Production Integration Revisited in the Context of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy

• Author: Byron Blake
• Pages: 169-176

Production Integration Revisited 169

INTRODUCTION

Production integration — vertical and horizontal; integrated production

and cooperation in production — has been a preoccupation of Caribbean

economic integrationists since the 1960s. In their path-breaking work

‘The Dynamics of West Indian Economic Integration’ (1967), Brewster and

Thomas not only argued that ‘integration in the West Indies . . . should also

include in its perspective the integrated production of goods’ but identified

a range of prospective areas of production, and developed a strategy

framework for production integration which recognized the importance of

political, social and cultural factors.

Most of the initiatives aimed at deepening the economic integration

process in the region, since the initial success and revealed limitations of

the pure market integration exemplified by the Caribbean Free Trade

Association (CARIFTA), have sought to provide in some measure for the

integrated production of goods. Specific industry and broad sub-sector and

sector studies have confirmed the earlier work of Brewster and Thomas

that there were myriad opportunities for production integration in the

mining, agricultural and industrial sectors.

Analysing several major studies and proposals, we concluded in a paper

on ‘Production Integration: Scope, Limitations and Prospects in CARICOM’

presented at a similar Conference on Ten Years of CARICOM that ‘Taking

the various proposals for integrated production together, and discounting

for the cases of overlap, there is a range of sectors and sub-sectors in which

production integration is both technically and economically feasible’.

There were also several policies in the Common Market Annex 1973 to

the Treaty of Chaguaramas, in instruments such as the CARICOM

Enterprise Regime, approved in 1976, the Regional Food and Nutrition

Strategy, approved first as the Regional Food Plan in 1976, and the CARICOM

PRODUCTION INTEGRATION REVISITEDPRODUCTION INTEGRATION REVISITED

PRODUCTION INTEGRATION REVISITEDPRODUCTION INTEGRATION REVISITED

PRODUCTION INTEGRATION REVISITED

IN THE CONTEXT OF THE CARICOMIN THE CONTEXT OF THE CARICOM

IN THE CONTEXT OF THE CARICOMIN THE CONTEXT OF THE CARICOM

IN THE CONTEXT OF THE CARICOM

SINGLE MARKET AND ECONOMYSINGLE MARKET AND ECONOMY

SINGLE MARKET AND ECONOMYSINGLE MARKET AND ECONOMY

SINGLE MARKET AND ECONOMY

Byron Blake

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