I.D.B. says Belize “doing well”
With very little time for sleep after Friday’s marathon budget debate, Minister of Finance Ralph Fonseca spent the weekend hosting top-level meetings with his regional counterparts and Governors of the Inter-American Development Bank. The meetings centred on several issues including international economic conditions and good governance. The conference also examined the recent bank collapse in the Dominican Republic and the problems it caused, with a view to avoiding a recurrence in the region. I.D.B. President Enrique Iglesias gave Belize’s macro-economic policies a clean bill of health, and Fonseca says additional assistance from the bank will continue to benefit the country.
Enrique Iglesias, President, I.D.B.
“The projection for this year, for sure your country is doing very well. Belize is one of the countries with the highest growth in the last year and I will expect the same thing for this year. We are seeing also the figures for expansion of the major instruments of growth of this country such as tourism and everything looks to be extremely good. So in a way we have very good prognosis for Belize and also very good prognosis for the rest of Central America. I think it’s a good opportunity to have this year solid growth all over the place in the region, based among other things on external conditions, which have been improving. The economy of the United States is growing and this is very important to everybody. And also because the countries are dong their work, the countries are really making their effort to keep the economy sound, to control inflation, to create a very solid management of the fiscal account.”
Ralph Fonseca, Minster of Finance
“One of the things that’s most important for Belize with the I.D.B. has not been so much getting the money from them, but also getting the transfer of technology because they bring in the experts along with these projects. And in some cases it’s not just loans, it’s grants. One of the things we talked about this morning was the completion of the process to get a grant I think for five hundred thousand dollars for the Public Utilities Commission, which is very important. That’s been a very topical here in Belize. They need as much help as they can, and they need the best consultants in the world to deal with some of the situations that we are confronted here in Belize, just like every other nation in the world is confronted as you start converting monopolies to competition.”
Iglesias says that several projects under the I.D.B. portfolio will continue to receive funding in 2004, including a major solid waste management initiative.
