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Contact: Shannon Lebourne
Thursday 7 October 2010 – OECS citizens must become more efficient in order to stimulate sustainable growth and development in the sub-region that is the message coming from Heads of Government and senior strategist at the end of consultation between the World Bank and the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU).
Chairman of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), Honourable Dr Ralph Gonzalves says the region’s leaders are committed to implementing programmes promoting growth and development that would not increase the debt ratios of the countries in the sub-region.
However, he
warned the traditional way of conducting business in both the public and private
sectors must change if the OECS is to achieve greater levels of productivity. “You go all around the region and people are saying the same thing: ‘we need to be more productive, we need to train our people more, we need to apply modern systems of organisation to promote better work ethics.’ In the entire world things are tight, and the idea that you can have ongoing splurging by anybody is something which we have to disabuse people of. Clearly, we have to protect the people who are most vulnerable.”
Meantime, Governor of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank Sir Dwight Venner says in order to promote sustainable growth, reduce poverty and unemployment, and maintain the human development indices, diversification of the region’s economies must be a priority. Tourism, he says, is one such sector that can lead this transformation.
“Right now we depend mainly on the US, UK, and Europe, but it is very evident that there are another set of countries that are rapidly developing, for example Brazil, China, and India. Since these are the growing parts of the international economy and growth is projected to be slow in the more advanced countries, we need to begin to figure out how we interface constructively with those countries. We must also consider the issue of diversification in the context of tourism, which is the lead transformational sector. In other words, we must focus on how to create those forward and backward linkages in order to propel the economies.”
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