Dear Editor,
Development economists have strong consensus that economic and social development is strongly associated with democracy and rule of law.
However, there is one comparison that constitutes the significant exception and that is the comparison between China and India. China has seen rapid development and has institutions that are dominated by a structure that is not very democratic. India on the other hand, has seen poor development in spite of having strong, particularly human, resources, but has produced very poor growth indicators. India is the world’s largest democracy, and has an excellent record in respect to constitutional compliance.
It crossed my mind that Sint Maarten, probably the world’s smallest parliamentary democracy, has similarities to the world’s largest democracy, India. We have an intense involvement, particularly by the indigenous population, in the constitutional democracy, but that appears not to be producing a high level of facilitation of economic growth. A high level of “ownership” of the political structure is espoused by the population, but that does not appear to convert to effective resolution of critical economic and developmental issues.
In a previous era, the rapid development of the island Sint Maarten, then part of the Netherlands Antilles, under the leadership of a more enduring but possibly less democratic leadership, did enjoy rapid growth and quick resolution of issues . Our high level of democratic involvement and compliance with a Constitution that has all the (expensive) institutional bells and whistles does not seem to be producing the expected results.
Will this ineffectiveness be corrected in the second five years of existence of country Sint Maarten, or will it last as long as the Indian experience that always looked like it would be corrected, but never did at the expected pace?
Robbie Ferron
