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Western Hemisphere > Dominica

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Cover Selected Issues Papers
Unlocking Tourism Potential for Sustainable and Inclusive Growth in Dominica
Mr. Yibin Mu
,
Sinem Kiliç Çelik
, and
Archit Singhal
Tourism is an important driver of Dominica’s economy. The damage of the pandemic on Dominica’s tourism sector was severer than in most regional peers, and the recovery has also been much slower, mostly due to the timing of lockdown restrictions. This paper reviews the tourism sector landscape in Dominica, assesses its recent performance relative to peers, and analyzes the main determinants and constraints for tourism development. Our econometric analysis shows that flight connectivity and demand variables play the most significant role in explaining tourism developments, while natural disasters can have negative lasting significant impacts. This calls for improving infrastructure and enhancing resilience.
Keywords:
Island economy; tourism; Caribbean states; tourism sector; tourism development; Dominica's economy; demand variable; stringency index; Natural disasters; COVID-19; Inclusive growth; Income; Caribbean
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
Dominica: Selected Issues
International Monetary Fund. Western Hemisphere Dept.
This Selected Issues paper reviews the tourism sector landscape in Dominica, assesses its recent performance relative to peers, and analyzes the main determinants and constraints for tourism development. Tourism plays a vital role in Dominica’s economy. It contributes significantly to growth, employment, and exports. The coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic had a significant impact on Dominica’s tourism sector, and the recovery has been slower compared to peers. While the drop in tourist arrivals in Dominica was similar to regional peers, the recovery has been much slower. The underperformance appeared mainly explained by the costs of stay and timing of lockdown restrictions. The econometric analysis shows that flight connectivity and demand variables play the most significant role in explaining tourism developments, while natural disasters can have negative lasting significant impacts. This calls for improving infrastructure and enhancing resilience. Furthermore, countries can enhance competitiveness and reduce vulnerabilities by investing in the expansion of skilled labor supply for the sector and diversifying product offers.
Keywords:
tourism sector landscape; tourism recovery; market source; tourism flow; Yibin mu; Tourism; Natural disasters; COVID-19; Income; Caribbean
Cover IMF Working Papers
The Macroeconomic Returns of Investment in Resilience to Natural Disasters under Climate Change: A DSGE Approach
Emilio Fernández Corugedo
,
Andres Gonzalez
, and
Mr. Alejandro D Guerson
This paper presents a Markov switching dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model designed to evaluate the macroeconomic return of adaptation investment to natural disasters (NDs) and the impact of climate change. While the model follows the existing literature in assuming that NDs destroy a share of the public and private capital stocks and a government that can invest in adaptation at an additional cost, it adds several features that are key to the analysis, both in the near (transition) and long (steady state) terms. Those include incomplete markets, financial frictions with collateral constraints, foreign remittances, full menu of tax and government spending instruments, and endogenous climate risk premium. The model is calibrated to the case of Dominica. It finds that NDs have large and persistent negative effects on output and public finances. It also shows that adaptation investment has large returns in terms of private investment, employment, output and tax revenue in the long term, especially under climate change.
Keywords:
natural disasters; climate change; DSGE; resilient capital; financial frictions; Dominica; climate adaptation policies; adaptation investment; investment producer; government spending instrument; endogenous climate risk premium; ND event; moment calibration summary; Consumption; Return on investment; Caribbean; Global
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
St. Kitts and Nevis: Selected Issues
International Monetary Fund. Western Hemisphere Dept.
This Selected Issues paper reviews anecdotal evidence on labor market conditions and discusses policy options to strengthen the labor market and support growth in St. Kitts and Nevis. The diagnosis of labor market conditions reveals challenges and opportunities in wages, productivity, and labor allocation across sectors. These include strengthening jobs and growth opportunities across sectors, enhancing the wage setting system to support competitiveness, and increasing the efficiency of the public sector. Strong institutions are needed to effectively manage public sector wages over the medium term. Several institutional arrangements can facilitate this goal including regular comparison between public and private sector wages, regular wage negotiations as opposed to ad hoc adjustments, and using medium-term wage bill forecasting to support better fiscal outcomes. Labor market and growth policies could play a key role in strengthening jobs and growth in the post-coronavirus disease era, including by leveraging sectoral linkages to provide more diversified and higher quality job opportunities, enhancing labor market policies, and increasing the efficiency of the public sector.
Keywords:
C. climate change ADAPTATION; labor market diagnosis; staff team of the International Monetary Fund; D. wage policy; Policy implication; Public sector wages; Labor markets; Wages; Employment; Caribbean; Global
Cover IMF Working Papers
Waiting for Godot? The Case for Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation in Small Island States
Mr. Serhan Cevik
Global warming is the most significant threat to ecosystems and people’s health and living standards, especially in small island states in the Caribbean and elsewhere. This paper contributes to the debate by analyzing different options to scale up climate change mitigation and adaptation. In particular, the empirical analysis indicates that increasing energy efficiency and reducing the use of fossil fuel in electricity generation could lead to a significant reduction in carbon emissions, while investing in physical and financial resilience would yield long-run benefits. From a risk-reward perspective, the advantages of reducing the risks associated with climate change and the health benefits from higher environmental quality clearly outweigh the potential cost of climate change mitigation and adaptation in the short run. The additional revenue generated by environmental taxes could be used to compensate the most vulnerable households, building a multilayered safety net, and strengthening structural resilience.
