Economy
Traditionally the city's economy had depended almost entirely on the sugar cane industry. Since around the 1950s, however, the town's economy has diversified and today its economy revolves around a mixed-industry manufacturing sector, retail, and tourism. The building of a mega port, anticipated to be completed in 2012, is expected to add significantly to the area's economy. Agriculture, retail, and services are also significant players in the local economy. "It is an agricultural, trade, and distribution center. Industries include tourism, the processing of agricultural products, rum distilling, canning, and diamond cutting. Manufactures include textiles, shoes, cement, paper, electrical devices, and metal products." The city, though, suffers from an unemployment rate that hovers around the 15 percent mark.
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Famous quotes containing the word economy:
“The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get “a good job,” but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“Even the poor student studies and is taught only political economy, while that economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy is not even sincerely professed in our colleges. The consequence is, that while he is reading Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Say, he runs his father in debt irretrievably.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)