BARBADOS HAS BEEN WARNED about the economy’s over-reliance on tourism and the risk that this situation poses to the country’s future.
The caution came from Ian De Souza, managing director and chief executive officer of Republic Bank Barbados Ltd, as he reviewed efforts by Government, the private sector and labour to craft a rescue plan for the country’s ailing economy.
De Souza told BARBADOS BUSINESS AUTHORITY that his membership of Trinidad and Tobago’s Economic Development Board had influenced his own views about the direction regional economies ought to take.
“When I look at Barbados and I see the economy being as single-sector as it is, you start to recognize that there are risks in that and any form of concentration in any kind of business, even the business of government, is a dangerous thing,” the experienced banker pointed out.
“Barbados has a concentration in tourism and in a certain type of tourism – the high end – and, in my view, we cannot run a country that gets going in the first week of December and falls off a cliff in the second week of April.
“You can’t run a country on that kind of economic model. That trough that you have in the middle of April to the end of November has to be filled with economic activity,” De Souza asserted.
According to the banker, Barbados needed to focus on diversifying its economy, including the tourism product.
“When I say diversification within the tourism model I would like to see much more tourism in the area of sports and culture. I believe that Barbados has all of the conditions required to have medical tourism and there is room for education tourism.
“If islands like Dominica, St Kitts and Grenada did not have those universities today to help with economic activity in the face of declining tourism, they would have been dead,” the senior banker contended.
De Souza, who has worked throughout the region, noted that another important driver in the tourism product of a number of Caribbean countries was luxury marinas.
“I was on the board of Republic Bank Grenada before I came here and I could tell you that Grenada, an island carrying a 40-plus unemployment rate, they are suffering badly but there are two things keeping them going: St George’s University and their Port Louis luxury marina,” he revealed.
In this connection, the banker stressed the need to get the Pierhead project, which included a marina, started.
And while there was room to diversify the range of tourists the island sought to attract, De Souza said it had to be carefully undertaken.
“Barbados has to be careful with that West Coast – that is a key product and you cannot go and interfere with that or make those people feel uncomfortable,” he remarked.
