Ms. Shirley Ayorkor Botchwey, the foreign minister, has suggested six changes the Commonwealth should make in order to better serve its wealthy and less wealthy members equally.
They include measures to ease trade and investment, control the movement of workers among Commonwealth nations while facilitating it, and encourage more spending on young people’s education, skill development, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
The Commonwealth in a Changing World was the topic of Ms. Botchwey’s speech last week at the British think tank Chatham House in London.
Other steps, according to Ms. Botchwey, include addressing climate change, giving special attention to tiny nations, and increasing the institutional human and financial resources of the Commonwealth.
“Our citizens watch as we battle with strategies to raise growth in isolation through austerity and high taxation,” Ms. Botchwey said to her audience.
Unless consumer-based market expansion takes into account the potential of our 2.5 billion people, 60 percent of whom are 30 years or younger, she claimed, “the pie just is not capable of feeding everyone.”
The Commonwealth is made up of 56 nations from five different regions, comprising some of the biggest and richest nations in the world, like Australia and Canada, as well as some of the tiniest, such Tonga and St. Kitts & Nevis.
According to Ms. Botchwey, the Commonwealth should be the second-most important organization of nations in the world given the size of its population, its demographic and political makeup, as well as its wealth and economic potential.
She posed a rhetorical inquiry, “But the issue we must ask ourselves is whether it is.”
In connection with Regional Integration Agreements and Economic Partnership Agreements both inside and beyond the Commonwealth, Ms. Botchwey advocated an industrialization and economic diversification strategy.
That would “provide a guarantee against the stagnation that is pervasive throughout our countries,” she said.
She argued in favor of a Commonwealth-wide Mobility Agreement to aid “safe, orderly, and regulated movement” address the demand for labor and skills.
Furthermore, what Ms. Botchwey referred to as “a common Commonwealth market” would enable the flow of labor and services without the need for employees to relocate across borders and would provide young people with training wherever they were in the Commonwealth.
Source: newsthemegh.com