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Since the early 1980s, the introduction of International Monetary Fund-directed structuraladjustment packages to stabilize the Jamaican economy has reduced the scope of thegovernment, cut back its capacity to intervene in the housing market, opened theeconomy to foreign goods (but limited capital), and re-produced the colonial version of anon-dynamic, labour-surplus urban economy in Kingston. This paper traces the impact ofstructural adjustment on unemployment and class formation in Kingston, and the relationshipof these issues to housing problems. Rented, poor-quality housing, underpinned by lowsocio-economic status and historically high rates of unemployment, has created an overtspatial concentration of poverty, located in West and East Kingston. Nevertheless, overall
unemployment is currently lower than at independence in 1962, and virtually all housingindicators have recorded improvements over the same time period. These improvementshave been due to a deceleration in the growth of Kingston’s population since the mid-1960s; government commitment, despite structural adjustment, to improve the quality ofcollective consumption; and the determination of Kingston’s citizens to build betterhomes for themselves, often aided by loans from local building societies and remittancesfrom family members resident overseas. However, at least a quarter of Kingston’spopulation remains both unemployed and concentrated into areas of poor qualityhousing. These circumstances in Kingston are compared with those in adjacent LatinAmerican cites under structural adjustment.
KEY WORDS:
Jamaica, structural adjustment, housing, employment, census analysis
Introduction
A
cademic opinion suggests that the ‘LatinAmerican city’ has been doubly underminedduring the last half century: firstly, bymassive population increase following 1950, as thebalance of the population has shifted from beingpredominantly rural to overwhelmingly urban; and,secondly, by structural adjustment, which, sincethe early 1980s has undone or undermined manyof the solutions to urbanization previously achievedby grass-roots endeavour in the face of labourintensivecapitalism – for example, the provision ofshelter through self-help housing and squattersettlements (Gilbert and Ward 1985; Gilbert 19941996). In short, whatever benefits late-twentiethcenturyglobalization has brought to Latin Americansocieties, there has been significant economicdeprivation among the urban poor (Clarke andHoward 1999). These issues may be analysed bylooking at the changing relationship betweenlabour and housing since 1945.
Broadly speaking, in Latin America, the informal(or non-legally protected) sector of employment
declined relative to the formal (legally protected)sector between the 1940s and the 1970s. Oliveiraand Roberts (1994) have suggested that selfemployment,an approximate guide to informalsector trends, declined from 29 to 20% over thistime period, as formal sector jobs were created inStructural adjustment in Kingston, Jamaica107government and the private sector, especially in the
manufacturing industry. In contrast, during the 1980s
and 1990s, Portes and Schauffer (1993) estimated
informal employment at 31% in the late 1980s,
and some individual city studies now put the rate
at over 50% (Mur本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。