Abrams & Associates Research Consulting

PREPARING OUR YOUNG PEOPLE TO LEAD THE INDUSTRIES OF 2040

Are we building industries our children will lead tomorrow?

Five Demands. One (moral) Argument.
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The Caribbean’s debt-climate trap can’t be talked away but the Caribbean Policy Development Centre’s Caribbean Emancipation 2030 initiative lays out exactly what would actually break it.

Five priority actions the international community is being asked to deliver:

1️⃣ Cancel the debt — as climate reparations, not charity. Roughly US$30 billion targeted across bilateral, multilateral, and private creditors, with new “Green Resilience Bonds” that automatically suspend payments when hurricanes strike.

2️⃣ Fix how climate finance is allocated. Replace the World Bank’s per-capita income criterion, which excludes most Caribbean SIDS, with a multidimensional vulnerability index. Today, 71% of climate finance comes as loans, not grants.

3️⃣ Operationalise the Loss and Damage Fund agreed at COP27. Grants only. Funded in part by a windfall levy on oil and gas profits, on the polluter-pays principle.

4️⃣ Redirect idle IMF Special Drawing Rights. Of the US$650 billion the IMF issued in 2021, roughly US$400 billion sits unused in Global North central banks. The Caribbean got just US$2 billion of that allocation.

5️⃣ Reform the IMF’s Resilience and Sustainability Facility. Barbados was the first Caribbean SIDS to access it, the test case for whether the design can scale.

Five technical demands. One moral argument: the countries that didn’t cause the climate crisis shouldn’t be the ones paying interest on it.

Source: Caribbean Policy Development Centre, Caribbean Emancipation 2030 — Sovereign Debt and Climate Justice for Caribbean SIDS (March 2023).

Pay Twice: The Caribbean’s Debt-Climate Trap and the Case for Reparations.”
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When Hurricane Maria flattened Dominica in 2017, it caused damage equal to 225% of the country’s GDP. Days later, with much of the island still without power, the government had to make a scheduled debt payment to its lenders.

That sequence is the debt-climate trap in one paragraph. Caribbean nations cause less than 1% of global emissions but pay among the highest costs of the climate crisis: first when the storm strikes, again in interest payments on the loans they had to take out to rebuild. Climate-vulnerability premiums alone are projected to drain US$5 billion out of the region over the next decade.

The Caribbean Policy Development Centre’s Caribbean Emancipation 2030 initiative argues the only way out is comprehensive debt cancellation — not as charity, but as climate reparations owed by the Global North whose cumulative emissions caused the crisis in the first place.

Source: Caribbean Policy Development Centre, Caribbean Emancipation 2030 (March 2023).

In a world where technology can help anyone create, the real question is no longer what you can build, but how you show up.

The future will reward those who deliver with excellence, communicate with clarity, and build trust through strong relationships. Your brand is not your logo, it is your reputation. It is the confidence people have in your work when you are not in the room.

This is the edge our young people must develop.

At Abrams & Associates, we believe success will belong to those who combine technical skill with discipline, character, and presence.

Because when everyone can create, these skills will determine who will be chosen.

Two numbers. One country.

The World Bank’s April 2026 outlook makes the disconnect impossible to ignore: resource wealth alone doesn’t create good jobs. The boom is real on the spreadsheet. The harder, slower work is making sure it reaches the kitchen table.

Latin America & the Cart Doesn’t Have a Growth Problem. It Has a Jobs Problem.
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The World Bank’s April 2026 outlook for Latin America and the Caribbean delivers an uncomfortable diagnosis: the region’s stubbornly slow growth — projected at just 2.1% this year — and its broken jobs market are the same problem in two faces.

8 in 10 poor workers across the region are stuck in informal jobs without benefits, security, or a path up. Workers are earning more diplomas than ever, but wages haven’t followed. Growth, when it comes, isn’t translating into the kind of work that pulls families out of poverty.

The Bank’s prescription is to rethink industrial policy as “learning policy” — built on four foundations:

🔹 Build skills across the full spectrum, from vocational training to research-grade talent
🔹 Enable experimentation so firms can innovate, scale, and yes, sometimes fail
🔹 Exploit openness — trade, foreign investment, and technology transfer
🔹 Strengthen the state so it can fix market failures without being captured

For Guyana and the Caribbean, the message is sharper still: resource wealth alone doesn’t create good jobs. Without a deliberate jobs strategy alongside it, the boom shows up in GDP but not in livelihoods.

Source: World Bank, Latin America & the Caribbean Economic Update — Revisiting Industrial Policy (April 2026).

Two sides of Guyana’s oil boom, in one picture.

The World Bank’s April 2026 outlook is
unambiguously positive on the headline numbers — 16.3% growth this year, 23.5% next, rising fiscal revenues, improving external balances, and a falling debt-to-GDP ratio.

But the same report also says the harder work is just beginning: spending oil money well, building state capacity to keep up with the pace of change, ensuring the wealth reaches ordinary Guyanese, and avoiding the classic resource-boom trap of pro-cyclical spending.

Two sides. Same coin. Both stories matter.