Caribbean Trade Law and Development

Tag: news

  • Caribbean Weekly Trade & Development Digest – February 28 – March 5 2016

    These are some of the major trade and development headlines and analysis across the Caribbean region and the world for the week of February 28- March 5, 2016 :

    Regional

    Biofuel Manufacturer to invest US$95 million in Jamaica plant by 2017

    South Florida Caribbean News: As renewable energy demands increase globally, biofuel developer Benchmark Renewable Energy LLC has officially announced plans to develop a large scale bio-ethanol operation in Jamaica. Read more

    Barbados passport tops Caribbean passports in ease of visa-free travel

    Caribbean Trade Law & Development: Barbados has the best passport among Caribbean countries. This is according to Henley & Partners’ recently published Visa Restrictions Index 2016 in which Barbados has topped Caribbean countries in the ease of which its citizens/passport holders can cross international borders. Read more

    US airlines sign up for commercial flights to Cuba

    CNN Money: American Airlines, Alaska Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Southwest Airlines, United Airlines and JetBlue have all submitted applications to the U.S. government to fly commercial flights to Cuba. Read more

    T&T facing downgrade by Moody’s Investors

    Trinidad Express: For the second time in two years, Trinidad and Tobago is facing a downgrade by international credit ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service. Read more

    Strike hits Guyana’s sugar industry

    Caribbean360: A day after declaring that Guyana’s first crop sugar target was on track to be met, the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) has been hit by strike action. Read more

    Barbados & St. Lucia Negotiating Agreement

    CARICOM Today: The Governments of Barbados and St. Lucia have decided to proceed to the negotiation and conclusion of an agreement establishing the maritime boundary between the two States. Officials from the two States met in Barbados from March 1 to 4, 2016 and prepared the draft text of a maritime boundary delimitation agreement. Read more

    International

    India files dispute against the US over non-immigrant temporary working visas

    WTO: On 3 March 2016, India notified the WTO Secretariat that it has initiated a WTO dispute proceeding against the United States regarding measures imposing increased fees on certain applicants for two categories of non-immigrant temporary working visas into the US, and measures relating to numerical commitments for some visas.  Read more

    Commodity prices signal market bottom

    Financial Times: When news of the highest crude stocks since the Great Depression hit oil traders’ screens on Wednesday, those expecting another rush of sell orders were in for a surprise. Read more

    Paraguay becomes second South American nation to ratify the Trade Facilitation Agreement

    WTO: Paraguay has become the second South American nation to ratify the WTO’s new Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA). Eladio Loizaga, Paraguay’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, presented his country’s instrument of acceptance to WTO Deputy Director-General Yi Xiaozhun on 1 March. Read more

    EU, Canada Revise Investment Protections in Trade Deal

    ICTSD: The EU and Canada announced on Monday that they have revised the investment protection terms in their bilateral trade pact, with the new version now including an investment court system that Brussels is hoping to pursue in other trade agreements – including with the US. Read more

    Barclays Africa ‘s trade finance future uncertain

    Global Trade Review: Barclays Africa’s trade and export finance future will be in the hands of the bank’s next majority shareholder after Barclays reduces its 62.3% stake to around 20% over the next two to three years. Read more

    US Imposes 266 percent tariffs on some Chinese steel imports

    Wall Street Journal: The Department of Commerce Tuesday imposed preliminary duties on imports of cold-rolled steel, used to make auto parts, appliances and shipping containers, from seven countries including China, whose steelmakers were slapped with a massive tariff. Read more

    Recent Articles: Caribbean Trade Law & Development Blog

    US President Obama’s Trade Agenda – 2016

    Barbados’ Passport Tops Caribbean Passports in Ease of Visa-free Travel

    For past issues, please visit here.

    Alicia Nicholls, B.Sc., M.Sc., LL.B. is a trade and development consultant with a keen interest in sustainable development, international law and trade. You can also read more of her commentaries and follow her on Twitter @LicyLaw.

  • Jamaica tops Anglophone Caribbean on ease of doing business in Doing Business Report 2016

    Alicia Nicholls

    Jamaica can boast of being ranked as the easiest place to do business among countries of the English-speaking Caribbean, according to the World Bank’s Doing Business Report 2016. Jamaica has an overall rank of 64 out of 189 economies surveyed in the report, improving seven places from a ranking of 71 last year. Jamaica was not only the highest ranked of the English speaking Caribbean countries but was second only to Puerto Rico (57) out of all Caribbean countries. Jamaica was also the only Caribbean economy ranked among the ‘top 10 improvers’ in terms of performance on the Doing Business indicators in 2014/2015.

