With the Barbados Economic Recovery and Transformation (BERT) Programme saving Government $4 billion over the last four years, it was an easy decision to go back to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Prime Minister Mia Mottley said Tuesday.
In fact, she said while her administration could have embarked on the initiative on its own, it chose to “play it safe” by opting for a three-year programme with the Washington-based financial institution which she predicts will be just as successful.
The Prime Minister made the comments on Tuesday morning in the House of Assembly as she piloted a Resolution to take note of the BERT Plan 2022.
Under the new programme that was announced last month and will run until 2027, Barbados is set to receive US$130 million in financing and a further US$210 million under the Resilience and Sustainability Trust set up by the IMF in May to help countries access financing to invest in resilience building.
Mottley said a previous suggestion that Government retrench over 5 000 workers would only have saved a maximum of $250 million annually, as opposed to the $4 billion that was saved over the last four years of the original IMF-backed BERT programme.
“All it would have saved us, quite frankly, is about $200 to $250 million. With the debt restructuring, this Government saved the country $1 billion a year for the last four years, each of the last four years,” the Prime Minister said to rapturous applause. “And that is why we have chosen to play it safe because the journey is not for the swift but for those who can endure it.”
“We could have chosen to do this on our own but the global conditions are overcast. I need to go no further than today’s newspaper where both the head of the IMF and the World Bank are saying that we are still not out of the woods….
“We could choose to go through on our own but the rate at which events are still upsetting the economy, the cancer of inflation…and apart from the inflation there are about 46 countries that are in the position Barbados was in when we took up office, where they are on the edge of a debt crisis…. Against all of that, this Government took the decision that it is better to be safe than sorry,” Mottley added.
The Prime Minister explained that BERT 2.0 would focus specifically on growing the economy and continuing fiscal reforms.
“Having completed the IMF programme that we entered into – a four-year Extended Fund Facility – passing all of the structural benchmarks, doing all of the things that we as Bajans said we would do, the time has come for us to move to the second phase, which is fundamentally focused on growth and continuing the reforms on the fiscal side that we did not get to complete because of the pandemic.
“We also will have to look at each SOE [state-owned enterprise] individually to determine what is the right balance between the services that they provide, whether it should be them, whether it should be someone else, whether the fees that we are paying make sense,” she said.
Mottley gave the assurance that BERT 2.0 was a homegrown plan which would achieve all of its goals.
With the worst of the pandemic behind us, she added, the programme would be administered with greater pace and alacrity.
“Just as we were successful with BERT 2018, I have every confidence in believing that we shall be successful again with BERT 2022. Not because of the Prime Minister, not because of the Government, not because of the public service or the Cabinet, but because we as a people have bought into the mission, have committed to the sacrifice, have committed to doing the things that we have to do and have committed to the principles that allow love and caring and empathy to keep us together,” Prime Minister Mottley said.
