| Overview | Agenda | Workshop Summaries | Conference Sponsors |
| Overview | Agenda | Workshop Summaries | Conference Sponsors |
Caribbean Capital Markets Integration Forum Financial Integration- One Regional Capital Market Caribbean
Capital & Equity Markets Integration October 7-8, 2003 – Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago
Overview Conference Purpose Bring together the key decision-makers in the region to create a greater sense of urgency in meeting the challenges affecting the future well being of the Caribbean. CLAA’s mission, Strengthening The Third Border ™, is centered on promoting private sector-led sustainable economic development in the Caribbean Basin. By joining the stock exchanges, bankers, legislators, regulators, investors, brokers, and governments of the region, we expect to build the consensus needed to bring new momentum to the process of integration of the financial markets of the Caribbean. For these efforts to be successful, the private sector across the region must come together and take the initiative in forging the public/private sector partnership required to confront these challenges head-on. Conference Objective Define
the public policy changes needed to integrate and
harmonize the capital markets of the Caribbean, consistent
with related initiatives from CARICOM. Obtain the
participants’ commitment to the process of development
currently underway in the region. Fundamentally, we
recognize that foreign investment is a necessary prerequisite
for economic development. Traditional sources of development
finance - domestic savings, government aid, multilateral
assistance and commercial bank lending - are no longer
adequate. Sufficient foreign investment has not come
due to three fundamental reasons: scale (small and
inefficient markets), bureaucracy (difficult business
facilitation practices) and corruption (lack of the
rule of law). Our aim is to attract greater investment
flows by building a constructive private/public sector
partnership to aggressively pursue what we have termed
a Transformation Agenda - accelerating the
pace of integration, harmonization and the impartial
application of the law throughout the region. Reaching
agreement on a plan of action to create a single regional
stock exchange to more effectively attract domestic
and international investment to the region is a critical
step forward. The methodology for the conference sessions will be the same. Each concurrent session will be conducted in a roundtable format where the moderator will engage the discussants and participants in an active dialogue aimed at providing 3 to 5 responses to two fundamental questions: Where do we need to be in the year 2005? What must we do to get there? Participants will be encouraged to avoid spending their time describing the difficulty of the present situation (Where are we now?). Instead, emphasis will be placed on sharing their vision of the future and more importantly, on what must be done to turn that vision into reality. Participants should reflect on 3 broad criteria as they relate to these discussions: What needs to be done to make the region more competitive? What needs to be done to attract foreign investment to the region? What needs to be done to encourage greater domestic investment and participation? The moderators will be responsible for conveying the roundtables’ main discussion points and their conclusions to the rest of the forum’s participants in the panel presentations that will follow each session. Each roundtable will also be asked to identify specific topics suitable for a subsequent "Best Practices" study. The aim of these studies would be to make recommendations that could be implemented expeditiously across the region. Constituents •
U.S. Government – Senior Representatives from
State, Commerce, Treasury and USAID
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