This morning economists, researchers, policy makers, and, in general, money men and women from throughout the Caribbean region gathered at the Belize Biltmore Plaza Hotel to talk about money. Not the shortage or the abundance of it but about the policies for managing it at the macro-level. It's the annual meeting of the Caribbean Center for Monetary Studies. They are here to share their research experiences, and exchange views and ideas to find solutions to common problems across the region.
What does all that mean? Mostly it means how to conserve and best utilize often scarce foreign exchange and with the rising price of oil worldwide, it's about to become a lot scarcer.
Sydney Campbell, Governor - Central Bank
"Well we have numerous amount of problems. Economic problems as we now face rising oil prices and we have to find ways in which we could best run the economy in a prudent way and at the same time realize that a lot of our foreign exchange will now go to meeting oil prices and the import of fuel into Belize."
Ramesh Ramsaran, Caribbean Center for Monetary Studies
"We're in a very precarious position. The increasing prices for oil means that the countries of the region, particularly non-oil producing countries, will have to spend more of their foreign exchange in paying for oil. That means there will be less foreign exchange available. That was in a sense the genesis of the whole debt problem that we had in the 80s; countries went out and borrowed money to pay for essential imports.
So we could be returning to that situation, a country can go out again to the extent that they can borrow to finance essential imports. So for the non-oil producing countries of the region, this is a crisis and its also going to affect questions of stability, social stability because if you divert foreign exchange from paying for essential imports, to pay for energy and so on, that could social implications which countries have to address. It's a frightening situation to be honest."
That was Ramesh Ramsaran, the director of the Caribbean Center for Monetary Studies. He was preceded by Central Bank Governor Sydney Campbell. Experts in the Ministry of Finance predict that the pump price for a gallon of premium fuel will break the ten dollar mark shortly.
