Not budging

DESPITE GETTING more up-to-date information on the Barbados economy, international credit rating agency, Standard & Poor’s (S), is sticking to the downgrade it issued five months ago.

It is also maintaining its negative outlook through to next year.

In September, S had downgraded Barbados’ long-term sovereign credit ratings from ‘B’ to ‘B-’, and in a report released Tuesday, which it said supplemented its September review, it felt the “differences have been determined not to be sufficiently significant to affect the rating and our main conclusions”.

S insisted that the negative outlook reflected the potential for a downgrade if Government failed to make additional progress on lowering its high fiscal deficit, if growth resulting from key investment projects failed to materialise, or if external pressures worsened because of persistent and large current account deficits (CADS). (AB)

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