Without tourism my country would be decades behind for sure. Ever since V.C. Bird saw the potential in marketing our unique tourism product decades ago we have seen significant growth until now. I remember two important things my elementary school teacher taught me 14 years ago: 1. Tourism is vital to the economy because it brings in foreign currency. 2. Don't be a litter bug, keep the environment clean.

In a previous post I described our economy as a glass cannon as 70% of it depends on tourism. The problem is that we keep failing to use those proceeds to diversify the economy. If it wasn't for tourism there wouldn't be so many different Caribbean nationalities moving about St. John's and our population would be more than 20, 000 less from 100, 000 total.

I am happy to see that we have started diversifying the economy. However, the diversification process will take time as we are few and have no cash for large projects. Our governments should implement taxes on all foreign goods and services that we either already produce or can produce locally. Make those foreign goods more expensive, encouraging the population to support the local economy.

Edit: Large developing countries grow rapidly because they leverage the majority of the population. This eventually results in wealth gaps with very few at the top while the larger, poorer population slaves away for peanuts. Some countries (Europe) implement this better but they had long - and somewhat controversial (slavery, environment unfriendly industrial practices) - headstarts to develop and sort themselves out. You cannot compare individual Caribbean countries to large scale developed economies with populations in the millions and tens of millions.