Barrow administration gets a failing grade on its first two years in office

Mark Espat

Earlier in the newscast we told you about the PUP’s press conference at Independence Hall. After a feisty statement by the party leader, his Deputy, Mark Espat made his own pronunciations about the economy and the recession. Espat says that there are thirty-two thousand more Belizeans living in poverty and over twenty thousand Belizeans who can’t find a job. In his judgment the two years of a U.D.P. government is nothing but abject failure.

Mark Espat, Deputy Leader of the Opposition

“I wish to briefly sketch the outlines of our great recession. Economic activity, as measured by GDP, has shriveled for three consecutive quarters by 2.2%, 1.9% and .2%, respectively. These are not intangible numbers bereft of human agony. They convert to thousands of lost jobs, businesses shuttered, houses re-possessed, children booted out of school and families broken. A gruesome example of the carnage of this great recession is the Corozal Free Zone, where imports have literally crashed-landed, falling by greater 50%. Burning in that crash have been hundreds of jobs. Those workers still collecting a paycheck are now stamped as part-time, effectively underemployed.”

“Domestic exports, one of the pillars whereupon rests the value of the Belizean dollar, shrunk by a breathtaking 20% in the January to October 2009 period alone. By comparison, the World Trade Organization projected that global trade would contract by 9%, less than half the height of Belize’s fall. 20,489 Belizeans who actively seek work cannot find a job today. For women and youth, the unemployment rate at September 2009 was one in four, twice the national average or twenty-five percent. At the peak of the Great Depression in the United States 1933, the unemployment stood 24.9%. And while the inflation tiger had been tamed, after chomping 6.8% of the Belizean Dollar’s purchasing power in 2008, the demon of deflation has now reared its head. Deflation depresses profits, devours jobs and stymies growth. Just ask the Japanese how deflation lost them an entire decade. But perhaps most startling is that today, 29% more Belizeans fathers, mothers and children now find themselves mired in poverty; living below the poverty line, compared to 2002. That twenty-nine percent is, in real terms, 32,000 more citizens.”