IT IS TO be devoutly hoped that the difficulties which the Central Bank appears to have been experiencing recently can be cleared up without too much delay. The economy of our country is too delicately poised for there to be any but total concentration by all relevant institutions on how best to advise on, and where necessary to help to resolve, the issues related to our balance of payments, fiscal credit and increased growth and related matters.
We have to make every effort to improve our foreign exchange earnings and the technical information gathering, as well as the institutional intellectual capacity of our Central Bank, will be a major asset in helping to fashion
remedial steps to bring our monetary and fiscal situation back into a more comfortable balance.
The task at hand is not easy. Apart from anything else, our performance in our chief foreign exchange earner, tourism, has not been as good as industry sources had hoped it would be, following the much improved performance in 2015.
As it happens, the 2016 tourist season was disappointing as chief executive officer of the Barbados Hotel & Tourism Association, Rudy Grant, recently stated. Both occupancy levels and spending by tourists dropped during the latter part of the year and the hope of vastly improved performance this past tourist season was not realised.
Critics of Government policies have been arguing for some time that the policy choices of the present administration were wrong, but economics is an inexact science and very often, like oil and water, the politics of the day may not coincide with the best and most worthy economic medicine for the situation. Sometimes, too, the actions taken by some governments are just plainly wrong.
But as things stand now, some action has to be taken and in the nature of a democracy those elected to office have the first responsibility and the power to put corrective action in place.
Last week, the Barbados Private Sector Association declared: “This is a time to analyse and tackle all our difficulties objectively and collectively and to do so in that same spirit of cooperation which served us well in not dissimilar circumstances 25 years ago when we correctly rejected devaluation and fixed our foreign exchange and deficit problems.”
These are views which we support totally, and which we commend to all Barbadians and local organisations since we are all in the same boat and the national interest matters most when potentially virulent problems threaten the economic health of our country.
We do not mean that accountability is thrown out with the bathwater. Our adversarial political system allows a time and place for such judgements to be made but all hands on deck must be the watchword at this time, even though we would do well to recall the statement of late Prime Minister David Thompson, who once advised us, “Don’t panic.”
This is a time for us to enhance confidence in our investors at home and abroad, as we seek to wrestle with troubling issues such as the need to shore up the tourism and offshore environments to maximise our foreign exchange earnings, while we tackle the fiscal deficit, among other things.
In all of this we anticipate that the Ministry of Finance and the Central Bank will be in the vanguard of the effort to lead us back to firmer economic ground. The battle will be tough, but easier if we have everyone on the same page.