ABSTRACT
This paper discusses the fiscal crises experienced in Barbados in the early 1990s and then again following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. In doing so, it presents the vulnerabilities faced by a Caribbean small island developing state (SIDS), seeking to navigate the Global Political Economy. Such small states face a complex mix of vulnerabilities to external occurrences which can be exacerbated by domestic efforts to manage social bargains and by the smallness of their economies. The case of Barbados brings out some of these complexities by presenting the fiscal crisis of 1991 that led the country into an IMF programme but that kept intact popular domestic expectations of a stable currency and of the maintenance of a respectable social safety net. During its twenty-first century crisis, Barbados has avoided going to the IMF (as of March 2017) but the debt situation has been precarious. The post 2008 crisis raises questions about whether an IMF programme should be pursued and also about whether, with or without IMF assistance, the popular expectations of maintaining the currency peg and of state funded social programmes can be continued. This paper addresses these issues while comparing the economic crises of the two periods.
