This reflection on the relationship between economic development and happiness in Jamaica since independence fifty years ago relies to a good extent on currently available data on life satisfaction (happiness), and on income and other socio-economic variables…
Since its establishment almost 50 years ago at the instigation of developing countries UNCTAD has always been a thorn in the flesh of economic orthodoxy. Its analyses of global macro-economic issues from a development perspective have regularly provided an alternative view to that offered by the World Bank and the IMF controlled by the west. Now efforts are afoot to silence that voice…
Havelock R. Brewster, a national of Guyana and Jamaica, has spent most of his career in international institutions and government service. He was until recently Executive Director for the Caribbean at the Inter-American Development Bank, Washington DC, and previously Guyana’s Ambassador to the European Union, Austria, Belgium, and Germany. Earlier, he served as Special Research Adviser and Director of the Commodities Trade Division of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Geneva. Presently, he is Consultant to the Caribbean Development Bank, Hon. Professor of Economics at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, University of the West Indies, and Senior Associate of the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery. Ambassador Brewster is the author of a large number of journal and other publications in the field of trade, primary commodities, social and economic development analysis and policy, trade negotiations, development financing, economic integration and the Caribbean economy. He is a graduate in economics of King’s College, University of Durham, UK, and Dalhousie University, Canada. In 1993 Ambassador Brewster was awarded Guyana’s Cacique’s Crown of Honor (CCH) and in 2008 he was awarded the Degree of Doctor of Laws, Honoris Causa, of the University of the West Indies.
Havelock Brewster is the author or co-author of over two hundred refereed (*) and other articles, papers, monographs, chapters in books, attributed or institutional. Click here for a list of his selected publications.
Sir George Alleyne, Chancellor of the Universirty of the West Indies, presents the Degree of Doctor of Laws , Honoris Causa to Ambassador Havelock Brewster at the UWI Mona, Campus on November 7, 2008. Following is Ambassador Brewster’s address to the Graduating Class.
Forty years ago, (the work of UWI social scientists) was greeted not as the ” first port of call for regional leadership”, but with unprecedented hostility. The authors were hounded as communists, Marxists revolutionaries, conspirators with Fidel Castro, at best lunatics. The would-be reformers had passports seized, some expelled from the country, fired, threatened, and one assassinated…
Citation for Havelock’s Honorary Doctorate
For a functioning, participatory, Caribbean Democracy Stabroek News 17/11/08
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The Jamaican Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade has circularised stakeholders on the ‘state of play’ in the CARICORUM/EC Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) Negotiations (Ref. No. 55/200/42dated 14th November 2007). This is a welcome initiative in increasing transparency and assisting public understanding of the implications of the EPA., These observations are offered as a contribution to the on-going public debate on the EPA..
From Stabroek News, 2/06/08
The extraordinary rise in food prices over the last couple of years has given a new prominence and urgency to this problem in the Caribbean, where as Tony Weis pointed out in a recent Diaspora column, ” food security is so utterly wedded to global markets and heretofore cheap breadbasket imports”…The EPA provisions on food security provide little or no support in grappling with this difficult dilemma, at the root of which is the production problem that afflicts staples like rice, ground provisions, vegetables and fruits, combined with the consumption of imported, processed, canned, frozen foods, rich in chemical preservatives, hormones, fats, and additives, exacerbating the health problem…
‘Time to Take in the Begging Bowl’
Prepared for an OAS/ World Bank Forum for Parliamentarians on ‘Shaping A Trade Agenda To Promote Regional Integration And Competitiveness For CARICOM, St. Lucia, May 17, 2007. Correspondence to hrbrewster@aol.com.Copyright Havelock Brewster 2007
I want to take the issue of development challenges onto a different dimension- one that could be of interest to politicians… Some of my thoughts center on our weak sense of purpose, deteriorating community values, and a paralytic deficit in democracy, reflected, in particular, in the dysfunctional politics of race and small size…[..]
Delivered at the CARICOM 30th Anniversary Conference on Regional Governance and Integrated Development, University of the
West Indies, Mona Campus, October 2003.Copyright Havelock Brewster 2003
The CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) was adopted fourteen years ago but very little has actually been implemented. The core of the problem resides in the fact that the Treaty of Chaguaramas is based on the intergovernmental mode of cooperation and thus its provisions are subject to the discretions of national sovereignty. But the experience of the European Union illustrates that supranational decision-making can accelerate the process of integration in chosen policy domains; that sovereignty is a dynamic concept, divisive, and customizable according to the needs and desires of the participating States. Intergovernmentalism and supranationalism are reconcilable..[..]
The Rose Hall Declaration on Mature Regionalism and Regional Governance, adopted by the CARICOM Heads of Government Conference of July 2003, was meant to adress the problem of Caricom’s ‘implementation deficit’. This review critically assesses the provisions of the Declaration…[...]
Prepared by Havelock Brewster, Tom Dolan and Taimoon Stewart for the World Bank, 2002
Covers issues related to the implementation of the CSME as it moves from Single Market to Single Economy, including the issue of national sovereignty, priorities, progress of the CSME and asssessment of needs.
Copyright the authors and the World Bank,, 2002
