Prime Minister Mia Mottley says now is the time to rebuild the economy.
However, she has lamented that Barbados’ ability to introduce such financial stimulus was hemmed in by limited access to concessional funding.
She voiced the concern on Friday while the featured guest of the second edition of the Caribbean Development Bank’s The President’s Chat with CDB president Dr Gene Leon. The session was moderated by Timothy Antoine, Governor of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank.
Speaking on the topic Marshalling Finance For Development, Mottley said Barbados needed to focus on infrastructural investments that would lead to economic growth and the creation of jobs.
These included housing and coastal protections. But she said Government continued to “fight the battles, regrettably, that preclude us from accessing the concessional finance and a large part of it is due to archaic and crude measurements that bear no relationship to our needs or our reality”.
“I am talking about the use of historic per capita GDP to determine whether countries should borrow or not. We were fortunate enough to break the logjam for Barbados and Bahamas with the World Bank in the last year but the amount of heavy lifting that that took us,” she said.
Leon said the region needed to focus on recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic, but had to do so while ensuring a resilient and sustainable recovery in the long term. (SC)
