BARBADOS’ ECONOMY, rocked by reputation- crushing downgrades, most recently from Moody’s, is getting some good news from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In its World Economic Outlook under the theme Too Slow For Too Long, the IMF predicted that Barbados’ economic growth for 2016 should come in at 2.1 per cent this year and 2.3 per cent next year, despite the multilateral agency’s concerns that the global economy was taking too long to recover from the great recession that started in 2007/2008. It warned that somemajor oil producing economies were being destabilised by continued low fossil fuel prices.
The IMF forecast suggested that this year Barbados’ real GDP growth would be ahead of The Bahamas and St Lucia but lag behind other CARICOM neighbours like Belize, St Kitts Nevis, and Guyana. Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago’s economies are amongthe few in the region expected to contract.
Head of Economics at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies, Professor Dr Winston Moore, told MIDWEEK NATION: “These projections are higher than the figures put forward by Moody’s to justify its recent downgrade.” (GE)
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