PM Mottley calls for greater functional cooperation

by Marlon Maden

Prime Minister Mia Mottley is calling for the establishment of a regional Financial Services Commission, as she expressed concern that Barbados and other Caribbean Community (CARICOM) member states do not have the expertise to adequately staff their own.

At the same time, Mottley is proposing that the Caribbean Regional Technical Assistance Centre (CARTAC) carry out a study to determine opportunities for the sharing of services and the combined undertaking of activities among regional states.

“We don’t have the level of expertise in the sub-region to appropriately staff a financial services commission for each country . . . We don’t have the level of capacity in terms of the skill-set without bringing in people to staff a fair trading commission,” she said.

“It is my view that this region needs to have – and I would like to see an entity like CARTAC start to do the proactive work – a strong regional financial services commission, that has both regional and national jurisdiction,” Mottley proposed.

“We would probably spend less but we will also be able to pay the salaries that need to be paid to attract the best in the region and to allow for the level of expertise to be at the level that we really need it, rather than having persons trying hard but really and truly not with the exposure of the range or volume of cases and therefore not with the capacity to develop the experience,” she reasoned.

The Prime Minister was speaking during a recent high-level meeting organised by CARTAC and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) under the theme Capacity Building Partnerships For A More Resilient Caribbean.

Insisting that regional states were struggling with a lack of capacity in some areas, Mottley said this along with a combination of other factors, were attributing to the anaemic growth in Caribbean economies.

She argued that too often people were unable to focus on strategic areas and develop their skills since they were being stretched thin across several areas.

“They don’t have the luxury of being able to focus on international relations within the ministry of finance or they don’t have the capacity to focus on procurement, or they don’t have the capacity to focus on matters of fiscal matters or monetary matters, or whatever.So everybody literally who is in those ministries, and it is worse in the Eastern Caribbean, has to do everything,” she lamented.

“So the first thing you have is them being pulled in all the different directions. The second problem you have is that they don’t have the ability therefore to do over and over and repeat the level of expertise that comes from repetition and singular focus on issues.

The third thing we have is that it also means that our engagement for continuous training and for continuous exchanges to be innovative and on the cutting edge is compromised because they are not literally able to have the time to focus on those other issues,” she explained.

Mottley said that while the IMF and CARTAC have been able to assist the region in making several structural changes over the years and provide critical technical assistance, this kind of assistance was still needed going forward.

Noting that a “one-size-fits-all” approach will not work across Caribbean states despite the similarity in size, Mottley singled out the issue relating to politically exposed persons as one example where she said the requirements were simply too intrusive and was likely to contribute to residents turning away from serving in certain capacity in the region.

“What we are finding is that persons who we might otherwise want to serve say they are not interested ‘because you want my mother, my father, my sister, brother and child, everybody to declare’, and that is going to mean that the level of expertise that is available domestically is going to shrink further,” said Mottley.

“Hence, the need for CARTAC to provide the technical assistance becomes even all the more important because an already small base is continuing to shrink even further because of the unintended consequences of what should be good governance.My view is, if you want to get at criminals you go for criminals, but you don’t spread the net so wide as to make governance impossible and that is what the world is doing particularly in small states without realising that they are doing it,” she said.

At the same time, Mottley suggested that the IMF’s regional technical assistance centre carry out “the kind of deep dive studies that say to the region ‘this is where greater functional cooperation can happen [and] this is how it can happen”.

“With respect to other aspects in the Eastern Caribbean and Barbados, I feel that there is room for a lot more cooperation, and I feel that one of the roles that CARTAC can play as well is that it can identify those opportunities for greater functional cooperation in a way that makes them more proactive rather than reactive, and I would hope that could happen,” said Mottley.

“The things that are affecting the quality of financial regulation and economic surveillance generally ought to be the subject of greater regional cooperation and singular cooperation,” she added.

marlonmadden@barbadostoday.bb