Caribbean: Caribbean finance ministers have expressed concern about the high energy costs

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) says Caribbean finance ministers have expressed concern about the high energy costs in the Caribbean that “constrain living standards and increase.”

The region’s finance and planning ministers voiced their concern here at the just-concluded Third Annual Conference of the IDB’s Caribbean Governors.

The IDB said it recently launched the Caribbean Energy Initiative, “which seeks to create a regional energy market that creates sufficient critical mass to enable nations to take chance of the reduction in the cost of natural gas and its increased supply.”

The Caribbean Energy Initiative will be complemented by the IDB’s ongoing energy efficiency and renewable energy projects, “which have proved to offer significant fiscal and foreign exchange benefits.”

“The region is looking for a new paradigm,” said IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno. “Both the larger, resource-based economies and the smaller, service-based economies face the same challenge.

“New products and new trading partners will have to be cultivated,” he urged. “This calls for a willingness to embrace change.”

The IDB said Caribbean Governors were as well briefed on the evolution of the proposed restructuring of the IDB’s private sector window, “which could increase development impact and mobilize additional resources from an expanded range of financial actors.

The conference as well prepared Caribbean Governors and bank managrs for the “substantive deliberations” on the next direction of the bank that are anticipated at the institution’s annual general conference to be held in Bahia, Brazil at the end of March