This publication is an updated edition of The Financial Evolution of the Caribbean Community (1970-1996) edited by Laurence Clarke and Donna Danns. The book charts developments in Caribbean financial systems from the mid-1990s to around 2008 and identifies the main policies and structural factors influencing their reconfiguration. The Caribbean experience has to be seen against the backdrop of factors affecting the real sectors of the economy, the quality of financial polices, the occurrence of debt, currency and banking crises in various parts of the world and the emergence and persistence of a severe recession in the developed countries towards the end of the first decade of the 21st century. In various degrees, the contributions not only seek to capture changes in the financial infrastructure but also point to challenges facing financial institutions stemming from domestic factors and external influences. While financial innovations driven by technology and market realities are welcome, and indeed necessary to meet consumer expectations and finance growth, imaginative company structures, unscrupulous managers, new financial products and a liberalized policy environment have severely tested government regulations in recent years, raising issues of confidence and creating a certain amount of instability in some cases. The ineffectiveness of traditional tools of monetary control has also forced central banks to experiment with new instruments to manage liquidity, contain inflation and defend the exchange rate.

The book available for FREE download from the Monographs section of our site.

The Caribbean Centre for Money and Finance announces the launch of a new publication that turns the spotlight on the behavior of prices of very specific items in an attempt to gain better insight into how prices are set.

The authors of the book, all Caribbean economists, also investigate when and why prices change, and seek to provide explanations about the nature of inflation in the Caribbean in the publication titled “Price Formation and Inflation Dynamics in the Caribbean".

The authors use data collected for the compilation of the index of retail prices in Barbados, Curacao, Guyana, St Lucia and Trinidad and Tobago. The book is the first study of inflation which documents the specifics of price formation in this way. The studies reported in this book seek answers to questions such as: how often are prices of particular items changed? How does the pattern differ between different products? How large are price changes on average? Are price movements symmetrical when increases are compared with decreases? Which price movements are most closely correlated with overall inflation, and to what extent do policies intended to control inflation appear to be affecting the changes in prices of individual retail items?

Please visit the Official Publication Website for more infomation and note that the book available for FREE download from the Monographs section of our site. See Press Release for more information about this book.