Minister of Economic Affairs, Sen. Hon. Michael Halkitis says that since coming to office this administration has been working to improve communications with stakeholders in the finance industry about what is going on in The Bahamas.
“We spent a lot of time in the last eighteen months since we’ve been in office speaking with the financial community, investors you know just improving our communications and letting them know what is going on in The Bahamas. There had been a significant lack of information about, you know, our prospects and the recovery that has been going on. People thought, you know, tourism economy hit by COVID, you know, they’re going over the cliff we had to do a lot of work to reinforce, that listen, the tourism economy is rebounding significantly, we have a plan, we’ve gotten some results already that you can see and we have plans in terms of our forecast and we have plans in place to achieve those forecasts.”
Minister Halkitis says that the government expects for the economy to remain strong even with talk of a slowdown internationally and in the United States. “Recently there are some concerns about global economic growth slowing down, economic growth slowing down within the US, you know there’s even been some talk about recession in some of the major economies of the world but we are confident that given our proximity to the US which is our major source market, given our marketing efforts, given still the pent up demand for travel and you know, even in recessions people have money and people still spend money and given the information that we’re getting from Ministry of Tourism and the hotel partners and other stakeholders in the tourism industry we anticipate that that strength will continue into 2023.”
