This text focuses on the contemporary economic, social, geographical, environmental and political realities of the Caribbean region. Historical aspects of the Caribbean, such as slavery, the plantation system and plantocracy are explored in order to explain the contemporary nature of, and challenges faced by, the Caribbean. The book is divided into three parts, dealing respectively with: the foundations of the Caribbean, rural and urban bases of the contemporary Caribbean, and global restructuring and the Caribbean: industry, tourism and politics.

May 1996 The public sector's performance in the Caribbean varies, in reducing poverty and in creating an enabling environment for growth. Barbados and the Bahamas have been the high performers, Guyana and the Dominican Republic have been sluggish, and the other Caribbean countries fall in between. In the Caribbean region, the public sector is now the predominant provider of tertiary education and health services (university education and hospital-based curative care), which mainly benefit the nonpoor. Attempts must be made to recover costs from high-income users and use that revenue to improve the quality and quantity (as appropriate) of basic services. Lessons from experience suggest that most Caribbean countries need to encourage the private sector to participate more in providing infrastructure and need to provide a better regulatory framework. The good news: this is already taking place in many countries.

A multidisciplinary study that reconstructs Jamaica's rise from low to high life expectancy and explains how that was achieved. Jamaica is one of the small number of countries that has attained a life expectancy nearly matching that in richer countries, despite having a much lower level of per capita income.

Gastrointestinal diseases present a considerable problem in human medicine in terms of both morbidity and mortality. The aim of this book is to cover the different immunological disorders of the gut with special reference to immunopathological and protective mechanisms. It will be of general interest to clinicians, scientists and students concerned with the gastrointestinal tract. Topics covered include: the current status of research into toxin-secreting pathogens, Campylobacter, Giardia and HIV; the immunological features of idiopathic inflammatory gut diseases such as Crohn's disease and intractable diarrhoea; the genesis of the flat mucosa; the iatrogenic diseases of the gut such as graft-versus-host disease and small bowel allografts; the immune mechanisms and lesions in the gut of patients with parasitic nematode infections (very important in the tropics). Basic background on the immune apparatus in the intestine is also discussed, as are the effects of inflammation on intestinal permeability.

An analysis of Barbados and Grenada during the 1979-1983 Period