The Bahamas will shortly select a private group to establish a new statutory body, Invest Bahamas – an independent statutory body that would facilitate the investment process from conception to implementation. The Finance Ministry is reviewing at least 7 bids received in response to a recently cl...

Saint Lucian Prime Minister Allen Chastanet has presented a EC$1.12 B revenue estimate for fiscal year 2021/22. The fiscal package, which contains “no new taxes,” represents a 21.3% increase over the revised estimate for the last fiscal year. However this is lower than pre-pandemic years of 2018-...

Effective May 8, vaccinated persons entering Barbados will only be made to quarantine pending the results of one locally administered COVID-19 PCR test. This could result in a quarantine period as little as 24 hours. According to Prime Minister Mia Mottley, a vaccinated person is defined as someo...

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) has mobilised to support St Vincent and the Grenadines as it faces the possibility of an imminent eruption of La Soufriere Volcano. Following an evacuation order of the immediate area around the volcano by Prime Minister Dr the Honourable Ralph Gonsalves, CARICOM...

Guyana’s economy will remain resilient against the effects of COVID-19, maintaining its growth trajectory as the petroleum sector ‘picks up steam’, the World Bank has said. Guyana grew at an extraordinary rate of 43.5% in 2020, having completed a year of oil production. The positive spill-over ef...

The Bahamas is targeting a $400m increase in annual passenger spending after data revealed more than 40% spent less than $50 in Nassau pre-COVID, thereby seeking to increase expenditure to $100 per head. According to the Ministry of Tourism in The Bahamas, data for 2019, the last full year prior ...

Time to Adapt From the Executive Director's Desk "We are living in unprecedented times. We are traveling through unchartered waters. The times in which we are living are uncertain, complex, insecure and anxiety-inducing. The COVID-19 crisis has greatly intensified the uncertainty, complexity a...

Fitch Ratings Agency, has affirmed Jamaica’s Long-Term Foreign-Currency Issuer Default Rating (IDR) at ‘B+’ with the outlook remaining stable. The Stable Outlook is supported by the expectation that the public debt level will return to a firm downward path post-pandemic, which is underpinned by p...

The Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) is reporting that the economies of its 19 Borrowing Member Countries (BMCs) contracted by 12.8% on average in 2020 but is projecting an average GDP growth of 3.8% in 2021. According to the Bank in 2020, the majority of BMCs registered double-digit declines in ...

Over a quarter of businesses in the Caribbean have not been able to meet their digitisation goals. This was revealed by PricewaterhouseCoopers in its Caribbean Digital Readiness Survey 2021. In the survey, 42% of respondents believed they were on target to meet their goals while 28% said they wer...