Begin with a simple equation: Take what a nation produces. Divide it by what went in, the hours worked, the capital deployed, the human energy expended. The answer is productivity, and it is, according to an expanding body of economic research, the single most consequential variable in determining whether a country grows rich or stays poor. It is also, in much of the developing world, quietly, systematically broken.

The World Bank and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have found, repeatedly, that well over 60 per cent to 70 per cent of income disparities between countries are explained not by how much people work, but by how efficiently that work converts into output. Nations are not wealthy because their citizens log more hours. They are wealthy because each hour produces dramatically more value.

For Jamaica, a small open economy of roughly 2.8 million people that has posted decades of sluggish growth, despite a well-educated workforce, a strategically located port, and a globally recognised Diaspora, the productivity deficit is not a minor inefficiency. It is, economists argue, the structural ceiling on national ambition.