King: Capture more accurate data

Minister of the Creative Economy, Culture and Sports John King wants Crop Over stakeholders and the ministry to capture empirical data on the festival more accurately.

During yesterday’s Brass Tacks Sunday on Starcom Network’s Voice of Barbados 92.9 FM, he said the ministry must also be part of the process of gathering the data.

“Those numbers, I don’t want to say they are either right or wrong, but they are what they are, because they are based primarily on, let’s say, tourism capturing the information. So you’re looking at arrivals in terms of persons coming in, you’re looking at spend . . . from those same people,” he said.

“It needs also to look at money that is spent within the economy in terms of the providers – alcohol, clothing, rental of cars, hair, persons who prepare foods. So we’re stacking all of those numbers in. There is some data, in my mind, that needs to be captured and this is the data from what we term the creative economy. I don’t think that is effectively captured in terms of the spend of the artistes, the spend of the costume designers, the spend of persons with recording studios, the spend of the persons who build costumes. There is all that other data which is not captured accurately at the moment,” he said. (RA)

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