Check out the latest commentary at the Nassau Institute. This week's topic is Caribbean Economies and Trade Liberalization: Rethinking Size, Asymmetries, and Coordination by José Raúl Perales of Manchester Trade, Ltd.
Here's a little snippet:
Caribbean countries consider themselves especially vulnerable to these sweeping economic changes. Preferential arrangements whereby Caribbean traditional products have been granted special access to European and American markets have been recently challenged (especially in the case of bananas and sugar in the EU), and their survival altogether questioned (in the case of the CBERA program in the United States.) Areas where Caribbean economies have developed certain competitive advantages, especially services such as tourism and offshore, have run into tight competition from either low cost jurisdictions (such as Mexico and the Dominican Republic for tourism) or global offshore players. Indeed, a common feature of many of the Caribbean's most recent challenges is their "globalized" origin, for instance, in the application of equal market access provisions in global trade rules of the World Trade Organization.
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