Governor of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB), Timothy Antoine.
AS countries across the region open back up, Governor of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank (ECCB), Timothy Antoine, expressed his belief that the business system as a whole will not improve until the vital tourism sector recovers.
He was responding to a question on how soon economies would start to recover while speaking at the 2020 Caribbean Economic Forum entitled ‘COVID and Economic Policy: Protecting Jobs, Businesses and the Economy’.
“The impact we are seeing in terms of jobs and revenues, which have plummeted to less than 50 per cent of what they were pre-COVID, those impacts were real and continuing, and until and unless tourism reopens, those impacts will continue. And because our borders are still closed for most countries and because tourism is expected to have a protracted recovery, as we are still at the very early stages in my estimation of this situation and so we are now internally in our countries, relaxing and reopening local businesses and so on, and that helps, so in that sense economic activity has picked up in the last month. But in terms of the macro economy, nothing fundamentally or dramatically will change until we are able to get tourism resuscitated or recovered and that I think is the major challenge that we all face at this time and that is why there are significant discussions going on about what are the protocols around which we would reopen our borders for tourism,” he stressed.
Agreeing with Antoine, Governor of the Bank of Jamaica Richard Byles said to a large extent recovery would be intertwined with the good management of spread of the pandemic in major source markets – the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Europe.
He pointed out that Jamaica had reopened its borders recently and was hoping to manage the process safely.
“A lot depends on countries on which tourists are coming from if the infection rates in those countries gets and stays low and that the protocol for those tourists coming back home is sufficiently simple that it does not stop people from wanting to take a vacation outside the borders of their country,” he added. (JMB)