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SIR Arthur Lewis, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1979, of St Lucia, was one of the most brilliant economists of the 20th century. Lloyd Best, a Trinidadian economist, described Lewis as “a fully committed West Indian and a paragon of industry.”
Lewis was a catalyst for sociopolitical, economic and intellectual revolutions. He certainly must be credited for the evolution of the modern West Indies. Despite avoiding party politics, it would be an injustice to assume that Arthur Lewis was a conservative intellectual and not a radical.
Lewis boldly championed the cause of the working class. He was affiliated with the left-wing Fabian Society in London, and in 1938 they published his seminal work – Labour in the West Indies – The Birth of a Workers’ Movement. In this publication, Lewis sympathised with the workers’ struggles, condemned their exploitation and emphasised the imbalance of the profits of the oil companies and the workers' wages.
Has this exploitation changed in 2025? No. Look at the use of cheap labour from China in our construction industry and programmes as Cepep in which lower-class workers are not unionised and kept in a state of dependency.
Regarding inflation and our weak dollar, maybe we should heed the advice of Lewis in September 1977 at a prestigious lecture in Washington, “An economy with weak control over its internal prices is likely to find itself on a treadmill, where devaluation raises domestic money, incomes and prices, so setting off further devaluation…”
Lewis always believed that agriculture was crucial in development but industrialisation was the future of the region. He emphasised this in two of his early works – The Industrialisation of the West Indies (1950) and Economic Development with Unlimited Supplies of Labour (1954). Maybe we should consider this in 2025.
In April 1971 while president of the Caribbean Development Bank, Lewis stated that our biggest problem in the agricultural sector was how to reduce the imports of food from outside the region. Lewis stressed that agriculture needs to revolutionise its structure and that in banana, cocoa, foodstuff and livestock industries, our agriculture needs massive new inputs of both biological science and capital.
In 1972, William Demas, then secretary-general of the Commonwealth Caribbean Regional Secretariat (who would later be the Central Bank governor of TT), speaking at a panel discussion, agreed with Lewis that there was a need to take drastic measures to boost agriculture for the home market.
Lewis would certainly be most disillusioned to see the neglect in agriculture in TT as the sugar cane industry followed the fate of the cocoa and coffee industries. Even worse would be the annual losses experienced by farmers after flooding, and prime agricultural lands being used for housing. Multinational corporations continue to pillage the Caribbean economies.
Lewis, as president of the Caribbean Development Bank in 1972, realised there was a crisis in the Caribbean regarding the lower class who were not able to obtain education: “We have a substantial university population but it is recruited almost entirely from our middle class. Since our middle class is still tiny, most of our first class brain power is still locked away in the social class whose children do not get beyond primary school. We worry about the brain drain into foreign countries, but there is a much greater waste of brains right here at home. We ought to improve our methods for finding the youngsters of poor families who have first class ability…”
A literate and educated population also creates a volatile scenario which our Caribbean governments have ignored and which Lewis identified. He said, “…as the schools expand and pour out more and more trained people, the gap between middle class and working class incomes closes swiftly. Then we begin to get strikes of doctors, nurses, teachers, civil servants and other middle class categories who find that they can no longer maintain their economic distance.”
This could explain the frequency of protests among the working class.
Lewis, in a relatively short work entitled The Agony of the Eight, expressed deep disappointment at those who contributed to the collapse of the Federation, Lewis agonised over the fact that, “If each little island goes off on its own, its people must suffer.” Lewis recognised the importance of non-economic factors and mentioned the need for “social discipline” in connection with exchange rates and income policies.
Whenever Caribbean and other developing countries are designing their annual budgets and seeking better allocation of resources, they should consider some of the ideas of this intellectual giant.
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