What a waste of time and money.

What exports are they talking about? We don't export anything from the Bahamas except crawfish and that just goes to the US who want more than we can sell.

Joining the WTO does not benefit the Bahamas. Our economy is based off tourism, not manufacturing or exportable natural resources. Our population is tiny and we cannot compete globally for manufacturing work, so joining the WTO is simply a make work project to go from collecting customs duty and tariffs to collecting VAT or payroll tax.

We should be focusing on bringing down airport costs and improving our accessibility to tourists, not worrying about non-existent exports. This whole WTO thing is just a waste of time and money.

Maybe the reason the Ministry of Finance has '7 different systems' is that the Minister of Finance has no knowledge of finance.

We need a proper access to information law and much more transparency. There is absolutely nothing stopping the political leaders from spending and taking whatever they want because no one can ever see what they are doing.

Of course our political leaders don't want improved government data. The first thing it will show is just how long they've had their hands in the cookie jar. It makes it a lot harder to steal when you're being watched.

But this is exactly what we need. We are a small population with a small national budget, and even a little waste can cause large deficits. We need to be spending our money better and have the information to know that we are doing so. It'll be a long road though. Most government agencies don't even use computers, or have electronic files. Our country is 15-20 years behind the times in terms of technology. How is it that government workers don't even have email addresses? We need all our information to be electronic yet we haven't even taken the first steps. Those same first steps were taken 20 years ago by the worlds leading nations. We need to take an example from them.

Pessimism seems to be a great attitude to have.

I hope they both do well. The better they both do, the better we all do.

Who are they going to hire from here? Besides the fact that this is being paid for by the IDB. Name one leading expert in transportation design in the Bahamas. Looking at our current roads and design clearly shows that outside help would be appreciated on the subject.

Now you are totally correct about the politicians, the FNM and PLP can't figure a damn thing out. It would probably benefit us a great deal to outsource them.

You're simply trying to trade one tax for another, but at the same time destroying the small but still import manufacturing sector of the Bahamian economy. The government requires some tax revenue, so if you take it away from duties then it becomes things like VAT and payroll tax. It does nothing to decrease our cost of living.

It does not lead to greater competition in any way. There are no restrictions on what goods can be imported now. Duties are applied evenly as it currently stands.

Your idea that we can now buy from Korea and cut out the US, we already can. Joining the WTO doesn't change that at all.

We can also export to any country we like. The issue is, we don't export anything apart from crawfish, which goes to the US market without any issue. Our resource here in the Bahamas is the beautiful natural landscape, not raw material, not manufactured goods. The WTO benefits exporters. Countries who have more resources than they can use themselves, it does not benefit import heavy nations.

We should be backing away from the WTO. There is no benefit to the Bahamas to join. We don't export anything so we don't benefit. Unless we exported as much or more than we import, then we are just shooting ourselves in the foot.

We are far better off without it.