This is one of the very few intelligent posts on this topic. Re-read this line over again: *"The Bahamas is more in line with a centrally planned than a market economy"* This is why communism failed in the 1990's. In a free market world, a centrally planned economy cannot function intelligently because no one or group is smart enough to know all of the factors and have all of the information of the economic drivers. The telling tale is the $500,000 threshold for FDI for the Bahamas. Goodbye Tech Hub and startups. Cayman added $4 billion to their economy with blockchain compaines, because the threshold to join Cayman Enterprise City, is roughly $12,000.
Joining the WTO is going to be hellishly painful for the Bahamas. No doubt about it. But it will be even more painful when we are forced to devalue the Bahamian dollar to 35 cents (which most external economists figure it should really be).

There are two other alarms and one is mentioned here. There is the term "usable reserves", meaning cash or other liquid instruments. I don't know how much, but a good portion of the reserves are not liquid. They are accounting tricks. Like when the govt borrows USD and gives the Central Bank a note for it, it is added to the dollar reserves, because it one day will be fungible in American dollars. But it would be illiquid in an emergency.
The bomb in the economy is the unfunded $1.2 billion that is owed by the government to NIB. That is 15% of the total economy of the country for a year.
At least we have half a chance with WTO by joining the market economy and taking the pain now, rather than continue on and take a huge death blow later. It really is that bad.

Trust you to bring politics into this sad situation. Disgusting.

When I used to lunch downtown at Athena Cafe, and got into conversations with tourists, they expressed little interest in seeing the water tower or the Queens Steps. Even TripAdvisor has visitor comments that say "Not much to see except a staircase". These things aint special anymore to tourists.

All you have to do is listen to KB's song "Civil Servant". It tells it all.

It's not a disease. It is the way that they are made. If you think it is a disease, do what Jesus would do -- help the sick, not condemn them.

And that is why we have religion.

The Bahamian bloodlines een no prize. The gene pool needs a little chlorine. Bahamian women are 8 time more likely to either carry or express the breast cancer gene. The probability of consanguinity between any Bahamian person within the last three generations is 50%. My colleague at the bank (in Nassau) married a man of Haitian ancestry to prevent gene mutation and inbreeding. With the high percentage of Bahamian women having children by multiple men, the genetics is so inbred that we really need new genetic material for future generations to prevent expression of negative genetic traits.

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LOL -- multi-billion industry. The US registered 250,000 aircraft in 2017. To register an aircraft in the US (including jets) is a $5 entry free and a 3-year additional fee of $5. So how is this going to be multi-billion industry? Jokes.

As a country that relies on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), we keep inventing ways to make it difficult for investors. For example, the government is/has passed an H1-B visa programme for skilled help in the Grand Bahama Tech Hub. Suppose a company hires 200 people under the visa plan, rents, builds or buys a building, creates an IT infrastructure, and seven years later, it has to send away its work-force for a year. My god, the country is run by retards. Where is common sense?