Black Immigrant Daily News

Attorney General and Minister of Justice and Legal Affairs Garth Wilkin said his office examined and made effective changes to the Citizenship by Investment (CBI) programme’s legislation on Dec. 23 to remove loopholes exploited by property developers.

During the Prime Minister’s Press Conference on Jan. 18, the Attorney General said, “What developers are required to do now, is that they have to place money received from the sale of real estate units into an escrow account and the administration of the citizenship by investment programme will now monitor the progress of the project such that a developer does not sell 20 units for example and not build anything.”

“What will happen now is that the money will now go into escrow and when the developer has now proved that for example, they have finished a foundation, then a certain amount of money will be released; if they prove that they have reached the roof stage then a certain amount of money will be released,” he said.

The Attorney General stated that there is also a new element of regulations set up to monitor the distribution of units processed.

He said, “For example, if you were a developer and you believe that you can sell 1000 units or 1000 buildings in your real estate project, you will not be given access to sell those 1000 units at the beginning of your project like was done in the past, what you will do is you will be given a certain amount of units, for example, 50, you would be able to put those on the market and until you complete a certain phase of your construction, you will not get the next 50, so there will be a staggered approach to the actual issuance of the units that you can sell on the market.”

He said that all of this was done to prevent what has occurred in the past where real estate developers were selling off plans and building one part of the project and not completing it in its entirety resulting in what he termed “white elephants”.

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Black Immigrant Daily News

Prime Minister Gaston Browne led his ruling Antigua and Barbuda Labour Party (ABLP) to a nail-biting victory in Wednesday’s general election, winning nine of the 17 seats for a third consecutive term in office, according to the preliminary results released here early Thursday morning.

The party had won 15 of the 17 seats in the 2018 general election.

“You know I have always said to people, you must always give thanks, no matter how small the blessing and I see this decision as a blessing upon the people of Antigua and Barbuda,” Prime Minister Browne told supporters.

He said the results will give the ABLP government the opportunity to re-align “and also create the opportunity for fresh talent.

“Truth be told, whenever you try to remove incumbents it is very difficult. So when you remove incumbents then it creates the space you could bring in new talent to the organisation, to the government.

“So we do not see this as a bad thing per say, we see it as an opportunity at the same time. However, I want to thank those of my colleagues who would have served this country well over the last eight and a half years and of course we will continue to stand by them, so we will not leave them out in the cold,” Browne told supporters.

Prime Minister Browne, who became the first government leader here to win three consecutive general elections, headed the victorious ABLP candidates, as the main opposition United Progressive Party (UPP) won five additional seats as compared to the solitary seat it had gained in the 2018 general election.

Browne polled 1, 295 votes as against 621 for Alister Thomas of the UPP and Jamel Knight of the Democratic National Alliance (DNA) to win the St. John’s City West seat.

“I want to thank you all very much …I say thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart. I feel humbled, again to be the first Prime Minister to get three consecutive terms and that is a significant amount of confidence and trust which I shall continue to honour,” Browne told supporters, adding that he would be sworn into office later on Thursday morning at 10.30 (local time) and the cabinet named on Friday.

Browne said he would have signalled to his party that it needed fresh legs and new talent.

“Truth be told after two terms some ministers become lethargic. They do not have the will to fight,” he said, adding that some of “our colleagues did not have the energy to mobilise, you could have seen it at our events, it is something the leadership discussed…

The Democratic National Alliance (DNA) failed to make any impact in the election with its leader, Joanne Massiah polling only 22 votes.

UPP leader Harold Lovell, failed to win the City East seat for a third consecutive time as Information Minister Melford Nicholas held on to win by six votes..

Preliminary figures released by the Antigua and Barbuda Electoral Commission (ABEC) showed that Nicholas, who has defeated the former finance minister on all three occasions, polled 791 votes while Lovell received 785. Leon Smith of the DNA got 13 votes.

In the last general election, Lovell lost by 153 votes. He has since called for a recount.

“If you are going to lead a government, you have to win your seat,” said regional political scientist and pollster, Peter Wickham.

On the sister isle of Barbuda, the Barbuda People’s Movement (BPM), retained the seat with the incumbent, Trevor Walker, comfortably winning against Knacyntar Nedd of the ABLP, according to preliminary results released here on Tuesday.

