Last weekend’s media blitz by?Minister of Finance Chris Sinckler must have shed a good deal of light on some aspects of the economy and its capacity for sustained recovery, and many members of the public would have heard what he had to say, and others, perhaps fewer in numbers, may have listened carefully.
The message is clear. The economy is recovering, but like any patient who has been subjected to a bout of severe illness, one swallow does not make a summer, and the growth experienced in 2010 has to be maintained and hopefully exceeded this year and beyond, before we can declare that we are out of the woods.
We rely in many respects on the health of the economies of our major trading partners and what happens in the economies of the United States, Britain and Canada matter to us as much as what happens in the economies of our regional trading partners, for we export to them both in different ways.
We are also at the mercy of the market in energy because oil is so integral to all economies that spiralling increases in the cost have a spillover impact on the price of almost every other commodity. This general increase in prices can have the impact of dampening demand and thereby depressing activity and decreasing profits to the chagrin of the Government which requires activity to maintain employment and to garner revenues.
So the road ahead has its potholes and the most careful driving and management will still be necessary. For example, the news that Standard & Poor’s may downgrade the AAA rating of the US may be a more potent indicator of the deep-seated nature of the worldwide problem than anything else.The economic and fiscal realities may mean that this threatened action will be only of symbolic importance, but it has shown even if only at the psychological level that nothing can be taken for granted as we seek, small and open as we are, to steady the ship of state.The minister was also very fiscally correct when he said in the Big Interview last week that a holistic picture has to be taken of the economy because tinkering with one area to create a subsidy may create problems down the road in other areas.
Barbadians must therefore face the fact that calls for some ease must be tempered by the reality that a careful and balanced response to those demands requires much thought and is not susceptible to plug-in solutions, even if campaign rhetoric may have suggested otherwise.
Yet, in a democracy, the government is the people’s government and as much attention, if not more, must be paid to the almost sacred voice of the people, as to getting the economic fundamentals right, for no society can be properly created or maintained without a sound economy.
