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PM Briceño says government finances are in bad shape

By on November 18, 2020

Prime Minister John Briceño

Punta Gorda, TOLEDO. Wednesday, November 18, 2020. Prime Minister John Briceño has given the country a preliminary look at the state of the nation’s finances.

And … “This is far worse than we had anticipated,” Briceño said in a televised statement to the nation on Wednesday evening.

According to the new Prime Minister, the first Cabinet meeting of his administration on Monday received briefings on urgent national issues and chief among them was the economy.

Briceño told the nation that, based on the reports he and his Cabinet got from the technocrats including the Financial Secretary Joseph Waight, the previous United Democratic Party (UDP) administration led by Dean Barrow, had been functioning “with unsustainable fiscal and debt positions.”

Briceño then reported that “Central Government’s revenues have fallen by over $166.8 million or by 24.9 percent.”

The Dean Barrow administration, the Prime Minister noted, was meeting monthly payroll for the civil service by borrowing “around $30 million per month.”

This kind of borrowing has pushed the government’s debt to more than double the internationally acceptable debt to GDP threshold, jumping “97.7 percent of GDP to 132.9 percent of GDP.”

This puts Belize almost at the top in terms of countries in the Caribbean with high debt to GDP ratios.

“In simple terms, the UDP Government maxed out the credit card,” Briceño said.

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