The Missing Middle: Firms, Diaspora, and the Unfinished Architecture of Caribbean Integration

The CARICOM Single Market and Economy guarantees free movement of capital and the right of establishment, yet three decades on these rights remain substantially unexercised by Caribbean-owned firms. This paper argues the cause is neither political will nor treaty design but the near-absence of firms capable of exercising them: the "missing middle", defined by the Caribbean Development Bank's medium-enterprise classification. Integrating the Caribbean structuralist tradition, the mainstream economics of firm growth, and the political economy of collective action, the paper traces the missing middle to a historical sequence — plantation economy, industrialisation by invitation, liberalisation — and explains its persistence through concentrated incumbent interests. Guyana's Local Content Act dispute and the diaspora's two-channel engagement pattern supply case evidence. The paper proposes a layered institutional response: regional growth finance, harmonised registration, succession support, activation of CARICOM's dormant competition regime, an Article 31-consistent local content template, and a capture-resistant diaspora institution.