Minister Straughn pleads for more investment confidence in local bonds

Pushing “a strong record of performance”, a Government minister has once again appealed to Barbadians to put their confidence in the administration by investing in their country through local bonds.

Minister of State in the Ministry of Finance Ryan Straughn said on Tuesday: “We as Barbadians must now have the confidence to invest in our country… The reality is that we would rather pay Barbadians and we’ve demonstrated that we are paying Barbadians with the settlement of the arrears for tax, as well as for goods and services that were owed by the last government,” he told the House of Assembly.

“We paid those and we continue to stay current with respect to our obligations, and therefore, our record of this fiscal framework ought to serve as a strong record of performance that can drive investment not just locally, but regionally or internationally into this country.

“If people from outside can have confidence in the Government of Barbados then I believe that the people of Barbados ought to have similar confidence and seek advice as they should before making any investment,” Straughn asserted.

Noting that funds were necessary for executing capital programmes, the minister urged Barbadians to have confidence to invest in their economy. He said people were reaping benefits every January and July from having put money into the BOSS and BOSS Plus bonds programmes.

At his final press event before demitting office at the end of January, former Central Bank Governor Cleviston Haynes noted the slow response to the $200 million bond offer which had fallen way short of expectation. Haynes said, “The demand has been quite slow,” he reported, only around $10 million had been taken up since it became available on September 1, 2022.

Minister Straughn also told the Chamber as he laid out Barbados’ Fiscal Framework 2023-2024 to 2025-2026 that as the government moves to clear this island’s pre-2018 debt, it will be focusing on new missions to propel economic growth.

“I’m saying to Barbadians, allow us to be able to continue to take fresh guard, because there is a new set of missions now that we now must undertake.

“Therefore having dealt with the debt sustainability issue, having dealt with the fiscal situation, having dealt with the foreign reserve situation, we must now focus on getting growth in the economy. And getting growth in the economy is going to be absolutely important, not just for the fiscal framework, but really for getting this economy back to 2019 levels. If we grow quickly that means we can catch up on the two, three years that we lost,” he outlined.

He identified the main priorities of the upcoming budget as reducing poverty and inequality, increasing the tourism sector’s long-term competitiveness, reducing unemployment, strengthening resilience to natural disasters and climate change.

Noting that during the debt restructuring of 2018, a four-year grace period had been granted on the repayment of the debt’s principal, Straughn said this break came to an end in October 2022.

He also stated that the reform that was intended for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) three years ago, but which had been interrupted by the COVID pandemic, will now be back on the cards.

“When we restructured the debt, we restructured it to give us a four-year grace period from having to pay principal to focus on fixing the things that needed to be fixed. But we had three years of disruption of COVID and we had a pause from the SOE reform that was intended in the third round in 2020-21.

“We have to embark on that SOE reform right now in the context of being able to deal with paying our amortisation and therefore the fiscal framework and the estimates that have been laid are designed to accommodate these things,” he said. (JB)