by TONY BEST

REMITTANCES are a major cash cow for Barbadians and Prime Minister David Thompson has appealed to nationals abroad to keep the money flowing to their relatives.

According to the World Bank in excess of $1 000 is sent on average to each man, woman and child in Barbados every year and Thompson used a reception in New York City on Monday to urge Bajans to continue assisting their relatives.

"You are here making your contribution and I am certain that in times of economic difficulty if there is one column in our national accounts that we would like to see your contribution made in, and

I am only talking about one of them because there are so many of them –it would be in the area of remittances," he told about 200 Bajans at Fleur de Lis in Ridgewood, Queens.

He said they would have recognised that many Barbadians living overseas made a significant contribution to Barbados helping to improve the physical development and the social and economic development.

"This is an important aspect of the development of our country, and even more so than in many other countries.

"There are people who are not as inclined to send remittances back to their own because the stewardship of governments that they left behind, has not been as good a stewardship Barbados has had in terms of building up the society and lifting up individuals," Thompson said.

It was that record of success and accomplishment, he told the cross- section of the Barbadian community in the city, that impressed senior Wall Street executives with whom he met on Monday and Tuesday in New York.

"You would happy to know as has happened with successive Governments, that most people are impressed with the quality of life that we enjoy in Barbados," he said.

"The fact that our country is the leading developing country on the (UN) Human Development Index in the world and that we have many other features of our economic, political and social development that are special and unique that mark us as anoutstanding country".

According to a chapter in a new World Bank book, the per capita level of annual remittances to Barbados had reached US$519 per person in 2005, the latest year covered in the publication.

That sum placed Barbados almost at the top of the per capita list for Western Hemisphere countries that received remittances from nationals abroad. Barbados was second only to Jamaica, whose per capita amount was US$700 annually.

Published figures compiled by the World Bank, the Inter-American Development and the United Nations show that between 2002 and 2005, Barbados received US$470 million in remittances. They grew at an annual rate of almost nine per cent and over four years contributed at least four per cent to the economy.