"We should not see ourselves as small island developing states, we must shift the paradigm to large ocean states."

Hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic remain uncollected on Caribbean islands each year and voluminous waves of plastic waste wash up on the shores, especially after severe storms.

This blog post was co-authored by Franz Drees-Gross, Director, Transport and ICT Global Practice, and Ede Ijjasz-Vasquez, Senior Director, Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience Global Practice.…

Building seawalls. Photo: Lauren Day/World Bank The first ever meeting of the Heads of Procurement of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) took place on June 20-21 in Barbados with…

It has been almost four years since I first became involved with the regional public-private dialogue initiative, the Caribbean Growth Forum (CGF). In June 2012, I walked into the conference room…

Understanding Macroeconomic Volatility: Part 4. Click to read the rest of the series

Understanding Macroeconomic Volatility: Part 5. Read parts 1-4 here

Understanding macroeconomic volatility part 3Read parts 1 & 2
There’s good evidence that a country’s level of financial development affects the impact of volatility on economic growth,…

Understanding Macroeconomic Volatility: Part 2 The fact is that a government can soften a recession by increasing spending (the counter-cyclical approach) to raise demand and output. If government…

Volatility in financial markets gets wide attention in the public eye. Less noticed is what we in the development world call macroeconomic volatility—faster-than-desired swings in the broad forces…