    Now in its 13th year of publication, the 2016 edition of the Report entitled ‘Measuring Regulatory Quality and Efficiency’ ranked 189 economies globally on the ease of doing business based on 10 indicators which measure and benchmark regulations which pertain to local small to medium-size enterprises throughout their life cycle. The indicators were: starting a business, dealing with construction permits, getting electricity, registering property, getting credit, protecting minority investors, paying taxes, trading across borders, enforcing contracts and resolving insolvency. Although presented in the economy profiles, labor market regulation indicators are not included in the aggregate ease of doing business ranking this year.

    On two of the indicators Jamaica ranked among the top 10 economies globally, namely ‘ease of starting a business’ (9) and ‘getting credit’ (7, tied with Puerto Rico). Its lowest rankings were in regards to ‘trading across borders’ (146), ‘paying taxes’ (146) and ‘registering a property’ (122).

    Several reforms introduced by Jamaica during the 2014/2015 period were deemed to have made business easier including, streamlining internal procedures for starting a business,  implementing a new workflow for processing building permit applications, by encouraging taxpayers to pay their taxes online, introducing an employment tax credit, just to name a few. However, the introduction of a minimum business tax, the raising of the contribution rate for the national insurance scheme paid by employers and increased rates for stamp duty, the property tax, the property transfer tax and the education tax were viewed less favourably.

    The average ranking of Caribbean economies on the ease of doing business was 104. After Jamaica (9), the next three top regional performers were St. Lucia (77), Trinidad & Tobago (88) and Dominica (91). Haiti had the lowest rank among CARICOM countries (182), followed by Grenada (135) and St. Kitts & Nevis (124). Of note is Barbados which slipped 3 places from 116 in last year’s ranking to 119 in the 2016 ranking, making it the fourth lowest ranked CARICOM economy by ease of doing business. In regards to the region as a whole, the Report commended the region’s continued “remarkable progress” on reforms to resolve insolvency, including the new insolvency laws adopted by Jamaica and St. Vincent & the Grenadines.

    It should be noted that although no Caribbean country made it into the top 50 economies on the list, the region did well compared to most SIDS globally, with the notable exception of Mauritius which ranked a laudable 32. On average the Caribbean region ranked highest on ‘getting electricity’ (74), ‘starting a business’ (87) and ‘enforcing contracts’ (90), while scoring lowest in ‘registering property’ (144), ‘resolving insolvency’ (114), ‘paying taxes’ (112) and ‘getting credit’ (112). However, individual countries’ performance on each of these indicators showed great variance.

    While it has its limitations, the Doing Business Report, a flagship report of the World Bank, remains one of the best comparative measures of countries’ business environments. After all, it touches on many of the indicators which companies consider when seeking to invest in a foreign market. As such these rankings are and should be used by countries across the region as a guide to measure the success of their regulatory reforms, identify strengths and weaknesses of their business environments, and compare their countries’ business environment ranking regionally, globally and over a time period as they compete which each other for global investment inflows. While Jamaica’s over all performance is praiseworthy, what these rankings demonstrate is that there still remains great room for improvement if Caribbean countries are to become globally competitive as choice destinations for doing business.

    The full Doing Business 2016: Caribbean States Regional Profile may be accessed here, while the full Doing Business Report 2016 is available here.

    Alicia Nicholls, B.Sc., M.Sc., LL.B. is a trade and development consultant with a keen interest in sustainable development, international law and trade.

  • Grenada leads the way by abolishing criminal libel – We all should follow suit

    Alicia Nicholls 

    The big legal news rippling across the Caribbean Sea this week is the revelation that the Tillman Thomas government in Grenada has made history by being the first Commonwealth Caribbean territory to abolish criminal defamation and thus bring its libel laws, at least on this front, in conformity with the exigencies of a twenty-first century democracy.

    According to the International Press Institute (IPI), Grenada’s Criminal Code (Amendment) Act of 2012 abolished sections 252 and 253 of the Grenada Criminal Code which imposed criminal sanctions for libel. The repeal was a big victory for the International Press Institute which has been ardently campaigning for the abolition of criminal defamation in all Commonwealth Caribbean States, advocating instead the reliance on civil actions exclusively. Seditious libel however still remains on the books as a criminal offence under s 357 of the Criminal Code. For a full background on the work of the IPI on this front, see here.

