I am Asokore H. R. Beckles, a Caribbean economist and statistician. I have spent twenty years working in public service, in regional labour leadership, and in building and investing in Caribbean enterprises. One question runs through all of it. How do small island economies make good decisions when their room for error is so small?
I was born in Edgecliff, in the Pine, St. Michael, one of four children on each side of my family. I was raised by my mother and my maternal grandfather, who worked as a barber in Bridgetown. My mother did what she could to rise up, be it working small jobs, buying wholesale and selling retail products on the side, travelling to work in the United States, all to keep us fed. Two Caribbean institutions changed my trajectory. Public education, and the labour movement that men like Sir Grantley Adams, Sir Hugh Springer and Sir Frank Walcott helped to build. Public service, for me, is repayment. That conviction shapes everything I build now.
The analytical foundation runs through two tracks. The first is the practitioner work, and it is public service in the plainest sense. Fiscal risk systems design, macroeconomic and fiscal databases, and the statistical analysis that informs sovereign debt management and medium-term budget frameworks. The Caribbean needs this work done properly, and it runs through the Fiscal Risk Unit of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Affairs, Barbados. Before that, senior analytical roles at the Ministry of Health and Wellness, the Economics and Statistics Office of the Cayman Islands, and the Barbados Statistical Service. The second track is the labour movement. Secretary-General of the Caribbean Congress of Labour. General Treasurer of the National Union of Public Workers. Twenty years of learning how institutions work, how they fail, and how they can be built to last.
The Bridgetown Brief is a weekly column on Caribbean economies and business: money, work, data and AI. The Blue-Green Token is a sustainable finance concept for small island developing states, using blockchain and tokenisation to channel capital into terrestrial and marine sustainability projects. A PhD in Economics at UWI Cave Hill is in progress. The academic grounding includes an MSc in Statistics from the University of Southampton and IMF Institute training in Securities Markets. I write and I research because the companies I build need the thinking, and the region deserves both.
Service has run alongside the analysis for most of that time. I sit on the credit committee of the City of Bridgetown Co-operative Credit Union, which I have chaired since 2025, where the work is weighing a loan application against what a member can actually carry. I have chaired the Village Foundation since 2014, and gave nine years to damage assessment for the Department of Emergency Management, work I came to through the Statistical Service. Giving has gone out through the Village Foundation since 2014, most recently to Verdun House and Marina House in St John, the men's and women's residential addiction treatment centres run by the Substance Abuse Foundation.
