OECS Members Praised For Trade Policies

by Amanda Banks, Tax-News.com, London

13 June 2001

At a recent meeting in the World Trade Organisation headquarters in Geneva, the six OECS (Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States) members were commended by fellow WTO members for the openness of their trade policies, and their well functioning institutions, but were also told that there was still work to be done in order to truly liberalise trade in goods and services.

The OECS members states include Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, and Saint Vincent, and their combined populations number just 425,000. Despite their size, however, the Eastern Caribbean states have recently come under fire from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), who have described them as encouraging tax evasion 'through bank secrecy and confidentiality laws' and warned that they face economic sanctions if they fail to mend their ways.

However, the OECS believe that their burgeoning offshore sectors are a credible instrument to facilitate national development in small island states, and took the opportunity of the WTO review meeting to issue a response to the OECD accusations.

All six member states expressed their gratitude to the United States, which has so far aligned itself with the Caribbean nations on this issue, and described the OECD's analysis of them as an attack on their national sovereignty: 'We are sovereign states...and we should have the right to determine our own tax regimes,' said Grenada's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Elvin Nimrod. Mr Nimrod also described the OECD as 'hypocritical', reasoning that: 'We in the region are engaged in the financial service sector in a very limited way comparable or relative to these same countries.'

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