From The Dominican

Bridgetown, Barbados (TDN) The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) will host a regional policy dialogue on science, technology and innovation on April 29, 2015 in Bridgetown, Barbados. The focus of this dialogue is: Rethinking Productive Development Policies for the Caribbean.

The relative stagnation of the Caribbean’s GDP capita over time, particularly when compared to small countries outside the region seems to be due to low productivity growth stemming from a regulatory and institutional environment unsupportive of competitiveness, and a fragmented, domestic-oriented private sector. Productivity growth has stagnated in Latin America as well.

Faced with the pressing need to turn around this trend, the IDB has recently concluded extensive research to understand what kinds of policies can effectively boost productivity in the Latin American and Caribbean region. The product of this research is the study IDB Rethinking Productive Development, Development in the Americas 2014 .

The policy dialogue, which features top level representatives from the IDB, Governments throughout the Caribbean, the private sector, donor agencies, the University of the West Indies and other agencies, will disseminate the main findings of the study, share with the region’s main public and private stakeholders new perspectives on productive development policy and instruments, and engage them in a discussion about how this new thinking on industrial policy can propel Caribbean countries on a different growth path.

At the event, the IDB will present guiding principles to design impactful productive development policies. The discussion will include how these principles can be applied in the particular context of the Caribbean, and will benefit by conversations with high-level representatives from the CARIFORUM, as well as with representatives from the international donor community active in the region.

The dialogue will also take a closer look at instruments that the international experience and the IDB have found to be effective in stimulating productivity and innovation, illustrate their application with specific examples in the Caribbean, and engage the audience in a discussion of whether and how these instruments could be more widely used.

The dialogue supports the work of the Compete Caribbean Program, a jointly funded initiative of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the United Kingdom Department for International Development (DFID) and the Government of Canada. The Program partners with the Caribbean Development Bank on projects in the OECS Countries.

Compete Caribbean provides technical assistance grants and investment funding to support productive development policies, business climate reforms, clustering initiatives and Small and Medium Size Enterprise (SME) development activities in the Caribbean region.

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