G.O.B. Responds to IMF’s Recent Country Review
John Briceño
Belize’s dire economic situation has been confirmed in a recent country review by the International Monetary Fund. The cheerless assessment substantiates what Prime Minister Briceño has been repeating all along, that Belize is broke and has been in a lengthy recession prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. It also confirms that the Barrow administration made use of roughly seven hundred million dollars in loans between 2019 and 2020. In a concluding statement issued by the visiting I.M.F. team earlier today, it was pointed out that COVID-19 led to a seventy-two percent decline in tourist arrivals last year. Tourism accounts for approximately sixty percent of Belize’s foreign exchange earnings and roughly forty percent of the gross domestic product. According to the UN financial agency, recovery from the pandemic is projected to be long-drawn-out, with real G.D.P. returning to its 2019 level by 2025. The solution, based on the preliminary findings, is to implement a medium-term financial strategy aimed at restoring debt sustainability, “while preparing the ground for the future adoption of a Fiscal Responsibility Law with explicit fiscal rules.” But, will government go in with IMF’s latest prescription? It’s a question that was put to PM Briceño earlier this week and he referred to government’s Homegrown Economic Recovery Plan.
Prime Minister John Briceño [File: March 11th, 2021]
“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.”
