Jamaica is emerging as a global technology center. Ya mon, Jamaica. The small island nation of 2.7 million people has relatively high levels of access to high-speed Internet connections, and is working to leverage its English-speaking abilities and location amidst the Americas region. There are no timezone problems for companies in North or South America when doing business with and in Jamaica.
More than a quarter of Jamaica’s people are online, with 4.3% having access to high-speed connections. The latter number may not seem to be a dazzling number, but compare it to 0.8% in Indonesia, 0.9% in India, 1.9% in the Philippines, 4.6% in Thailand, and 6.8% in Brazil. Jamaica’s fast connections are also focused on business.
My ongoing research crunches statistics into the maw of relative income, which takes into account local cost-of-living and the idea of a “pound-for-pound” economic analysis. By this standard, Jamaica is on the rise.
Aggregating and integrating factors such as income, income disparity, Internet connections, corruption, the use of English, and infrastructure development on this pound-for-pound scale finds Jamaica exceeding Mexico, Turkey, all of Southeast Asia except the Philippines, and all of the BRICs except China.
I was excited to see a recent in-depth look at Jamaica published The Sauce, an Australian outsourcing consulting firm. A detailed article written there by David Mullings, a Jamaican investor, states that the country has 13,000 employees in the BPO sector and is planning 10,000 more.
Looks like it’s time to visit Kingston.