Caddle: Ease of doing business must improve

Minister in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Investment Marsha Caddle is insistent that doing business in Barbados must become more efficient.

As she brought the Green Paper on Planning Law Reform to the Lower House yesterday, she lamented the fact that the island has continued to dropped in the Ease of Doing Business Index over the years.

Barbados fell in 2018 from being rated 117th to 132nd out of 190 countries.

“This is the kind of step that will signal to the world that Barbados is open for business again, and beyond being open for business again, that we are
serious about stepping into the decade of the 21st Century,” she said.

Caddle pointed out that one of the major contributing factors to the island’s slippage in several of these indexes is due to the delays in having matters dealt with in the public sector.

Pointing to the length of time it takes to have construction permits issued, for example, she said that it takes on average 442 days or 14.5 months to gain approval for such on the island.

“The average time is 192 days or 6.3 months for Latin America and the Caribbean…This average delay exceeds the two month limitation period that we had determined for applications for planning permission to be responded to under the current act. So we are failing ourselves and failing our own targets that we have set, and this green paper seeks among other things to address these failures,” she added.

Insisting that Barbados was once again beginning to attract an environment for domestic investment, Caddle stressed that systems must be improved to become more efficient as she has “lost count” of the number of times persons have come to Barbados to invest, but because of the lengthy delays taken their money and jobs and gone elsewhere.

“We need to make it easier for Barbadians to invest in their own country. The kind of growth that is going to sustain us is the kind of growth that is led by Barbadians,” she added. (JMB)

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