Will 2011 be the year that the languishing Doha development round finally moves forwards; or will it mark the point at which the members of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) quietly accept that negotiating a single global undertaking on trade liberalisation is unlikely in the foreseeable future?
Some years ago, I heard the late Michael Manley, the former Prime Minister of Jamaica, deliver a speech on the Caribbean’s changing place in the world.
Cuba’s economy is in a bad way. There is a widespread sense of social discontent and a deep concern among many groups in society including some of those who are committed to Cuba’s communist system.
It is not often that the Caribbean can say it is leading global thinking on an issue, but that it what happened this week when the Caribbean Tourism Organi-sation (CTO) released a detailed report on the damaging effect on tourism that the UK government’s controversial Air Passenger Duty (APD) is having.
Once again global food prices are spiralling upwards. On November 2 the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) announced that its global food price index had climbed for the fifth month in a row and had reached its highest level since its index peaked in July 2008.
One of the stranger aspects of the Caribbean is the disjunction between the many reports and studies produced by academic or multilateral institutions and the thinking of those intimately involved in the industries concerned.
On October 3, over 100m of Brazil’s 194m people will vote for a successor to that nation’s hugely popular and successful President, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
What future for Caricom? Recent developments in the form of concern about Trini-dad’s commitment to the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) and the appointment of a new Secretary General suggest that the coming months may well determine its future trajectory.
– but little forward movement by private sector
It is unlikely that you have ever heard of Christofer Fjellner from Finland or Peter Sratsny from Slovakia.
Britain has a new foreign policy. Its coalition government has begun to enunciate a more pragmatic approach that recognises the ways in which the world has changed, political and economic relationships overlap and new centres of power are emerging.
As the region prepares for the thirty-first meeting of heads of government, it is clear that despite sporadic rhetoric to the contrary, pan-Caribbean integration is stagnating and that weak or no economic growth threatens what little unity is left.