CHANGE COURSE

ALTHOUGH Barbados boasts $2.6 billion in reserves, that money will not be used to stimulate the economy which has registered a massive fall in 2020.

Instead, said Analyst Bruce Hennis, the reserves will be used for balance of payments support to stabilise the country’s macro-economic environment.

As such Mr. Hennis, who is part of the economic team of the People’s Party for Democracy and Development (PdP), is suggesting that Barbados needs to undergo a massive national strategic reorientation.

He said that policy-based loans are the financing which will be used to promote growth.

In an interview with Business Monday, Hennis said that the economy has essentially, in real terms, declined by as much as 16 per cent between September 2019 and September 2020.

He described this as by far the largest ever drop than even the six per cent decline in GDP, which occurred from 1991 to 1992.

“Therefore, it actually represents a clarion call to the island of the urgent need to undergo a massive national strategic re-direction followed by a rapid, yet sound implementation of that redirection,” Hennis told Business Monday.

The PdP member referred to those relatively small economies which, during the period September 2019 and September 2020, experienced declines of as little as 1.5 per cent.

These countries, according to him, “were able to accomplish this because of their specific targeting of key growth industries globally, over the past few decades, as well as being strongly innovation-led economies”.

He pointed out that countries such as these were “already well able to recover from the last very significant global crisis of 2008, a crisis that Barbados has unfortunately never recovered from”.