No to IMF Programs for Economic Recovery

John Briceño

Belize will not be signing on to an International Monetary Fund program to work our way out of the financial crunch brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic.  That’s the decision taken by the Briceño administration, following a series of meetings with the IMF.  It harkens back to a similar decision taken by the Musa administration in 2005 when government was also faced with harsh economic headwinds.  Despite I.M.F.’s prescription, Belize’s economy was able to rebound using a homegrown economic recovery strategy.  In short, PM Briceño says Belize does have the talent to deal with this on our own.

Prime Minister John Briceño

“As a country, and as responsible leaders, I think we have a better understanding as to what we’re going through.  We have people with the expertise and with the ideas to be able to put [together] a full homegrown economic recovery plan, as opposed to having people outside of Belize imposing on us what it is that we need to do.  We know what we have to do, we have done it before you know.  Remember in 2005 when we met with the IMF, we came up with our own homegrown economic recovery plan that when we left, the former prime minister then had to admit that we left, we left a primary balance in the budget and the deficit was less than one percent of GDP.  We’ve done that before.  Right now we are facing a primary balance of negative nine percent of GDP.  That means that we don’t have enough money to pay the light bill, that’s how bad it is.  And we’re going to have an overall economic deficit, a budget deficit of about almost thirteen percent of GDP.”