As Caribbean economies continue to be buttressed by a weak world economy an international two-day conference has been arranged in Barbados to provide a road map for future economic growth.

A salient consideration and focus of the November 11-12 Caribbean Exporters’ Colloquium 2014, organised by The Caribbean Export Development Agency, funded by the European Union as part of the 10th EDF Regional Private Sector Development Programme, at the Hilton Barbados is the role of the private sector.

Regional business executives will be joined by Caribbean and International experts to examine the contribution and performance of regional exports.

Trade expansion is widely recognised as essential to providing a sustainable and resilient path for regional development to occur, a statement from Caribbean Export noted.

The growth trends of regional exports, in both goods and services will be analysed under the conference theme: “Building Economic Resilience in the Caribbean.”

The conference will take a detailed look at the performance of key sectors, including tourism, agro-processing and the creative goods and services. To facilitate an understanding of the performance of the exports sector the opening session chaired by His Excellency Ambassador Mikael Barfod, Head of Delegation of the European Union to Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean will seek to identify those exports that have proven to be success stories for the Caribbean as well as those that have the highest potential for growth.

One of eight companion panel discussions on trade performance is the global competitiveness of the private sector and importantly the challenges and hurdles it faces in being competitive. Various studies have concluded that some of these challenges are high operating costs, high transportation costs and inadequacies in enabling structures and processes.

The colloquium aims to come up with specific recommendations in this area by taking a detailed look at hurdles and challenges that curb the private sector ability to be competitive.

This assessment is particularly relevant at a time when regional Governments are pressing the private sector to do more to facilitate economic recovery from a six-year-old recession that has hit economies hard.