Dame Billie Miller (left) chatting with St James Central MP Kerrie Symmonds. (MG)

OPPOSITION LEADER Mia Mottley made a call last night for the Barbados economy to be re-measured as a matter of urgency.

She said this must be done because there was a genuine belief that the Barbados economy was drastically underestimated.

Delivering her reply to the Budget, Mottley explained that even though the framework for measuring the economy was settled in 1974, Government might not be capturing the volume and range of economic activity going on in the country today, because a number of industries which existed back then no longer existed now and vice versa.

She said the former Barbados Labour Party (BLP) Government was seeking to have the economy re-measured but decided not to do so because of last January's election. "We took a conscious decision that we would seek to have it re-measured after the Central Bank did a paper that informally put it at being underestimated by about 30 per cent. So instead of having a $7.4 billion economy, it really means that your economy is more in the vicinity of $9.7 billion......

"However, we recognised out of an abundance of responsibility that for a Government on the eve of an election to seek to re-measure the economy would cast doubt as to the credibility of the figures. And even though we were confident that it would cause us to reflect even better, we chose as a Government not to bring the collection of statistics in Barbados into disrepute."

Mottley went on to state in more detail this underestimation: "When you take the absolute debt that is recorded in the Central Bank statistics which is $5.1 billion in terms of Government debt, it means that instead of you having a debt-to-GDP [Gross Domestic Product] ratio that is hovering around 80 per cent, that your debt-to-GDP ratio is in fact in the high 50s."

She further pointed out that this would mean that Barbados was really "not as stressed in relation to debt as the official 1974 framework would cause you to believe".

In addition, she said that in 2 000 the unemployment figure was recorded at 9.2 per cent based on samples done. However, she stated that the census was showing that the reality of the unemployment statistics was in fact 8.2 per cent.

The BLP leader expressed the belief that the Central Bank would have advised the new Democratic Labour Party Government of this state of affairs.

"I hope we do the re-measurement because it is critical for this Government to have the confidence in itself to make judgements about the protection of Barbadians and their pockets without being subjected to the dictates of petty and junior technocrats from outside of the Caribbean to tell them what they must do and what they must not do," she said. (MB)