Trade and Development - the Caribbean Perspective

  Introduction Caribbean news was recently abuzz with Barbados’ plan to remove the Queen as its Head of State, which would signal a severing of some of the last vestiges of its legislative colonial ties. In the aftermath of that announcement, some of the media in the Global North pounced on China as the instigator of this change, suggesting thereby that our own Caribbean leaders could not themselves be credited with such a move. As a budding trade professional, my thoughts pivoted to the underlying recognition of the importance of strategic relations, in particular, in matters of trade.   The result is this Shridath Ramphal Centre (SRC) Trading Thoughts which provides a snapshot of the Caribbean’s main trading relations, chronicles developments with some of their trade partners arising from COVID-19 and finally proposes recommendations for future trading relations and strategies. Brief Snapshot of Caribbean Trade A country or region’s trade profile is inherently embedd...

  The totality of something is the sum of  all its constituent parts. In that vein, lets talk about one part of CARICOM - Guyana. Isn't Guyana such a fascinating country? 🤔🤔. I think that it is😁. It is replete with natural resources, situated in South America "on the doorsteps" of huge consumer markets (for eg. Brazil) but simultaneously it has a large diaspora and its currency is among the lowest valued in the region. Nowadays? Guyana seems to be on a newsworthy streak: the discovery of oil, election stand-offs and the recent liberalisation of its telecommunication sector. Stick around if you are interested in the unpacking of some of these issues. In relation to the discovery of oil in Guyana, a plethora of narratives abound. One publication  notes the new COVID-19 induced reality which has drastically reduced oil prices and dampened growth forecasts; others restarted discussions on the resource curse  which sees resource-rich countries continue to be plagued by...

  Barbados is being blacklisted by the European Union (EU). As one publication puts it, Barbados failed to implement changes to its tax exchange framework over the required period of 2015 to 2018. The changes were instead implemented by December 2019, too late to avoid a rating of "partially compliant" by the Organisation for the Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The EU subsequently added Barbados to its blacklist. There has been many public discussions since these development but what does any of this mean? If you are interested, stick around for a breakdown of the different components of this development. What is the OECD's role in this process and what is the significance of their rating? The OECD is an intergovernmental organisation with objectives such as facilitating global economic progress and trade. One route through which this is done is via setting standards to manage international tax evasion, of interest to this concept of blacklisting. The OECD c...

  Fair warning, Covid-19 makes appearances in this article... it is just so pervasive that all my articles will make some reference to it, at least for the near future.   Amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, we have seen many aspects of the regional mechanisms come into play. To name a few, the OECS joint procurement mechanism was used to procure medication for some CARICOM countries and the Caribbean Public Health Agency (CARPHA) has provided tremendous support to national health entities in areas such as testing and training. These are the new success stories for the Caribbean’s regional integration but of course the “old” stories are those such as the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency or the University of the West Indies. Some regional integration stories, however, are those of special regional arrangements. Stick around if you are interested in reading about some of the provisions made available to CARICOM’s less developed countries (LDCs), which can be useful for th...

Ah, that shiny January 1 st 2020. A day replete with promises, resolutions, new plans and maybe new directions for the more ambitious among us. Then the rest of the year followed. In what followed after, none of us could have predicted the reach of Covid-19 or that we would be housebound, telecommuting like there is no tomorrow and becoming more tech savvy than we thought possible. Fortunately, there has been some good moments between these developments (some of us learnt to bake; cook; reacquainted ourselves with those lovely apartments/homes that were a blur as we sped through our busy pre-Covid-19 routines; spent more time with family). However, I think most of us would gladly trade in 2020 for…anything else at this point. So, if 2020 has been so tumultuous for us on an individual level, how has it affected countries, especially the small island developing states of the Caribbean? Stick around if you want to read my thoughts on what 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted ...