Prime Minister Dr Andrew Holness has held up Dubai and Singapore as development models for Jamaica, arguing the island must shift from attracting visitors to becoming a place where people choose to live, work, and invest permanently.

But he warned that the transformation would require a fundamental change in attitudes toward productivity, wages, and labour.

Dubai, a city-state in the United Arab Emirates, and Singapore, the Southeast Asian financial hub, are among the most celebrated examples of rapid economic transformation this century.  They have leveraged strategic location, institutional discipline, and openness to foreign talent and capital to become global centres of commerce, finance, and high-end living within a matter of decades.