The painfully slow progress towards a Caribbean Single Market and Economy, now some ten years beyond the target date of 1993 suggested in the Kingston Declaration, has led many to give up hope. The reasons given for failure range from bureaucratic incompetence to a lack of political commitment. But perhaps there is more to it than that. Perhaps part of the answer is that there has never been any compelling logic or reason to push for a single market and economy. Intra-regional trade has always been limited, a fraction of what it was in Europe where the move towards economic integration has been more successful. For example, according to the Caribbean Economic Performance Report for 2003 intra-Caricom sources were responsible for EC $2.8 billion or 11% of all imports by Caricom. In Europe, by contrast, intra-European trade is in the vicinity of 60%. Intra-Caricom investment is similarly a fraction of the internal investment in Europe. Trade and investment have not been seen as a compelling motivation for integration.

This perception is, of course, not new. In their important work The Dynamics of West Indian Economic Integration published in 1967 Havelock Brewster and Clive Thomas had explored the limited gains available from free trade. In the chapter "A strategy for the economic integration of the West Indies" they had stated:

"Although opportunities do exist for expanding trade in some agricultural and industrial commodities by a system of free trade, it is evident that the possible quantity and range of trade which could take place at present are limited by the structure of our own demand and by the existing narrow production-capacity of West Indian economies. The range of goods within which trade creation is possible is limited immediately by the fact that the area over which internal competition can prevail is minute. The constituent members' production is geared almost entirely to external demand. And similarly, their structure of demand is geared almost entirely to external production. In effect the West Indian economies are neither competitive nor complementary. Hence the scope for both short-term trade creation and trade-diverting trade creation through the mechanism of free trade is extremely narrow."

That study originated from a joint initiative of the members of the staff of the University of the West Indies and the governments of the English speaking Caribbean who were seeking to devise a regional economic policy that made sense. Drs Brewster and Thomas proceeded to describe a somewhat different vision of integration namely the concept of integrated production in the areas of manufacturing and agriculture which they felt, correctly, held out much greater possibilities. An example of what might have been possible, given that line of thought, was the discussion many years later of the possibility of using cheap power in Trinidad to process bauxite from Guyana and Jamaica, thus gaining the enormous benefit of the added value lost when bauxite is exported. Regrettably, that project never got beyond the drawing board, if it got that far.

A single market and economy is a big step forward and worth achieving. But one has always felt that, the heads of government having explicitly sidelined the important dimension of some kind of political integration and the sort of vision outlined by Brewster and Thomas, what was left was not enough to generate either great commitment or interest. The politicians in their insular fastnesses have made a token virtue of this compromise and recent initiatives by Prime Ministers Patrick Manning and Ralph Gonsalves seem to be making little headway.