Sovereignty, non-sovereignty, and economic development in small island economies : an evolving story

Abstract

A worldwide statistical pattern observed in small island economies is the tendency for sovereign independent small island developing states (SIDS) to have lower per capita income than sub-national (non-sovereign) island jurisdictions (SNIJs). This paper reviews the progress of work by small-island researchers to account for this. An initial hypothesis, that causality ran from attribution of post-colonial political status to subsequent levels of income, was eventually rejected by the data. An alternative proposition, that income levels determined political status during decolonisation, is not rejected, but would need to be substantiated by in-depth documentation from the record of twentieth-century decolonisation. A third possibility, that political status and modern incomes were jointly determined by some other cause, remains open. Long-run series of import data from 1900 on indicate that the divergence between current SIDS and SNIJs took off during the 1920s and 1930s, prior to decolonisation. The reasons remain a subject for historical research.