• Bowe notes upticks in tourism infrastructure and job numbers.

• Warns against misinterpreting debt reduction amid economic improvements.

By YOURI KEMP

Tribune Business Reporter

ykemp@tribunemedia.net

A top financial expert said while the economic rebound was significant, there is still a lot of work left to do to get the country back on a pre-pandemic growth path.

Gowon Bowe, Fidelity Bank (Bahamas) chief executive, told Tribune Business there are a number of positive things that point to growth in the economy, such as new hotel rooms and the increase in employment across the board - although the number of persons employed has “decreased” since 2019.

“Whilst we had a tremendous amount of ailments and deaths, we certainly didn’t have that, to that extent, to lead and contribute to the contraction in the size of the workforce, and the number of working persons. So from that perspective, I think that we need to continue to preach prudence that persons should not take the exuberance of the growth as meaning that they do not need to conserve, they do not need to save, they do not need to invest, and put aside for what could be a rainy day,” he said.

The country has withstood major hurricanes and a global pandemic along with other social shocks, but it should not take this resilience to mean we are immune from anything.

Mr Bowe said: “We should take the good, meaning the increase in tourist numbers, and exploit it to where we get stopover because we don’t want large cruise ship tourists who have been reported as spending less - even though the cruise port will ideally start to get more spend out of them. We want to take those numbers and them into greater revenue, we want to take the buoyancy in the economy and turn that into savings, investment and independence financially as opposed to just sovereign independence.”

While the debt to GDP improving is a “significant number”, overall GDP improvement is the more important statistic to watch for. “Why it’s sobering is if we have a contraction in GDP, that number can worsen and let us not mischaracterise the actual improvement as being an improved state of our debt. We are still incurring new debt, even though we’re on a trajectory, hopefully, to reduce it and that should be encouraged. But let us be mindful that the the headroom that has been created is the result of higher GDP.” Mr Bowe said.

He further cautioned: “We know we reside on a hurricane belt. We know that there are things that can interrupt economic progress. So from that perspective that is all within our power to reduce actual debt. So that if there is periodic blips in GDP that doesn’t disrupt our credit worthiness, we cannot rely solely on future economic output we need to start paying the piper and reduce some of historical data accumulation.”