    Freedom of the press is held to be one of the central tenets of a functioning liberal democracy. The rationale behind press freedom is that a robust and independent press keeps public officials in check by informing the populace of their actions, calling them out on their shortcomings, while also providing information which would allow the public to make informed decisions in their own interest. However, the existence of antiquated defamation laws on the statute books of Commonwealth Caribbean countries has led many to criticize these vestiges of the colonial era as fetters on the efficacy of the fourth estate in scrutinizing our public officials, and thereby serving as a barrier to true democratic governance.

    The zeal with which Commonwealth Caribbean territories have tended to cling to our pre-independence laws has been heavily criticized, but in the case of our libel laws, the situation becomes even more perplexing. While it is accepted that a delicate balance must be maintained between the much deserved need to protect a person’s reputation and the equally deserved right of the public to access information, the harshness of Commonwealth Caribbean countries’ libel laws can be contrasted with the iniquitously broad freedom of expression privileges granted to parliamentarians on the floor of parliament under the convention of parliamentary privilege.  Is the freedom of speech of parliamentarians therefore more valuable than that of those whose role is to serve as the watch dogs of our post-independence democracies?

    Defamation legislation throughout the Commonwealth Caribbean ranges in vintage from semi-modern to archaic acts dating back to the mid-nineteenth century.  With sluggish statutory change, if any, it has been up to the common law to adapt the laws of defamation to the needs of modern twenty-first century democracies. The defence of qualified privilege is one which has not generally found much success in case law before the landmark House of Lords decision in Reynolds v Times Newspapers Limited [2001] which recognized the duty of the press to communicate to the world at large and also recognised a public interest defence which commentators have called the “Reynolds defence”. In Jameel v Wall Street Journal Europe, Lord Nicholls of Birkenhead further clarified the Reynolds defence by giving some guidance on the factors to be taken into consideration when deciding whether the defence of qualified privilege applies.

    Criminal libel prosecutions remain alive and well in the Caribbean, although their frequency varies according to territory. In the recent Grenadian case of George Worme and Grenada Today v Commissioner of Police of Grenada (2004) which had been referred to the Privy Council, Lord Rodger importantly rejected submissions by counsel that then section 258 was too narrowly drafted to allow for the raising of the Reynolds defence. However, the court also regrettably held that criminal libel  was “a justifiable part of the law of the democratic society in Grenada”. Rulings such as this reinforce the cloud of fear hanging over regional journalists in execution of their ‘watch dog’ function.

    Penalties for criminal libel vary across the region. Before its abolition, section 252 of the Grenada Civil Code provided that the penalty of conviction for negligent libel was imprisonment for six months, while two year imprisonment existed in the case of intentional libel. The Barbados Defamation Act (Cap 199) of 1997, one of the more ‘modern’ acts,  is a bit more lenient at Article 34(3) as it gives the Court the discretion to impose a fine of up to $2,000, imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or both.Despite the talks and promises of libel reform decades after many of us have achieved independence, our journalists still have the risk of criminal prosecution as an ‘occupational hazard’ of their profession. It is little wonder therefore that self censorship by media houses is endemic in several Commonwealth Caribbean states, including Barbados. It is a practice which, though done to shield these entities from prosecution, is contrary to the public interest.

    Moreover, stringent libel laws have tended to make the constitutional guarantee of right to access to information virtually nugatory, particularly where freedom of information acts do not exist. In Barbados, the proposed Freedom of Information Act which was supposed to buttress the constitutional guarantee of right to access to information under section 20 of the Constitution of Barbados by, inter alia, providing greater public access to information held by government bodies, has not yet been passed and neither have the proposed defamation reforms. On the contrary, the UK, from whom our defamation laws were inherited, abolished criminal libel and sedition per section 73 of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 and is currently in the process of passing a new Defamation Act (currently HL Bill 41) which is aimed at modernizing that country’s defamation laws.

    In countries which pride ourselves as democratic states, it is high time that we purge our statute books of these archaic and anti-democratic laws. As seen in Grenada, this is not a move most politicians would make without strong lobbying by local, regional and international civil society.  Despite this, Grenada’s big step towards the complete removal of criminal defamation should be applauded and one can only hope that other post-independence Commonwealth territories, including Barbados, would follow suit in the interest of greater democracy.

    Alicia Nicholls is a trade policy specialist and law student at the University of the West Indies – Cave Hill. You can contact her here or follow her on Twitter at@LicyLaw.

  • The 2012 London Olympics: Rally around the Caribbean!

    Alicia Nicholls

    David Rudder’s famous calypso ‘Rally ’round the West Indies’ came to my mind as I watched the end of the track and field events of the 2012 London Olympics on television today with regional pride. This song, which has become the anthem of the West Indies cricket team, is about cricket but the regional pride and call to action which it exudes can apply to any facet of regional life.

