Despite the challenges facing the economy and expectations of slow growth over the next year, Central Bank Governor Dr Delisle Worrell is reporting that investor confidence has returned to the local economy.
And he says it’s a result of Government’s fiscal programmes announced in the August 2013 budget and reinforced by measures announced last December.
The level of confidence, he suggested, meant that those strategies were “essentially the right” ones.
“Confidence has come back,” Dr Worrell said at a media conference at the Central Bank earlier to day to discuss Barbados’ 2013 economic performance and projections for this year.
“The thing that we all recognized, and we have emphasize it in the central bank, is that we protect our exchange rate anchor and the value of our dollar by maintaining an adequate level of foreign reserves. So when we saw the rate at which our foreign reserves were declining in the second half of last year people naturally became nervous. We cannot blame them. That is why we had to take very firm fiscal action because that is the way we correct that situation,” he explained.
He said, however, those strategies, which are expected to run until the end of the 2015 fiscal year, needed to be “refined”.