Barbados Government To Blank New Capital Market Loans

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, November 13, 2019 (CMC) – The Barbados government will not be taking any new capital market loans, over the next four years, as it seeks to put a stop to spending more than it earns, while focusing on ‘growing’ the island’s economy, the Minister in the Ministry of Finance and Investment, Marsha Caddle, disclosed.

“We are ending the period, in which the government spent more than it earned, the period in which the government ran deficits and consumed the entire nation’s savings that would otherwise have financed private investments. Government consumption during that period, the decade 2008 to 2018, crowded out private investment, but no more,” she explained.

Caddle told members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Barbados (ICAB) that the Mia Mottley government was helping to mobilize these savings into investments, with new regulatory regimes, such as the new growth and innovation market, regulatory sandbox, and proposed regimes for crowd-financing and peer-to-peer lending.

Noting both developed and developing countries were always under construction, she stressed that as government continued to rebuild, partnerships were required, and she thanked ICAB for the role it has played in the fiscal recovery process so far.

The junior finance and investment minister praised the social partnership for its ongoing involvement, emphasizing that the island’s adjustment has been one of the most shared, in the history of fiscal adjustments anywhere in the world.

“We said from the outset, that labour would not bear the brunt of the adjustment; it is an adjustment that has seen capital and other sectors also have to share the burden,” she said, explaining that government would not be entering new loan arrangements within the next four years.

“Let me specify that this relates to capital markets and not to multilateral financing, which is, as far as we can try to achieve, [is] mostly concessionary financing,” she said.