Economy & Business - July 2021

Perhaps not surprisingly given the level of debt carried by her government (148.9% of GDP), Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados continues to be the strongest advocate for debt relief for the Caribbean. In her most recent intervention, speaking at forum on ‘Sustainable Island Futures’ staged by the University of the West Indies (UWI) on 21 June, Mottley argued that there was “something fundamentally immoral” in the system of global governance and she called for a debt-repayment programme for the Caribbean that would be analogous with the concessions granted to indebted Europe at the end of World War II.