Barbados Government Encourages Private Sector to Boost Exports

Government wants the private sector to play a more active role in helping Barbados grow its exports to significantly boost foreign exchange earnings and generate wealth that stays on the island.

Minister of Finance Ryan Straughn said that having spent eight years making Barbados fiscally sound via the first two Barbados Economic Recovery and Transformation (BERT) programmes, BERT 3.0 was about making the country “economically formidable”.

“BERT 3.0 is contingent on competitiveness and growth, and that growth has to be driven and led by the private sector, with a little more focus on exports. Therefore, it is important that we move quickly, and that we move with purpose to ensure we can unlock opportunities for investment for Barbadians,” he told participants at the CAF Private Sector Dialogue yesterday.

The event was convened by CAF Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean in collaboration with the Ministry of Finance and took place at the Sagicor Cave Hill School of Business and Management, The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus.

“Today is really a deliberate intent to ensure that we can chart a different path . . . for Barbados, and so the Government is driving export-led growth . . . . It is really an intentional strategic priority, because we’ve decided that this country will compete outward, earn more foreign exchange and generate wealth that stays right here in Barbados, and certainly across the region,” the minister said.

Facilities available

With Barbados now a full member of CAF, Straughn said this meant “the envelope of facilities available now can be deployed to the private sector”.

“This is an intentional commitment to unlock some of those untapped opportunities that we know exist not just here in Barbados, but really across the region to strengthen businesses to be able to make our economy much more resilient,” he noted.

Straughn told business community representatives that they needed to “get to know what is available directly from CAF as potential opportunities for investment and financing, and this is not to be seen in any way as being in any competition with the local financial institutions”.

“You need scale, you need to invest in opportunities that give our people the same kind of return as others in the world. Therefore, we have it within us to do the hard work to find the right projects, find the right partners, the right financiers to be able to make these things possible for our people,” he said.