Business View Caribbean | April 2019

19 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN MARCH 2019 build capacity to add more value, to get more from the industry, more for people in the community, for the economy overall. “From those understandings, we began to look at how we can encourage participation in this wonderful industry. You need not be a rocket scientist to be a stakeholder in tourism. You merely need an idea, which you can convert into something material, or a service, at a price. It responds immediately to what we call the passion points of people. Tourism is all about people travelling across the world in pursuance of happiness and to realize their passions. If you build products around those passion points, you’ll have economic activity and growth. “The basis of the work I’ve been doing over the past 18 years has been to build that realization, then the country can tap into the long, lucrative, and rich tourism engine. Last year, 1.4 billion people travelled across the world for tourist-based purposes, and the latest figures show they spent 1.6 trillion US dollars. Directly, that represents 30 percent of trade and services, and 10 percent of global employment in a region of 450 million people.” BVC: Does tourism significantly affect the GDP? Minister Bartlett: “In the last 15 years, tourism has morphed into a global industry affecting the economies of more than 79 countries. These countries are distinguished by the fact that they have GDP contribution from tourism of 10 percent and more. We, in the Caribbean, are at the top quintile of this. In fact, we are regarded as the most tourism-dependent region on earth, ranging from 30 percent of indirect and induced impact of tourism, to 95 percent, in places like Tortola, Antigua, Barbuda, St. Kitts, and Aruba. One in five workers in the Caribbean is employed in tourism. “In my own domestic Jamaica, tourism has 9 MINI STRY OF TOUR I SM, JAMA I CA