of economic transformation in CARICOM nations. Moreover, CARICOM nations have not accumulated the knowledge skills that are replacing low-skilled labor in production processes, which are creating a competitive advantage for nations and which are promoting economic growth and the structural transformation of economies.

Caribbean colonies were established to produce agricultural commodities for export to the colonizing nations from which they imported virtually all the food and manufactures they consumed. But the more than three-hundred year metropole–colony relationship resulted in poor economic and social conditions in the colonies, which contributed to regional underdevelopment. The report published in 1945 by the West India Royal Commission, sometimes referred to as the Moyne Commission after its chairman Lord Moyne, described the colonies as monocultural, a feature that defined them soon after colonization, producing primarily sugar that offered little hope of creating jobs for the unemployed or for an expanding labor force. In addition, housing conditions were said to be in many instances unfit for human habitation; health conditions were very poor; medical departments were handicapped by a lack of funds; and, the diets of the poor were often insufficient and ill-balanced, although, the Commission noted, nutritious foods of all kinds could be produced in all of the Caribbean colonies without much difficulty.