Distributional Impacts of the‘Free Zone’Component of Structural Adjustment: The Jamaican Experience

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Abstract
Our understanding of the socio‐economic and geographical impacts of structural adjustment has not kept pace with the transformations, and this paper responds to this problem. Faced with massive foreign debt and a collapse of traditional exports, governments throughout the developing world have agreed to World Bank‐ and International Monetary Fund (IMF)‐prescribed structural adjustment and to its component industrial free zones. The zones are designed to attract foreign manufacturers to produce for export, and thereby generate hard currency for governments and jobs for young women. Jamaica, which has experienced a greater foreign debt burden and more structural adjustment agreements than virtually any other third world country, provides a case study of free zone policy. The research employs a political economy approach (Barnes 1993, whereby conventional wisdom that free zones contribute positively to Third World development is initially scrutinized. Free zones are examined with respect to the historical, social, and spatial contexts in which they are imbedded, and social groups affected by free zones are disaggregated by class and gender to expose power relationships and differential impacts. Most evidence is drawn from internal Jamaican government records and interviews with public and private managers involved with the free zones. The findings indicate that the costs and benefits of free zone promotion are distributed very unevenly with respect to class, gender and location.

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