    Of the two hundred and four countries represented at the games of the XXX Olympiad, twenty-two were from the Caribbean,  representing our unique melting pot of cultures and tongues. Since the region’s first showing at the Olympic Games in London in 1948, the way for our younger athletes today has been paved by several regional track and field legends, the likes of which include: Arthur Wint (Jamaica’s first Olympic gold medalist),  Rodney Wilkes (Trinidad & Tobago’s first Olympic gold medalist), Hasely Crawford, Donald Quarrie, Merlene Ottey, Ato Bolden,  just to name a few.

    I would be the first to admit that unlike previous years, I was not initially feeling the hype of the Summer Olympic Games this time around.  But by the second week of the games, the strong Caribbean presence, particularly in the track and field events, was enough to shake my apathy and keep me glued to my computer to hear the latest updates.

    The London Olympic Games were full of heart-warming, tear-inducing moments for all Caribbean people here and in the diaspora. Thanks to Jamaican athletes Usain Bolt and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce’s lightning fast wins in their respective 100m events, the Caribbean can boast the fastest man and woman on earth. Smashing world record after record, Usain Bolt has been the first to successfully defend an Olympic gold medal in not one but two events (men’s individual 100m and 200m) and has undoubtedly sealed his place in history as the greatest sprinter of all time. Anchored by Bolt, the record-setting performance of the Jamaican quartet in the 4 by 100m relay brought a resounding end to the track and field events for the region.

    The 2012  London Olympics has been the best Olympic Games for the Caribbean in terms of medal tally and the distribution of medals. The region won 15 medals in Sydney, 15 in Beijing and now 18 medals in London, of which  7 are gold medals.  This is also the best Olympic performance by individual CARICOM countries, with Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, the Dominican Republic, Grenada and the Bahamas all winning Olympic gold in track and field events. Jamaica has finished third overall in the track and medal table, winning 12 medals, only behind the United States and Russia, but ahead of other big countries like the UK. While the English-speaking Caribbean’s medal success has been in track and field, Cuba represented the region well off-track by winning gold in judo, boxing, shooting and wrestling.

    Perhaps the most poignant moments  of the games for me were the successes of our young, first-time Olympians. Hitherto unknown and not yet twenty, Trinidad & Tobago’s Keshorn Walcott became the first person from the western hemisphere in over six decades to win Olympic gold in the javelin throw. Kirani James’ stunning win in the 400m dash gave Grenadians the world over their country’s first Olympic medal and the inspirational moment of hearing their national anthem being played at an Olympic Stadium for the first time.

    The Caribbean is traditionally used to world-dominance in cricket, producing some of the greatest cricketers the world has ever seen. Now our region’s world class track and field athletes have shown the rest of the world that the track dust which we stir up is larger than the dots that represent us on maps. The symbolism of the Caribbean’s domination of the track and field events in this year’s games cannot be escaped.  For the English-speaking Caribbean, being able to flex our athletic muscle and assert our dominance against seasoned athletes from metropolitan countries, in the capital city of our former mother country, was an empowering feeling. The performance of Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago is particularly symbolic given that this August marks a half century of both countries’ independence from Great Britain.

    Nothing can compare to the pride I felt seeing the flags of Caribbean countries being hoisted in the air or the look of achievement and love of country and region on the faces of our athletes as they stood atop the podiums to receive their medals at the medal ceremonies. It is Caribbean athletes’ names that will be on the lips of all who speak of the London Olympics of 2012. Their prowess will be etched in our memories forever.

    In addition to this, the Caribbean pride I saw glowing from the status updates and comments of my Facebook friends, the impassioned cries of Caribbean unity and “one Caribbean” was truly encouraging particularly at a time when so many are bemoaning the apparent stagnation of CARICOM and the regional integration movement on a whole. Caribbean people both in the region and in the diaspora have been united in their celebration of regional athletes’ success at the London Olympic Games of 2012. The Caribbean pride that I saw during these games was not manufactured. It was genuine. Never again can anyone say that Caribbean integration is beyond our reach. Just as we have put parochialism and petty stereotypes about each other aside momentarily for the past days and rallied around our Olympic athletes, it is about high time our governments get serious about regional integration and rally together for the good of the region.

    The Caribbean could not have asked for a better performance from our ambassadors. All of our Caribbean Olympians, whether they medaled or not, are champions and deserve heartfelt congratulations from the region. You have made our people proud!

    Alicia Nicholls is a trade policy specialist and law student at the University of the West Indies – Cave Hill. You can contact her here or follow her on Twitter at @LicyLaw.