The CARI­COM sin­gle mar­ket and econ­o­my (CSME) and CARI­COM is not a fan­ta­sy but a con­crete sit­u­a­tion that is mov­ing for­ward. This is ac­cord­ing to CARI­COM’s As­sis­tant Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al in the Di­rec­torate for Trade and Eco­nom­ic In­te­gra­tion, Joseph Cox.

Speak­ing on CNC3’s the Morn­ing Brew, Cox said, “First of all, for those who say that we’re in a dream, I would urge them to wake up, be­cause guess what, it’s a re­al­i­ty and it’s hap­pen­ing.”

Cox con­tin­ued, “Is it hap­pen­ing at the speed at which you hoped? Of course not.”

An econ­o­mist by trade, Cox said that the CSME is in a process of ne­go­ti­a­tion. He not­ed that all of the coun­tries in the re­gion are not at the same lev­el of de­vel­op­ment and there­fore, a process must be un­der­gone to have the CSME func­tion­ing suc­cess­ful­ly.

Cox said, “CSME is not a goal it’s a process be­cause you are mov­ing to­wards es­tab­lish­ment of a sin­gle mar­ket and econ­o­my.” He not­ed that along the way to cre­at­ing a more ef­fi­cient and ef­fec­tive CSME there would be gains.

Ac­cord­ing to Cox, gains have al­ready been made in­clud­ing the mul­ti-lat­er­al ser­vices agree­ment, the pro­to­col of con­tin­gent rights and “con­sid­er­able ad­vances in re­new­able en­er­gy.”

Cox ex­pressed that the is­sues be­ing ad­dressed through the sin­gle mar­ket and econ­o­my ini­tia­tives are not dreams, but im­per­a­tives. He not­ed that col­lab­o­ra­tion is nec­es­sary for CARI­COM to stand up against is­sues like un­fair treat­ment by the Eu­ro­pean Union against the re­gion around the mat­ter of de-risk­ing.

Cox con­tin­ued to say that a unit­ed re­gion, though small in size is pow­er­ful on the in­ter­na­tion­al lev­el. He said, “Just re­mem­ber one thing, when you go to in­ter­na­tion­al fo­ra, we do have po­lit­i­cal might.”

Ad­dress­ing the forex short­age in the coun­try, Cox said, “You have to look at in­creas­ing the re­ten­tion rates of your for­eign ex­change.” He con­tin­ued by us­ing the ex­am­ple of tourism, not­ing that many coun­tries have not re­tained the forex that has en­tered its na­tions.

Cox not­ed, “I think the high­est re­ten­tion rate I have seen in re­cent times is 30 cents to the dol­lar. Most of that doesn’t even stay in the coun­try, and some­times doesn’t even come in the coun­try.”

In or­der to rec­ti­fy this is­sue, Cox said that a mech­a­nism or frame­work must be put in place to fa­cil­i­tate greater “uti­liza­tion or re­ten­tion of what you would ac­tu­al­ly earn.”

While Cox men­tioned that there is “no one size fits all” mech­a­nism, he gave the ex­am­ple of en­cour­ag­ing ho­tels to buy from more lo­cal sup­pli­ers in­stead of im­port­ing goods.

Cox added that there is sub­stan­tial leak­age in the Caribbean. He al­so called for a re­vis­it­ing of in­cen­tive pro­grams that are used to at­tract for­eign in­vest­ment. Cox said, “In a lot of cas­es we are in­cen­tivis­ing ac­tiv­i­ty that would have hap­pened any­way.”