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My own experience in the third world was that even if people started to make more money, the cost of living and housing increased often faster than the wages.

The trends that are shaping the twenty-first-century world embody both promise and peril. Globalization, for example, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while contributing to social fragmentation and a massive increase in inequality, not to mention serious environmental damage.

This is not bad, but the pace of globalisation has surpassed the capacity of the system to adjust to new realities of a more interdependent and integrated world.

Between 2001 and 2011, Brazil lifted 20 million people out of poverty and into its growing middle class, and in the last quarter of the twentieth century Botswana's gross domestic product per capita grew faster than that of any other country on the planet. The once-labeled 'Third World' is edging its way into the 'First World.'

Technology has changed things, same as everywhere. But the economy has changed drastically. When Jamaica first won independence, our dollar was stronger than the U.S. dollar. Now ours is about 90 to one. That's had a big impact on crime and poverty.

This country is undergoing great changes for the better.

There are many countries in the world that when they reached the middle-income stage, they witnessed serious structural problems such as growth stagnation, a widening wealth gap and increasing social unrest.

Firstly, economic globalisation has brought prosperity and development to many countries, but also financial crises to Asia, Latin America and Russia, and increasing poverty and marginalisation.

We have benefited greatly from the globalization of the economy in the last 30 years.