Focus on CSME as UWI opens research day in Kingston today
The Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), its opportunities and challenges, will be discussed over the next two days in Kingston, at the Annual Research Day of the University of the West Indies, Mona.
Participants for the seminar will comprise those from academia, government, private sector, non-government organisations and leading officials of regional institutions.
The high-level seminar on “production integration” has been designed to identify the practical possibilities for mobilising resources – public and private sector, as well as civil society – in pursuit of the major goals of Caricom with sustained institutional support arrangements.
An opening welcome statement by Jamaica’s foreign minister K D Knight, will be followed by an overview from Shridath Ramphal, former UWI Vice Chancellor who headed the West Indian Commission, with an assessment covering the precursor to Caricom, the Caribbean Free Trade Area (CARIFTA) that had initially laid the foundation current efforts to create a seamless regional economy with the CSME.
Top regional economists and others of academic institutions and agencies, among them Havelock Brewster, Clive Thomas, Norman Girvan, Maurice Odle, Trevor Farrell, Richard Bernal, Denis Benn,as well as leading representatives of the region’s banking and financial sectors, like Dwight Venner, Eleanor Brown and Dennis Lalor will be involved in presentations and inter-active sessions.
These will include issues on production integration from various perspectives, development, business, civil society, investment strategies, agriculture and manufacturing, energy, implications for regional trade, the financial sector and for the OECS subregion; governance dimension, labour market implications; as well as the challenges and opportunities for regional air transport.
The two-day seminar comes ahead of next week’s formal signing ceremony at Mona of the instruments for the official launch of the region’s single market as the first phase of the CSME that is taragetted to be operational in 2008 for participating states.
