Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley has pushed back on recent suggestions in some quarters that Barbados is in over its head as a result of its near $1 billion debt to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which is due by 2029.
Mottley, who was speaking yesterday at the book launch of Sir Alister McIntyre’s compilation of works entitled Caribbean Trade, Integration And Development, charged that some of the analysis that had come to the fore regarding the debt lacked “context and perspective”.
She contended that with the high point of the debt payment not surpassing four per cent of revenues earned, the debt did not pose a challenge for the country to repay. She said some were using the perceived large number in an attempt to create “excitement” within the public.
“More and more as I read sometimes in the newspapers, I wonder if people have lost perspective and have lost context. For to hear that $900 million from an IMF programme is something that will cripple a country, when that constitutes a mere 6.4 per cent of its debt and at no stage would garnish more than four per cent of the revenues in servicing the debt, tells me that the figure has been used to excite persons without context,” Mottley said. (CLM)
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