Vulnerability And Resilience of Small States
26 February 2004
The Commonwealth Secretariat in collaboration with the Islands and Small States Institute and the Economics Department of the University of Malta has organised an international workshop on economic vulnerability and resilience-building of small states next week.
The workshop will be held in Malta from 1 to 3 March 2004 at the University of Gozo Centre and will include experts from the Caribbean, Pacific, Indian Ocean and Mediterranean regions. Representatives of the United Nations Development Programme, UNCTAD, UNDESA, the Commonwealth Secretariat and other international organisations will also attend.
Discussions will focus on those features which lead to the inherent economic vulnerability of small states and will also deal with the issue of economic resilience-building to enable small states to cope with economic vulnerability.
There will be discussion of how some small states have successfully improved their resilience. The work carried out by the Economics Department of the University of Malta indicates that many small states, such as Barbados, Cyprus, Malta, Mauritius and Singapore, have a relatively high Gross Domestic Product per capita when compared to the developing world, indicating that these countries have taken measures to strengthen their resilience against economic vulnerability. The workshop will explore what can be done to replicate this capacity more broadly.
The workshop will look at methods of measuring and creating indices for economic vulnerability and resilience. The vulnerability indices produced so far, including those developed by Professor Lino Briguglio of the University of Malta and the Commonwealth Secretariat, indicate that small island developing states, as a group, tend to be more economically vulnerable than other groups of countries.
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