Business
Reducing fiscal deficit major challenge facing Barbados economy – Prime Minister Stuart
Barbados Prime Minister Freundel Stuart
The major challenge facing the Barbados economy is to reduce the fiscal deficit in order to determine a policy that finds the right balance between fiscal consolidation and economic expansion.
Prime Minister Freundel Stuart, last week, told a one-day National Consultation on the Economy that Barbados is experiencing its most severe economic challenges since World War II and that it had managed to stave off the worst effects of the economic and financial crisis which had “ bedeviled the world economy over the last five years”.
He told public and private sector officials that the island-nation’s economic history showed that when the major trading partners from the developed world were doing well, “we do well, and when they are challenged, we feel the negative impacts of their challenges”.
Stuart said that the test now was to reduce the fiscal deficit, and that it was imperative to do all that was required to ensure that the foreign exchange earning sectors were “restored to vibrancy and that we save foreign exchange”.
The prime minister contended that a fiscal deficit was not “totally undesirable”, but rather its size was a cause for concern.
He called for a “laser-like focus on cost effectiveness” noting the major challenge confronting government was determining a policy choice that “finds the right balance between fiscal consolidation and a sustained economic expansion that is led by the foreign exchange earning sectors”.
