After CARICOM 51 - Time for a Higher ROI

By Joseph Cox

Although the Community has now completed its 51st Regular Meeting of Heads of Government, CARICOM itself is fifty-three years old. After more than half a century, its challenge is no longer one of vision, but one of return.

The question is no longer whether regional integration matters, but whether it is consistently delivering measurable economic returns for Caribbean people and businesses.

The official outcomes reflected many of the Community’s longstanding priorities—Haiti, food security, climate resilience, governance reform, regional security and international partnerships. These remain important priorities. The more strategic question, however, is whether the Community’s agenda is evolving quickly enough to address the operational constraints that increasingly determine Caribbean competitiveness, economic resilience and, ultimately, the Return on Integration (ROI).

Every meeting agenda is a statement of priorities. It reflects not only what leaders choose to discuss, but also the issues that receive comparatively less strategic attention. That matters because the Caribbean’s greatest challenges are becoming increasingly operational rather than aspirational.

Operational Constraints, Not Aspirations

The first operational constraint is regional connectivity. The Meeting again reaffirmed support for advancing a regional ferry service—an objective that has now featured in successive CARICOM declarations. That continued commitment is welcome. It also illustrates a broader challenge confronting the Community: repeated reaffirmation is not the same as implementation. The Meeting did move the ferry question further than in past cycles. Parallel discussions at the High-Level Breakfast Dialogue between Heads of Government, the CARICOM Private Sector Organisation (CPSO) and regional stakeholders produced a number of concrete proposals, including a September 2026 target for the enabling regulatory framework and an interim pilot service. That is more than reaffirmation. It is also, on its own terms, a modest test. The Region has missed ferry timelines before because of recurring difficulties with vessel acquisition, port infrastructure, customs and immigration harmonisation, and questions about commercial viability. The September deadline will therefore be the more useful indicator of whether this cycle differs from previous ones. The Region is generating increasingly sophisticated policy ideas. The challenge is ensuring that those ideas migrate from stakeholder dialogue into the Community’s formal decision-making architecture and, ultimately, implementation.

Aviation, meanwhile, is where the operational strain is least ambiguous. As at the week ending 3 July, jet fuel prices for Latin America and the Caribbean stood at approximately US$126 per barrel. Combined with already fragile route economics and declining intra-regional connectivity, aviation has become a strategic economic issue rather than simply a transport issue.

The trend line is worse than any single fuel-price snapshot suggests. An independent study commissioned by Airports Council International–Latin America and the Caribbean found that the region’s intra-regional connectivity index fell by nearly 30 per cent between 2010 and 2024—the only region in the world moving backwards over that period, even as global and extra-regional connectivity expanded. Over the same period, Asia-Pacific and the Middle East recorded growth of more than 100%. The Caribbean is not merely lagging: it is the only region in the world moving backwards. The share of intra-Caribbean capacity in total regional seat capacity fell from 14% to 8% over the same period. The commercial fragility behind that trend is not abstract: Caribbean Airlines withdrew from Dominica, St Kitts and the Ogle–Suriname market in June 2026, and reduced service to Martinique and Guadeloupe, after the routes had accumulated close to US$18.84 million in losses. Conversely, the Caribbean Development Bank estimates that closing the Region’s air-connectivity gap could add US$4.4 billion to GDP and create approximately 288,000 jobs. That is precisely the kind of Return on Integration the Community should be tracking—and the kind of indicator that belongs in a communiqué, not merely a technical study.

A second operational constraint is logistics and digital competitiveness. High shipping costs continue to influence food prices, business competitiveness and intra-regional trade. At the same time, Artificial Intelligence and fifth-generation telecommunications infrastructure are rapidly becoming determinants of productivity, investment attractiveness and public sector efficiency. The High-Level Breakfast Dialogue similarly generated practical proposals on non-tariff barriers, import diversification, regional investment mobilisation and transport costs. These initiatives deserve serious consideration. The question is whether they now become embedded within CARICOM’s formal decision-making process and translated into measurable implementation.

Citizenship by Investment programmes present perhaps the clearest strategic issue that the Meeting did not discuss and the communiqué did not register. On 25 June 2026—barely two weeks before Heads of Government convened—the European Commission formally asked five Eastern Caribbean governments to phase out their CBI programmes by 1 June 2028 under its revised visa-suspension mechanism. The fiscal exposure is considerable. In recent years, CBI has contributed roughly 5 per cent of the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union’s GDP, reaching an estimated 37 per cent in Dominica. Whatever one’s views of these programmes, an external deadline capable of affecting more than one-third of a member state’s economy within two years constitutes a Community-level strategic risk.

From Dialogue to Decision

Collectively, these are not sectoral issues. They are operational constraints that increasingly determine the Caribbean’s competitiveness.

Many of these proposals emerged from the High-Level Breakfast Dialogue rather than from the Conference itself. That distinction matters because CARICOM’s legitimacy derives not from the quality of ideas discussed, but from the decisions formally adopted. The Dialogue produced a number of thoughtful and practical recommendations. Yet recommendations are not decisions. Until they are adopted by Heads of Government through the Community’s formal decision-making processes, they remain proposals rather than policy—and cannot provide the mandate against which implementation should ultimately be judged.

This leads to a broader governance question: Who gets to shape CARICOM’s agenda before Heads of Government sit around the table? Stakeholder engagement remains largely episodic rather than institutionalised. The High-Level Breakfast Dialogue with the CARICOM Private Sector Organisation represents a welcome step towards deeper stakeholder engagement. It also highlights a broader governance gap. The private sector is only one of many constituencies with a legitimate interest in shaping the Region’s development agenda. While initiatives such as the Heads–Private Sector Dialogue are valuable, they do not substitute for a governance model that provides the wider Caribbean community with a structured opportunity to help shape the regional agenda, contribute to supporting papers and systematically inform decision-making before issues reach Heads of Government. Equally important, there remains no clearly articulated mechanism through which stakeholder recommendations are tracked, reported upon and demonstrably integrated into subsequent regional decision-making.

There is another reason why this matters. CARICOM decisions are not self-executing. Before they can take effect, they must pass through national Cabinets, be debated in national Parliaments and implemented through legislation, regulations or administrative action. Every stage introduces delay, political scrutiny and capacity constraints. If the regional policy process itself remains largely inaccessible, national debates begin with incomplete information and after regional momentum has already dissipated. That compounds the implementation deficit the Community has acknowledged for decades.

Governance Beyond Communiqués

No serious observer expects sensitive diplomatic negotiations to occur in public. Confidential negotiations are an essential feature of effective diplomacy, which is precisely why CARICOM has caucuses and retreats. The question is what happens after those confidential discussions have taken place.

The United Nations routinely broadcasts General Assembly proceedings and many Security Council meetings while reserving private consultations for sensitive negotiations. Across the Caribbean, parliamentary proceedings are routinely televised. Governments negotiate privately, but formal deliberations occur publicly. It is therefore difficult to identify a compelling governance reason why CARICOM’s formal plenary proceedings should be treated differently.

It is now time to strengthen the Community’s governance architecture.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Joseph Cox is an applied Economist and Managing Partner of Joseph Cox and Associates. He hosts Caribbean Business Review and is the author of the Caribbean Financial Dispatch, a weekly analysis of regional and global economic developments.

This article was initially published in the July 14 edition of the Caribbean Financial Dispatch and has been republished here (with small modifications) with the permission of the writer.