In the coming days, CARICOM Heads of Government will meet in Montego Bay. There, they will hold a special session on the future of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME). They will also consider the recommendations contained in the Golding report, which was published earlier this year.
As is now well known, that report spoke to the region’s historic failure to modernise; CARICOM governments’ inability to act on decisions; and the need for long overdue remedial measures to be agreed to make the CSME fit for purpose. It made 33 specific recommendations and proposed that each CARICOM state should commit to establishing a ‘specific, time-bound, measurable and verifiable’ action programme to make the CSME ‘fully established and operational’ within the next five years.
More recently, to inform and perhaps pre-empt too divisive a debate when Heads come to discuss how to make the CSME more effective, CARICOM convened a two-day regional stakeholder consultation in Guyana to explore these ideas.
