Thursday’s meeting aims to tackle the restoration of regional growth while addressing fiscal and debt sustainability objectives

NASSAU, Bahamas, Tuesday September 17, 2013 – Prime Minister Perry Christie will address a high-level International Monetary Fund (IMF) conference on Thursday that will examine sustainable growth in the Caribbean.

The two-day meeting is a follow up to last year’s conference held in Trinidad and Tobago on rethinking policy priorities and will be attended by finance ministers, central bank governors and senior public and private sector officials from Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, St Lucia, and Trinidad and Tobago, the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank and the host country.

It will also be attended by the IMF’s deputy managing director Min Zhu, president of the Barbados-based Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) Dr Warren Smith, the president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Luis Moreno, as well as well as Hasan Tuluy, vice president of the World Bank and Jean Phillippe Prosper of the International Finance Corporation (IFC).

The meeting will have as its theme “Building Growth into the Caribbean Sustainability Agenda -a Concerted Approach” and is being held in collaboration with the CDB, IIDB, the IFC and the World Bank.

“The goal is to discuss how to restore growth in the Caribbean while addressing fiscal and debt sustainability objectives,” said Adrienne Cheasty, deputy director in the IMF’s Western Hemisphere Department.

He said the conference would “bring to the table all of the major stakeholders with a view to developing a shared, comprehensive vision for growth in the region”.

Among the topics to be discussed during the two-day conference include “how to Increase the growth potential of economies in the region; how to stimulate and harness the private sector’s potential as well as how to reduce and mitigate against the region’s vulnerability to natural disasters and economic shocks”.

Bahamas Minister of State in the Ministry of Finance Michael Halkitis said that the focus “continues to be on how the international financial institutions can enhance support they provide in particular to small and highly vulnerable income countries both in terms of tailoring policy advice as well as how they intervene with direct assistance when small middle-income countries encounter economic crises”.(CMC)

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