Over the past decade, the international community has championed several initiatives to help mobilize more resources for development or to make them more effective. Well known examples include the International Finance Facility for Immunization, debt conversions, emissions trading, a financial transactions tax and use of the IMF’s Special Drawing Rights  2  BIS central bankers’ speeches  (SDRs).
The jury is still out on whether these major schemes have created additional financial flows for development. For many Caribbean countries, remittances have become an important and promising source of non-traditional external financing. In fact, the Caribbean is among the larger recipient of remittances in proportion to its GDP.