Barbados' Potential for Global Excellence Depends on Mindset Shifts and Improved Business Environment

Barbados has the potential to be the best country in the world but this requires the right mindsets and a drastic improvement in the cost of doing business.

Senator Chad Blackman, the Minister in the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Investment, was the keynote speaker on Thursday, day one of BIBA’s Global Business Week Conference in the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre, Two Mile Hill, St Michael under the theme Innovation for a Sustainable Future.

He drew reference to countries such as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Singapore, saying Barbados needed to have a similar attitude to innovation and public engagement as those states that are small in size.

“If our sector collectively is to go where it needs to go, there has to be a whole country approach to how we do business in Barbados, not just local business, but the international business sector. Using Singapore, using UAE, using the Norwegian approach, those countries have taken ordinary citizens as partners in the wider ecosystem.

“In Singapore, one of the things that struck me was that . . . the business community constantly has dialogue with the public on where the business sector is going, where it needs to grow, and the role that the average man . . . has to play in its delivery,” he said. Blackman said, with modern technology, Barbados could do the same. He said those countries also had long-term plans which Barbados needed to emulate. “One of the things that they’re doing, whether it be Qatar, whether it be UAE, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Norway, is they have 40, 50-year plans as to where the country needs to be, where the sector needs to be, the relevant legislation that will get them there, the educational system, the skills and the tools. So therefore, you work backwards to where you want to go,” he said.

However, the minister said it was too cumbersome to do certain things in Barbados, to which many of the assembled business people agreed. He said setting up a business took too long as well as things such as setting up a bank account.

“How long does it take to register a company here? That laugh tells me all I need to know – too long. Where UAE is at with respect to their incorporation of entities is that you can literally establish a company online using artificial intelligence in six minutes . . . and they are working to make it four minutes.

“It takes forever to open a bank account. True? The question is, what are you doing? I’ve been back home long enough

to see that there is that deep stranglehold, not only on the government but the society. We all know what the problem is, but we’ve not rolled up our sleeves enough, all of us, to say, ‘Here’s the problem, this is how we’re going to fix it’.

Blackman said he was making a commitment to BIBA to ensure that bottlenecks that are strangling the success of the global business model would be removed.

Blackman, a former diplomat, said the UAE constantly set performance indicators, achieved them and set more without resting on their laurels and this was where Barbados needed to head.

“The question then becomes, how can we in Barbados, particularly as a jurisdiction, as a country, not just as business, but the entire ecosystem that is Barbados, how can we ensure that everything that we do is in that mode? We are competing not just regionally . . . we’re competing amongst countries who have a quest for innovation, who have a quest for new things, who have a quest for understanding how the world works in new ways and adapting those realities to their models. Therefore, innovation has to be the bread and butter of Barbados,” he said.

The Senator said, once Barbados could get it right, “no one could stop us”. ( CA)