In a small meeting room, tucked away from the faux waterfalls of the Paris Regency Hyatt hotel’s immaculate lobby, Warren Smith, a soft-spoken Jamaican economist and the newly re-elected president of the Caribbean Development Bank, explained how it all might work.
“The trick,” Smith said, “is to take a regional approach.”
Electricity in the Caribbean region costs three to four times as much as in the United States. Caribbean island economies are highly vulnerable to the “vagaries of the international petroleum market,” Smith said, and the boom and bust cycles that characterize those markets spell instability and risk for island states hampered by isolation and size constraints.
Printing articles to share with others is a breach of our terms and conditions and copyright policy. Please use the sharing options on the left side of the article. Devex Pro members may share up to 10 articles per month using the Pro share tool ( ).