Caribbean & Central America - May 2018 (ISSN 1741-4458)

*** BAHAMAS GOVERNMENT LOSING GROUND. The Free National Movement (FNM) government, led by Prime Minister Hubert Minnis, is just a year old and already its popularity is slipping worryingly. Opinion polling by a new market research company, Public Domain, in April found that the number of people who think the country is going in the “right direction” has fallen to 40% from 67%. Those who think the country is going in the “wrong direction” have increased from 21% to 39%. Those who think the country is going “very much in the right direction” are now just 12% from 25% last September.

In the view of Public Domain’s chief M’wale Rahming, the main problem for the government is communication. He said: “The main reason I would think that is causing this is communications.”

For Rahming, the poll figures are not yet disastrous, “but they [the government] need to stop the trend because once they go past a certain threshold down, and it has been trending down…that’s the thing that would worry me if I was this administration…Once they go past a certain threshold it’s very, very hard to recover from it.”

The view that the real problem is a communications one has been given credence by the economic figures. The latest figures show that GDP grew by 2.7% in 2017, up from 0.4% in 2016. A press release providing the figures added: “The main industries contributing to this growth in GDP include construction, wholesale and retail trade, business services of a professional nature, administrative business services, and arts and other services.”

In another piece of good news for the government, in mid-April the European Code of Conduct Group, which is composed of high level representatives of member states and the European Commission, recommended that The Bahamas be removed from its list of non-cooperative tax jurisdictions. The country had been blacklisted on 13 March, alongside Saint Kitts & Nevis and the US Virgin Islands. The EU stated that these countries had failed to make commitments “at a high political level in response to all of the EU’s concerns”.

*** TRINIDAD & TOBAGO OUTLOOK CHANGED TO NEGATIVE. On 27 April, Standard & Poor’s ratings agency revised its outlook on Trinidad & Tobago from stable to negative. It maintained its long-term sovereign credit rating at BBB+. The change in outlook to negative points to S&P’s assessment that there is a one-in-three chance of a downgrade within the next two years.

The agency pointed to a mild economic recovery, but it said that it was not certain that this would be sufficient to relieve pressure on the exchange rate and access to foreign currency.

Prime Minister Keith Rowley, in London for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, told the Commonwealth Business Forum that “inaccurate reporting” was behind some of Trinidad’s problems. He complained: “This practice has an adverse effect on the nation’s ability to stimulate growth and development.”

According to the prime minister’s office: “The Prime Minister noted T&T pursues tourism as a viable industry for growth and development. However, when some nations issue negative travel advisories on incidents of crime, efforts made in the industry are stymied.”