Abstract

This paper compares the very different results of the use of the theories of Arthur Lewis in constructing the mixed economies of China and the Caribbean, the widely diverging paths these economies took in the era of neoliberal globalization, and how the two can cooperate now that China has entered its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) phase. We argue that in response to the great depression of the 1930s, both China and the Caribbean embarked on socialist alternatives to pure capitalism. China took the path of revolutionary socialism, while many of the Caribbean territories embarked on reformist paths of democratic socialism. Although both of these experiments went through what we have called their Lewisian phases, several decades later China, now a market socialist state is the home of the world’s number two economy, and will soon be, if it is not already a major center of the global economic system. China now exports not only industrial goods but also capital on global scale, with the Caribbean being one of the major recipients of China’s exporting of surplus capital via its BRI. With the Caribbean remaining very much a peripheral area within the global economic system, the paper discusses the complicating factors that are likely to arise in the cooperative relations between the two regions as this gap in their locations in the global economy continues to widen.