Both Sides of The Coin: The Story of The Central Bank of Barbados 1972-2017

Chapter 5: Some Notable Developments 213 EARLY RESEARCH EFFORTS During the 1970s, there were 18 publications by the Bank’s economists. 104 The first, by Dr. Worrell, dealt with econometric models of the Jamaican economy. Work on this had been started when he was on the staff of the ISER at the Mona campus of the UWI and it was published in the June 1973 edition of Social and Economic Studies . Worrell’s paper on the determinants of changes in commercial bank deposits was also the first to be published in the Quarterly Report (Volume 2, September 1974). Such was the commitment to published work that the third edition of the Report also contained a paper jointly prepared by Economist Michael Howard and Research Adviser Basil Wapensky entitled Commercial Bank Liquidity and Central Bank Operations . While the Quarterly Report was the major outlet for publications, Judy Gittens (later Whitehead) was the first to get an article published in an extra-regional journal, when her paper The Control of Inflation in a Small, Underdeveloped, Open Economy - The Barbadian Experience appeared in American Economist in 1978. In this period, apart from the analysis of monetary and financial developments, the research emphasis was on real sector activity, external sector issues and public finance as the economists tried to understand the workings of the economy. Several of the early papers focused on various aspects of commercial bank operations. Examples are the articles on liquid asset holdings (Howard and Wapensky, 1974), bank credit (Saunders and Worrell, 1978) and interest rate behaviour (Howard, 1976). Among this early set of papers, the only attempt to explain the behaviour of depositors came from Worrell in 1974 when he identified a number of short and long-run influences. Other aspects of banking also came in for scrutiny. In 1978, Clyde Johnson and Desiree Springer (both from the Bank Supervision Department) outlined domestic bank supervision practices and Eric Brathwaite wrote about off-shore banking centres. The latter paper helped to inform attempts to promote off-shore banking operations in Barbados. Another of the early research interests was consumer prices, which was not surprising in light of the relatively high rates of inflation in the