Top economists: Bajan wage freeze a must

(Barbados Nation) Top economists Charlie Skeete and Sir Courtney Blackman believe that a wage freeze is necessary and that Government must cut spending on tertiary education by making some parents contribute to their children’s education.

The two agreed that a public sector wage freeze designed to rein in Government spending was an absolute necessity for Barbados and that Government shouldn’t have waited for the International Monetary Fund to tell it what action to take.

As a matter of fact, a freeze should have been implemented in 2010, if not sooner, according to two of Barbados’ best economists.

Within days of the IMF recommending the freeze to the Freundel Stuart administration, both Charlie Skeete, a retired senior economic adviser at the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington DC, and Sir Courtney Blackman, the first governor of the Central Bank, told the WEEKEND NATION that long before the IMF suggested it, they had called on Government to implement a wage freeze because the rate of spending was unsustainable.