Walker polled 624 votes to Nedd’s 456 votes.

Among the casualties of the election were Works Minister Lennox Weston, Samantha Marshall, the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Barbuda Affairs, Michael Browne, Minister of the Creative Industries and Innovation and Dean Jonas, the Minister of Social Transformation, Human Resource Development and the Blue Economy.

Jamaica based pollster, Don Anderson, who had conducted several opinion polls prior to the general election, said while the UPP “will do much better than they did in 2018,” it failed to drive home the issues during the campaign.

“The shift we are seeing is a vital one,” Anderson said on a radio programme here, noting however that the shift was not sufficient to drive the UPP home “because they started too far behind”.

Opposition Leader Jamale Pringle, who was the sole UPP legislator in the last Parliament, easily won the All Saints East and St. Luke constituency, defeating Colin James by a margin of 1, 799 to 1,047.

Avory Knight of the DNA polled 52.

The highlight of the election was the victory of independent candidate, Asot Michael, the former government legislator, who had been the parliamentary representative on four occasions, but was had been prevented from contesting the seat on behalf of the ruling party.

Michael had taken his matter to the courts in a bid to get the ABLP to reverse its decision and had even entertained the idea of becoming prime minister if none of the two major parties had failed to win sufficient seats to form the government.

Browne told supporters that Thursday would not be a public holiday to celebrate the victory, adding ” I want to make an appeal to all Antiguans and Barbudans, especially our political opponents to accept the results of the elections.

“Let us come together as a united nation that will fight together in order to advance this country. There will be yet another political cycle some time down the road…but let us cool the rhetoric going forward, let us prioritise the advancement of this country recognising the challenges that we are faced with, and let us not be daunted by the challenges,” he added.

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Black Immigrant Daily News

The Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Jos? Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, proposed cluster-based policies as a powerful instrument to promote growth and productive diversification to help pull the region out of the prolonged, development crisis that has impeded high, sustained and sustainable growth in the last decades, except in cases of price bonanzas in primary products.

The United Nations senior official is in Davos, Switzerland for the 2023 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting (WEF) from January 16-20. The 53rd edition brings together the largest number of world political and economic leaders in its history, including more than 50 heads of State or government, 56 finance ministers, 19 central bank presidents, 30 ministers of trade and 35 ministers of foreign affairs, under the slogan “Cooperation in a Fragmented World.”

In his presentation during the “Sustainable Solutions for Latin America” session on Wednesday, January 18, attended by the President of Ecuador, Vice President of the Dominican Republic and distinguished authorities from the public sector, business leaders and academics, ECLAC’s Executive Secretary stressed that productivity has not grown at all in 30 years in Latin America and the Caribbean, the region of the world with the worst productivity performance in the last 40 years. He added that the average rate of growth in the last ten years (from 2014 through 2023, considering the projection of 1.3% growth for this year) is just 0.9%, or less than half the growth the region had in the infamous lost decade of the 1980s.

“Therefore, this decade will be even more lost than the last lost decade. This is the real developmental crisis of Latin America and the Caribbean: the region has failed miserably in promoting technological sophistication, economic complexity and production and export diversification. The result is that all countries are in the medium-income trap,” he stated. As a result, none have even gotten close to the threshold of $20,000 dollars per capita income.

In this context, Salazar-Xirinachs warned that without growth in productivity, prosperity is not sustainable, the creation of jobs and social policies are not sustainable, social mobility is not possible, and without all this, the reduction in inequality and social pacts are at risk.

“We know that there are no easy recipes for achieving high, sustained and sustainable growth. There are no silver bullets. There is a whole checklist of things that have to be right, such as investment climate, infrastructure, education, macroeconomic balances, good governance, etc. But a solution could be cluster initiative policies or cluster-based policies that could be built from the bottom up, even if some of the factors on the competitiveness checklist are not 100% right,” he explained.

He indicated that clusters are a specific form of public-private partnership that creates a space of governance where all relevant players collaborate to promote competitiveness, job creation, innovation, skills, financing and remove obstacles for the growth of the cluster, sector or agglomeration. The most successful clusters are led by the private sector, with close cooperation of government agencies and educational and training institutions.

