Governing from a photograph.
Authoritative sector data reaches a Caribbean Cabinet roughly eighteen months after the period it describes. We ask governments to steer an economy using a picture of where it used to be — and then to defend the picture as though it were a window.
One argument, twelve minutes, every figure sourced.
Read the full argument
A Prime Minister I worked with years ago had a habit I have never forgotten. Before saying any number in public, he would pause — half a second, no more — and you could see him deciding whether he was willing to defend it.
He was right to pause. He had no way of knowing where most of his numbers came from.
This is not a criticism of him, and it is not a criticism of his statisticians, who were serious people doing careful work with inadequate resources. It is a description of a structural condition that almost every small state governs under, and which is so normal that it has stopped being remarked upon.
The lag between the period described and the picture a Cabinet sees.
Every figure in this piece can be checked before you give us a name.
- 01Typical staleness of authoritative sector data — 18 months, grade B. ECCB & NSO release cadence review, 2024.
Chamber 01 — The National Ledger
The single source of GDP truth every other decision reads from.
- A 12-sector ontology with a decade of history and a data-confidence grade on every series.
- Exposure indices — single, methodologically-documented numbers, drillable to source.
- Four-layer sector dossiers: economic, policy, comms, and regional.
Adam Anderson is the founder of OPEN Interactive and the author of the GDPVision instrument. He writes for principals, not for procurement.
The region is being asked to replace half its revenue with the instruments of the last century.
Citizenship by Investment reaches half of government revenue in the upper band of five OECS states, and its phase-out has a date. The harder problem is that the region is being asked to engineer that transition using evidence that arrives eighteen months late.
Ask a minister what their portfolio contributes.
In most governments that question starts a procurement. Weeks later a consultant returns a figure and the Ministry of Finance disputes it. Meanwhile one sector carries most of the economy and every other ministry is arguing blind.
Two hundred and twenty-six per cent, in a single night.
Hurricane Maria cost Dominica more than two years of national output in one evening. Every fiscal plan in this region is written inside a hurricane corridor. Almost none of them is rehearsed against one.
The date is set. The replacement is not.
Five OECS states built a revenue pillar that Brussels has now scheduled for demolition. The question is no longer whether to diversify. It is whether anyone has priced the hole.
Zero seats.
The OECS holds no votes on the body setting the global minimum tax. When the rules that price your economy are written elsewhere, the one thing still within your control is whether you arrive at the argument prepared.
What happened to the decision?
Minutes record what was said. They do not record what was decided, who carries it, or whether it landed. In economies where a quarter of revenue is spoken for before Cabinet sits, that gap is not untidiness. It is money.
We are exporting the people we need, and guessing at how to keep them.
Up to seventy per cent of tertiary-educated citizens have left the upper band of Caribbean states. Retention policy is written, announced, and only then discovered to have missed the people it was written for.
Someone will grade your manifesto. It should be you.
Every government publishes a programme and then loses track of it. The scorecard gets built regardless — by a journalist, an NGO, or the opposition. The only real choice is whose numbers the public sees first.