Former PM wants unity, Caricom systems review

By Marlon Madden

One of the region’s ex-prime ministers is calling on the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to undertake an urgent review of its agencies and traditional sources of funding for national projects.

This was among several recommendations from former Prime Minister of the Bahamas Perry Gladstone Christie, who also called for greater unity among the 15-member bloc if it was to effectively tackle economic, developmental and other challenges relating to pandemics and climatic events.

“Let us not have a situation where we say ‘the Cayman has done well, Barbados has done well, but the others are struggling’. These are matters that the founders of CARICOM intended to avoid by being able to ensure that our strength will be maximised by the levels of unity we forged, by the common ground that we share and by the common policies we articulate and promulgate to all, with a view at the end of the day [of] making it better for future generations,” said Christie.

He was delivering a wide-ranging address to the recent 38th annual conference o the Institute of Chartered Accountants of the Caribbean (ICAC), which was held under the theme Envisioning the future, Managing our Reality.

Christie, who has spent over four decades in the public sector, told the start of the two-day seminar that given the region’s experience there should be a major plan in place to “anticipate emergencies to ensure the best security for the region”.

However, he quickly pointed out that all 15 member states had difference experiences and realities, and that was one of the major challenges to having an “automatic one-voice position”.

“The question to be asked is ‘should we continue to wait for them [natural disasters] to happen or do we use our collective will to move forward in negotiating with developed countries for a commitment to support us in the event of such disasters taking place?” he said.

“We need to review CARICOM’s agencies. One of the recommendations I would like to make is that we ought to review the agencies of CARICOM to determine their sufficiencies in dealing with a post pandemic world. We also should immediately review our traditional sources of funding for national projects involving determining what funding is available in our region,” said Christie.

Christie, whose administration was responsible for introducing the Value Added Tax in the Bahamas at a rate of 7.5 per cent with the aim of paying down national debt, recommended that Caribbean states work together to “devise a tax system based on empirical evidence and information”.

He said while tax policies varied across the region “we must all ask whether our tax systems provide sufficient revenue to fund the demands on the public purse based on debt to GDP ratios across the Caribbean. The answer is obvious”.

He expressed concern that the Caribbean did not have an agreed protocol for entry, stating that “during this pandemic we were left to our own resort with each country having to determine its own strategy and therefore not being able to maximise the advantages we have of bringing all of our scientists together and finding the right formula for our respective region and the countries”.

Pointing out that some CARICOM countries were lagging when it came to vaccination and effectively managing the pandemic while struggling with high debt, Christie said he believed CARICOM had a responsibility to assist countries in determining how to rationalise health care resources to ensure the most disadvantaged were not left out.

Adding that tourism was likely to be the primary economic sector of the region “for a very long time to come”, he called for greater use of “new analytical tools” in order to maximise the region’s ability to extract more economic benefits from the sector.

“There is no question that the people in our region are recognised as some of the most literate and articulate in the world, but in order to get where we need to be in tourism we need to become some of the most numerate, because there is no question this brave new world is being driven my digitisation, data and analytics,” he said.

In his wide-ranging discourse, he also expressed concern that the health pandemic could “strengthen the resolve of larger countries to eliminate offshore status, and protectionism will become the order of the day, whether admitted or not”.

This, he said, would be a major blow for the region since the financial services sector has been responsible for a large portion of the middle class in the Caribbean. “Financial services in the Caribbean will only survive where economic policies and the systems and processes support them. That requires ambition, planning and collaboration,” he said.

Christie also recommended that the CARICOM Secretariat help countries to urgently address their nursing shortage and help them to stem the importation of illegal guns.

marlonmadden@barbadostoday.bb