Does Barbados still have a poverty problem?
Although we talk a lot about poverty in the country, we have very little objective data on poverty. I know ministers and politicians would always talk about poverty in this and poverty in that, but I always ask ‘well, where are the numbers?’.
We don’t have much hard poverty data, but what we do have would suggest one or two things which I want to highlight.
There are various measures of income equality at the household level. We make the assumption that there is income sharing in the household, so therefore we look after each other.
What the data suggests for Barbados is that there has been a general trend towards greater household income equality.
That is a situation where there is equality taking place among households, that’s the general trend given all of the problems associated with the methodology.
That is supported in many respects if I look at the employment data. The unemployment data suggests to us that there has been an increase since Independence in the middle income class in Barbados.
And that is evident by changes in the income equality on one hand, and secondly by the skill content of the employment on the other hand.
That is, you have a situation where we have a greater professional class.
What we can indicate is that certainly, although there was an increase in poverty between the years 1997 and 2010, that was largely due to the recession.
You had a situation where unemployment would have increased, therefore there were a lot of zero incomes and low levels of income.
So we need to do a lot more work in relation to poverty – getting more poverty data to work with than we have had in the past.
One of the things that we can point to in relation to extreme poverty is that Barbados has, to a large extent, eradicated the degree of extreme poverty and hunger in the country.
We don’t have those extreme situations that you would see in other countries. We have seen in relation to deprivation and poverty that the overcrowding in housing has been reduced.
There has been universal access to potable water and sanitation, and there is the existence of a social security and protection system.
These in particular point to the fact that since the Independence period, we have seen some improvement in the socio-economic dimension of the country.
The United Nations Development Programme has developed what they call a multi-dimensional poverty index and they also come to the same conclusion based on the same data.
Certainly in terms of multi-dimensional poverty, it is extremely low in Barbados; 1.2 per cent of the total population is multi-dimensional poor and this is in terms of health, education and so on.
So in general, the degree of deprivation in Barbados has been relatively low and we are happy that the development process, although we have had some challenges, has seen improvements in the quality of life of most persons.
Professor Andrew Downes is recently-retired Professor of Economics and Pro Vice Chancellor for Planning and Development at the University of the West Indies. He shared these views in a lecture on Barbados’ economic development since Independence in 1996.
