"International Financial Reform: Unintended Consequences for International Financial Centres"

Please join the School of Public Policy and Administration and the High Commission for Barbados to a public lecture by Dr. DeLisle Worrell, Governor of the Central Bank of Barbados.

Among the unintended consequences of global financial regulatory reform we find changes in the availability and costs of banking services in emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) and small international financial centres (IFCs), which are large and have the potential to distort the international financial market, increase the costs and risks of international commerce, inhibit global transactional and competitive efficiencies, and slow the process of addressing global inequality. The evidence will be presented in this paper, which will be illustrated by how these problems manifest themselves in the Caribbean.

Dr. DeLisle Worrell began his second five-year term as Governor of the Central Bank of Barbados on November 1, 2014, having been first appointed in 2009. Dr. Worrell, an Economist, founded the Research Department of the Central Bank in 1973, and served with the Bank until 1998, by which time he was Deputy Governor with responsibilities for research, management information systems and banking supervision.

Between 1998 and 2008 Dr. Worrell worked with the International Monetary Fund, focusing on monetary policy, financial stability and stress testing in Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Latvia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Haiti, the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union, The Gambia, Ghana, Sao Tome, the Comoros and Tanzania.

More recently, Dr Worrell served as the Executive Director of the Caribbean Centre for Money and Finance (CCMF). Dr. Worrell holds a Bachelor of Science Degree in Economics from U.W.I. and a Ph.D. in the same discipline from McGill University.

Dr. Worrell is the author of Policies for Stabilization and Growth in Small Very Open Economies (Group of Thirty, Washington D C, 2012) and Small Island Economies (Praeger Publishers, 1987). His publications on money and banking, exchange rate policy and the balance of payments, fiscal policy, the economic implications of size, and the comparative economic performance of Caribbean and South Pacific economies, may be found on the websites of the International Monetary Fund, the Central Bank of Barbados, the Caribbean Centre for Money and Finance, and international journals and publications.

Dr. Worrell has held research fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution, the Peterson Institute and the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, at Yale University, Princeton University and the University of the West Indies. He has been consultant to the Inter-American Development Bank, the Foundation for Development Cooperation in Brisbane, Australia, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the World Bank, the UN Economic and Social Council and the Caribbean Community Secretariat. He was general chairperson of the International Symposium on Forecasting 1997, and a member of the programme committee of the International Economic Association Moscow congress of 1992.