Above: Jamaica Minister of National Security Peter Bunting (CJ Photo)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

While Jamaica’s crime rate is showing a downward trajectory, the last four decades of high crime have had a severe impact on the country’s economic development, according to National Security Minister Peter Bunting.

“Conservatively, if we had not had the crime rate that we have had over [the] last four decades, we would have three times the size economy we are at now, and perhaps, as much as 10 times the size economy we are at now. That would put us on par with a first-world country.”

Bunting was speaking to Jamaicans at community meeting held at the Jamaican High Commission in London.

“Because we have had an above-average violent crime rate for at least four decades, the estimates that some of our professors have done is that, cumulatively, it has cost us 60 to 90 percent of where we would, otherwise, have been in terms of our GDP and the size of the economy.”

It is all in addition to the “pain, grief and suffering” of the victims of crime and their families.

Bunting said there has been a 30 percent drop in Jamaica’s murder rate over the past two to three years.

Now, the “big, audacious goal” is to bring the murder rate down from 42 per 100,000 to 12 per 100,000 by the year 2016, he said, an almost 75 percent reduction.

“We have to challenge those dysfunctional elements of our culture that have developed over time and have made Jamaica a good place for criminals to do business,” he said.