Keywords:
Climate change; decarbanization; energy efficiency; mitigation; adaptation; carbon tax; green financing; climate change mitigation; risk-reward perspective; Island state; adaptation strategy; climate change adaptation; Greenhouse gas emissions; Natural disasters; Caribbean; Global
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
Eastern Caribbean Currency Union: 2022 Article IV Consultation with Member Countries on Common Policies of the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union
International Monetary Fund. Western Hemisphere Dept.
This 2022 Article IV Consultation highlights that with Eastern Caribbean Currency Union economies slowly emerging from the pandemic with scars, the impact of the war in Ukraine is a setback to the nascent recovery. Higher food and energy prices, amid ongoing supply disruptions and intra-regional transportation bottlenecks, are raising inflation, eroding income, lowering output growth, worsening fiscal and external positions, and threatening food and energy security. The financial system has remained broadly stable so far, with adequate capital and liquidity buffers, but nonperforming loans remain high and could rise further following the expiration of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank’s loan moratoria program. The outlook is subject to large downside risks, primarily from further increases in commodity prices and new coronavirus disease variants amid vaccine hesitancy, in addition to the ever-present threat of natural disasters. The report recommends that maintaining fiscal prudence while protecting the vulnerable through health spending and temporary targeted transfers and enhanced social safety nets to cope with rising living costs. Adopting well-designed rule-based fiscal frameworks would help achieve fiscal consolidation, enhance resilience to shocks such as natural disasters, and preserve the credibility of the regional debt target.
Keywords:
ECCU economy; ECCU member country; ECCU country; ECCU member states; ECCU region; Natural disasters; COVID-19; Fiscal stance; Caribbean; Global; Climate change; Loans
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
Eastern Caribbean Currency Union: Selected Issues
International Monetary Fund. Western Hemisphere Dept.
This Selected Issues paper focuses on scarring effects of the pandemic on the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union’s (ECCU). Assessing the extent of the scarring effects is essential for the conduct of future economic policy in the ECCU. A better understanding of the factors affecting the scarring effects and their fiscal implications could help inform the discussions on policies needed to overcome them, especially for economies with limited economic diversification and high vulnerability to frequent shocks and natural disasters such as the ECCU countries. The significant output contraction would generate scarring effects in the ECCU countries. The degree of scarring could vary with countries’ economic structure and policy responses to the pandemic. ECCU countries need to balance difficult tradeoffs to mitigate scaring effects of the pandemic, other recent shocks, and limited fiscal policy space. In the short term, the priorities are to continue health spending to cope with the pandemic and use effective social transfers to cope with rising living costs. In the medium term, moving from income support and job retention measures to adopting active labor market policies would facilitate the reallocation of workers and resources to their most productive uses and help foster productivity growth.
Keywords:
responsibility framework; ECCU country; difference in Debt-to-GDP projection; B. output loss; Real GDP loss; Fiscal rules; Natural disasters; COVID-19; Fiscal stance; Global; Caribbean
Cover IMF Staff Country Reports
Dominica: 2021 Article IV Consultation-Press Release; Staff Report; and Statement by the Executive Director for Dominica
International Monetary Fund. Western Hemisphere Dept.
Dominica has been hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic, with an estimated decline in GDP of 11 percent in 2020 underpinned by a sharp reduction in tourism receipts that affected connected sectors and by lockdown measures to limit virus contagion. The output decline was contained by health spending, social transfers, and public investment resilient to natural disasters which increased significantly, leading to an increase in public debt to 106 percent of GDP despite record-high Citizenship-by-Investment (CBI) revenue. The financial sector remained stable and liquid, but vulnerability continue to be significant in the under-capitalized non-bank sector.
Keywords:
CBI revenue; authorities of Dominica; authorities' effort; pandemic well; response to the pandemic; Natural disasters; Public investment spending; COVID-19; Caribbean; Global
Cover IMF Working Papers
Growth at Risk from Natural Disasters
Mr. Tamim Bayoumi
,
Mr. Saad N Quayyum
, and
Sibabrata Das
The paper analyzes the impact of natural disasters on per-capita GDP growth. Using a quantile regressions and growth-at-risk approach, the paper examines the impact of disasters and policy choices on the distribution of growth rather than simply its average. We find that countries that have in place disaster preparedness mechanisms and lower public debt have lower probability of witnessing a significant drop in growth as a consequence of a natural disaster, but our innovative methodology in this paper finds that the two policies are complements since their effectiveness vary across different disaster scenarios. While both are helpful for small to mid-size disasters, lower debt—and hence more fiscal space—is more beneficial in the face of very large disasters. A balanced strategy would thus involve both policies.
Keywords:
disaster preparedness; impact of disaster; quantile regression; impact of natural disaster; regression estimator; Natural disasters; Fiscal space; Caribbean
Cover Finance & Development
Finance and Development, September 2021
International Monetary Fund
Finance and Development, September 2021
Keywords:
IEA report; IMF staff research; emissions target; Bitcoin mining; climate threat; Climate change; Climate finance; Greenhouse gas emissions; Virtual currencies; Global; Asia and Pacific; Africa; Pacific Islands; Sub-Saharan Africa; pricing carbon; bitcoin rival Ethereum