Senior Director at the OECS Secretariat Randy Cato told Chief OECS Statisticians on Wednesday their meeting was timely as OECS Member States shift towards an Economic Union, particularly in the area of exclusive legislative competence. Under the imminent OECS Economic Union, exclusive legislative competence means the responsibility for legislative action in selected areas such as Trade Policy, will rest more with the central secretariat than that of Member States:“..which means that trade policy formulation across the Economic Union will now take place at a central level rather than individual country levels to achieve a greater degree of conformity, harmony and common and collective direction in the area of trade development. For this to happen effectively, trade data is simply vital. The value of this move to exclusive legislative competence at the center will be lost and there will be no real effect if we do not have the underpinning of proper, timely, effective, reliable trade data. It is not an assertion, it’s a fact.”
The OECS Secretariat, in collaboration with the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) convened the meeting on March 17th 2010, to mark the re-activation of the OECS Technical Cooperation Project on strengthening the
capabilities of the Statistical Offices of OECS Member Countries and
the OECS Secretariat in Statistical and Data Management. Cato said the
resumption of the project after several years of dormancy is critical
in enabling the building on infrastructure to provide essential data
for policy making and implementation particularly as the OECS continue
to increasingly engage in dialogue on International Trade Arrangements.
This includes Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) from negotiation to
implementation, with territories like the United States, Canada and
South America.
He said timely trade data is essential for the OECS to make maximum and optimum use of these arrangements: “We have found in the EPA negotiation for example, that we were very hamstrung by the absence of timely trade data very often at the level of the OECS. We were uncertain about levels of exports, volume of trade with trading partners; whether it be the collective EU or individual EU countries, we were uncertain about the volume of products, what were the key products and decisions had to be made particularly in the area of agriculture as to what kind of protective arrangements we would want to negotiate with respect to products that were of sensitive value to the OECS. When we were asked for data to support the representations we were making, very often we found ourselves scrambling. We found ourselves where we could not at the click of a switch get the information. We found ourselves having to construct arguments very often based on conjecture and indications rather than hard data. That is not acceptable and as we move the OECS more seriously into the area of international transactions and activity we must have the data.”
Cato also encouraged OECS member countries to ensure that they make sufficient use of systems being provided through the revitalized technical co-operation agreement project. He suggested investments in training and reforming systems to enable the end use of the project to be effective: “The challenge is upon you as Heads of Statistics and the OECS Secretariat that we continue to work effectively in looking at how we energize the process of proper data for decision making.”-Cato
OECS countries participating in this project will be provided with technical assistance in developing policies, practices and procedures for managing the full data lifecycles of various sets of statistics produced in the OECS region. This would allow individual countries and the OECS Secretariat to respond in a more efficient and timely manner to requests for social and economic data in support of national and regional development initiatives. One of the key outputs of this project is a data dissemination platform for trade statistics, which will form the central component of an OECS Trade Policy Information Systems (TPIS) that is currently being developed by the OECS Secretariat. The re-activation of this technical cooperation project coincides with the implementation of several complementary statistical development initiatives that are all designed to enhance the capacity of the OECS Secretariat and OECS Central Statistics Offices to manage and disseminate statistical information that will be essential to the smooth functioning of the OECS Economic Union.
Programme Officer in the OECS Economic Affairs Division Sean Curtis Mathurin says the meeting was instructive in enlightening Directors of Statistics on the objectives and goals of the OECS Technical Cooperation project.
Media Contact: Raymond O’Keiffe Email: rokeiffe@oecs.org Tel. 1-758- 455-6305 or 455-OECS