Today's conference ran for 80 minutes. The Bank's most senior executive presented snapshots of each country, the challenges they are facing, and how the respective governments are trying to manage external debts while trying to recover from natural disasters such as those destructive hurricanes that have devastated the island nations over the past 2 years.
But, apart from natural disasters, the Caribbean is also struggling with high crime rates. Earlier this month, we told you how Belize, in particular, was ranked by insightcrime.org as the 6th deadliest country within Latin America and the Caribbean, with a murder rate of 33.5 per 100,000.
So, how does crime impact on small economies like ours? That's what Dorian Pakeman of the Government Press Office asked the head table at today's CDB conference, and here's the conversation on that topic:
Dr. Justin Ram - Director of Economics, CDB
"It's a topic that we're going to examining in our research in 2020, because we recognize how important this is for the overall wellbeing of our stakeholders in our borrowing member countries, and of course, the likely impact that this can have on economic activity. So, just to give you a quick overview, we're likely to look at crime from a public health standpoint, the protocol associated with public health, like if there is a public health challenge, there are certain protocols that you examine when you actually try to deal with such a challenge. And we want to look at can we utilize such an approach to the reduction of crime. Now, crime has a number of impacts. It impacts productivity in a number of negative ways, when, for example, people are either injured or for example, it might increase mortality rates. It impacts the economy in that way, but for our types of economies, for many of them that are service-oriented, that are really reliant on the tourism industry, crime can actually play a very negative role in actually discouraging visitors to our shores. So, it's really important that we manage what is currently happening with criminal activity, and I think some of our countries are doing a pretty good job of this. Others, of course, need to improve, but I think for us, that tourism and that service sector-based economic activity, crime is really important for us to manage and to minimize, so that it doesn't have knock-on impacts, on visitor arrivals, as it relates to economic activity."
The Bank's representatives say that later this year, they will be working on the development of youth strategy to address crime in a hopefully meaningful way. They say that the strategy came about as a result of consultation with a cross-section of Caribbean youths, including those who have come in conflict with the law in their country.
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