“The countries of Latin America and the Caribbean should embrace cluster-based approaches and scale them up in their productive development policies. In this sense, we want to turn ECLAC into a Center of Excellence in Knowledge on cluster policies, among other themes,” specified the organization’s Executive Secretary.

Jos? Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs was one of the key speakers at the WEF session on Enabling an Equitable Transition, held on Thursday, January 19, alongside distinguished panelists who addressed paths for incorporating equality and justice in the transition toward greener, more equitable and inclusive economies.

On this occasion, he emphasized the need to speed up the pace of economic transformations in the region, saying that economic changes, whether induced by trade and globalization, the technology revolution, or by green growth and the big environmental push, are a process of “creative destruction” or structural change where there are sectors, workers and territories that win, and others that lose. And he pointed out that the big public policy challenge to promote a fair and equitable transition is in making the creative aspects of the change come before the destructive aspects, in terms of unemployment and the obsolescence of existing productive capacities.

He added that one of the fundamental aspects for there to be a fair and equitable transition is having major investment in education and training. “One of the greatest restrictions for making the transition toward what’s new is not having the talent and competencies that the new sectors of the future demand,” he said. In addition, he recommended bolstering the active labor market policies to help displaced workers find new employment opportunities through training, re-training and labor reinsertion policies.

Furthermore, in a special column published on the 2023 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting blog, ECLAC’s Executive Secretary addressed how to reverse the cycle of slow growth Latin America and the Caribbean is experiencing. In the article, Salazar-Xirinachs says that average growth for the countries of the region will be 1.3% in 2023, reflecting a structural trap of low growth, elevated inequality, weak institutions and bad governance, combined with adverse international conditions. For this reason, “policy priorities should focus on reactivating job markets, curbing the rising cost of living, improving tax collection and sheltering vulnerable groups, and investing in well-designed social policies and universal health,” he indicated in the article.

Likewise, during his time in Davos, the ECLAC senior official held numerous bilateral meetings with figures from government, international organizations and institutions, and representatives from the public and private sectors, including: Michael Frohman, Vice Chairman and President, Strategic Growth, Mastercard; Rebeca Grynspan, Secretary-General of UNCTAD; Janio Rosales, Minister of Economy of Guatemala; Andr?s Velasco, Dean of the School of Public Policy, London School of Economics; Mathias Cormann, Secretary-General of the OECD; Jos? Antonio Ocampo, Minister of Finance of Colombia; Gabriela Bucher, Executive Director, OXFAM International; David Herranz, Senior Vice President, Manpower Europe, Manpower Group; Lars-Hendrik R?ller, President, Berlin Global Dialogue and Pamela Coke-Hamilton, Director, Geneva Center for International Trade.

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The Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism (CRFM) has a new fisheries assessment scientist on its technical team. Dr. Pranaya Kumar Parida, who holds a Ph.D. in Fisheries Resource Management from India with more than 18 years of experience in Fisheries Research, Teaching and Extension, was recruited to assume a three-year tenure with the CRFM through the longstanding Cooperation Programme between the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and the Government of India.

Dr. Parida will assist the CRFM and its Member States with fisheries assessment studies, statistical analyses of commercially exploited marine fish stocks, as well as the formulation of fisheries management plans and advice for decision-making. He will also provide training to Fisheries Biologists, Data Collectors, and Data Managers in CRFM Member States and at the CRFM Secretariat. He will be based at the CRFM Office located in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

Milton Haughton, Executive Director of the Caribbean Regional Fisheries Mechanism said: “The recruitment of Dr. Parida to assist with stock assessment studies is expected to provide critical data and information on the state of our fisheries, enabling CRFM Member States to enhance the way they manage the region’s fisheries resources. Through this engagement, the CRFM will continue to work towards strategically improving the sustainable development and management of the living marine resources of the CARICOM and CRFM Member States. The CRFM Secretariat is very grateful for the generous support being provided by the Government of India in making the services of Dr. Parida available to the CRFM Member States.”

He is credited with the publication of more than 35 international peer-reviewed research papers, 10 popular articles, and 2 books. He has been awarded a design patent and has filed another 4 patents as co-inventor.

Dr. Parida previously served as Assistant Professor (Fisheries Resource Management) at College of Fisheries, GADVASU, Ludhiana. He has furthermore conducted over 50 training programmes for the farmers, students from different universities, and government officials from different states of India.

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