Belize Seeks to Attract More Foreign Direct Investments as Trends Improve

Osmond Martinez

Belize is seeing trends in foreign direct investments that are more encouraging now than in previous years. In the past, there were a lot of bureaucratic procedures that discouraged foreigners from investing their money in Belize, but there are steps being made to lift a lot of the proverbial “red tape” that accompanied that activity. Today, C.E.O. in the Ministry of Economic Development, Doctor Osmond Martinez says that even though much more is left to be done to ease the burdens on foreign investors, a lot has also been done towards that end.

Dr. Osmond Martinez, C.E.O., Ministry of Economic Development

“Investors always look at macro-economic stability. That is one and two, we need to take advantage of the peg that we have with the U.S. dollar. That’s at two-to-one while the rest of the world right now is suffering where there is a lot of fluctuation with their currency. Ours has been stable. We don’t have that problem. So we have to promote it. And for the first time last year in November, the Office of the Prime Minister launched the Invest Belize. Last year, over two hundred million dollars came from foreign direct investments and that’s U.S. dollars – in the middle of the pandemic still. That’s something to celebrate. The data is right there at the Central Bank of Belize. In Q-One of this year, quarter one – January to March – eighty-six million U.S. dollars. That was the amount that the previous administration was able to mobilize in 2019, before the pandemic.We need to take advantage of the CSMEs (CARICOM Single Market and Economy). Why? Because we can ask big companies to come to Belize and manufacture in Belize and export to the Caribbean. We have to take advantage of that market. So that’s how we will be able to reduce imports.”