Government needs to have a conversation with the country in order to build national consensus, says former Prime Minister Owen Arthur, who has described the Barbados economy as being “twice as bad as it should have been”.
Speaking at a Barbados Labour Party meeting of his St Peter constituency at Alma Parris Secondary School tonight, the veteran economist said the spectre of devaluation was stalking the land and Moody’s ratings agency could only have downgraded this country as a result of the 11 per cent deficit presented to Parliament by the Minister of Finance.
He, however, recalled that the minister had also said that the worst-case scenario for the deficit was five per cent of Gross Domestic Product, which meant that the fiscal situation was now twice as bad as its worst-case scenario.
He therefore urged the Government to take the people into its confidence if it has to make difficult decisions, since the issue was now too big to be handled by the IMF alone. (RJ)
