By Professor Emeritus Compton Bourne, former President, Caribbean Development Bank
Introduction
My address to the Caribbean Develop-ment Bank Board of Governors in Georgetown in May 2005, postulated that major social and political problems in the Caribbean constituted the soft underbelly of economic progress in that the social progress achieved was insufficient in its distribution across households and districts to cap the wells of discontent which threaten the stability of future economic growth. I made reference to indicators on poverty, education, health and nutritional status, water resource provision, unemployment, and income inequality.
I returned to the matter of underachievement in social welfare in my co-authorship of the Caribbean Human Development Report 2016 entitled Multi-dimensional Progress: Human Resilience Beyond Income. That report dealt exhaustively with human vulnerability from economic, social and environmental perspectives and identified the most vulnerable groups within Caribbean countries as women, the elderly, young males, child labourers and street children, people with disabilities, and indigenous people and Maroons. It provided estimates of poverty, for example, CDB’s estimate that 36% of Guyana’s population fell below the poverty line in 2008. It reported that Caribbean people perceived poverty in terms of their inability to provide for childcare and education, hunger, inadequate dwellings, and under-employment.