Manifesto concern

Two economists say the Barbados Labour Party’s (BLP) manifesto has critical unanswered questions about how its economic ambitions will be financed and executed.

Head of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Professor Don Marshall, argues that the just-launched manifesto does not present a credible industrial policy capable of delivering the kind of structural economic transformation Barbados requires.

Professor Troy Lorde, dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Cave Hill, who has also reviewed the document, has raised related concerns about the document’s execution framework and fiscal coherence.

At the manifesto launch last Saturday night in Golden Square Freedom Park, The City, BLP leader, Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, announced proposals that included Barbadians earning less than $50 000 a year no longer having to pay income tax; a cost of living cash credit of $100 a month to pensioners, those on welfare and others receiving the special needs grant; a $750 reverse tax credit for those earning between $25 000 and $35 000, while those earning up to $25 000 a year getting $1 700, up from $1 300.

A Barbados Republic Child Wealth Fund is also to be set up, giving a one-time birthright investment of $5 000 to every child born on or after November 30, 2021.

Flyovers on the highway, an increase in car loan limits for public servants and housing benefits, hiring more police officers and the expansion of the Queen Elizabeth Hospital with a connecting bridge to a nearby site, are also among the manifesto promises.

The Prime Minister said the proposals would cost just over $142.2 million a year, with the highest cost going to the cost of living cash credit and returns to the pensioners.

Marshall said while the manifesto outlines an expanded social agenda and a range of relief measures, it remains rooted in policy assumptions that have historically failed to produce economic diversification or quality employment.

“I have had several discussions and debates over the years about the salience of an industrial policy,” he told the DAILY NATION.

“Recent dynamics and events have allowed for greater consensus among those of us who teach, write and publish on these matters for a living. The neoliberal grip on the policy imagination of our planners suffocated the possibility of transformation beyond the goal of financial sector enhancement, and the populist accommodation with neoliberalism has not led to quality jobs, nor a real diversification of the Barbados economy.”

He argued that the manifesto trades heavily in social protection while failing to interrogate the underlying commercial structure of the economy.

“We are presented a suite of relief measures and promises of an uplift of social sector protectionism – health, education and housing – but there is no analysis of the commercial dealing bias of the economy that leaves the country bedraggled with heavy imports in fuel, food and medicine. That underlying structure is what continues to drive high costs and vulnerability.”

Marshall said the document does not articulate a clear conception of the developmental state required to drive value-added production and sectoral integration.

“No conception of the enabling developmental state is presented,” he said. “Instead, the manifesto proceeds as if the prevailing conservative enterprise culture is not itself a challenge to overcome, when in fact that culture is one of the binding constraints on transformation.”

He also questioned how sectors identified for growth will be meaningfully integrated into the wider economy.

“Mention is made about encouraging growth in the creative sector, but how is this to be integrated into a coherent strategy of nurturing forward and backward linkages to tourism, international business and food security?” the professor asked. “What is the plan, the statecraft and the budgetary action plans to buttress the same? These are the questions that matter if transformation is to be more than rhetoric.”

Lorde said the BLP manifesto is structured less as a traditional campaign document and more as a governing narrative that assumes continuity in office and rewards for administrative competence.

He noted that it frames governance, life outcomes and state capacity as a continuum, signalling a shift from crisis stabilisation to execution. However, he said this framing heightens the need for fiscal clarity.

“The manifesto is asking voters to see the BLP less as a party of new promises and more as the manager of a system – institutions, delivery and resilience,” Lorde said. “The difficulty with that approach is that legitimacy through competence depends on showing how the entire programme fits within a binding fiscal logic.”

While acknowledging that the BLP explicitly cost its Making Life More Affordable package, the economist said this transparency was not extended across the rest of the programme.

“It is relatively easy to cost one flagship social package. What is much harder, and what is missing here, is a clear presentation of the mediumterm budget constraint – how health expansion, policing infrastructure, water systems, digital government and industrial zones are all to be funded together, and what trade-offs are being made.”

Lorde said many of the manifesto’s major initiatives are presented as discrete projects rather than as part of an integrated expenditure framework.

“Without that integration, voters are left to infer whether these commitments will be financed through higher charges, reduced service quality elsewhere or the reintroduction of fiscal stress by other means.”

He also cautioned that the manifesto’s industrial ambitions, including reindustrialisation and proposed GIGA zones, rely on expansive language without sufficient operational detail.

“The language is big and appealing, but the manifesto does not force itself into the level of specificity that makes industrial policy believable – particularly in a small, open economy with well-known coordination constraints.”

On crime, Lorde said the manifesto’s blend of prevention, enforcement and correctional reform was coherent in intent but weak on institutional mechanics.

“What ultimately changes lived reality is throughput. Case files, forensic turnaround times, court scheduling culture, remand management – these are the things that translate activity into deterrence and they are largely absent from the discussion,” he stated. (CLM)

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