Prepared for ACE retreat, Tobago, June 1-2, 1996

The ACE mission and its roots

ACE–the Association of Caribbean Economists–was founded in the mid-1980s, at the height of the neoliberal resurgence. ACE’s founding mission was to critique structural adjustment, and to formulate alternative, people-oriented development strategies for the

Caribbean. Pan-Caribbean cooperation–across language areas and political system-status–would be a means to this end. The ACE Constitution defines its objectives as promoting professional exchange and collaboration amongst the region’s economists to the end of contributing to the “economic development and sovereignty of the peoples and states of the Caribbean, and to economic cooperation and integration within the

Caribbean region”. I argue in this paper that this mission remains highly relevant in the mid 1990s, although the specific concerns and modalities of our work may change.
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