Private sector companies are being urged to comply with requests from the Barbados Statistical Services (BSS) Department to complete surveys.
Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley made the appeal to these companies during a hybrid press conference streamed live from Ilaro Court this afternoon.
“We need Barbadian companies and individuals to cooperate whether it was the Census, whether it is the Barbados Statistical Services questionnaires, Central Bank’s, questionnaires that come.
“All of these things may appear unsexy to you, but they have a very real benefit and consequence. Benefit if it is done properly and we collect the data, and if we don’t do it, then it means that we are not in a position to appropriately estimate what has taken place…,” she outlined.
She explained that a failure to accurately capture the size of this economy appropriately, restricted the amount of fiscal space and room that Government would have to spend going forward.
Ms. Mottley noted that entities in the business of production, but who refused to cooperate for the collection of data going as far back as 2014, 2015, 2016, and even up to 2018, were still in existence, and posed a challenge.
However, she disclosed that she had called on Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs, Dale Marshall, and Minister in the Ministry of Finance, Ryan Straughn, to make the necessary amendments to the legislation to curb this challenge.
“We need to measure what we are doing and how much we are earning in this economy. And very often what is happening is that our failure to measure all of the activity, both within the formal sector and even in terms of the informal sector, means that we are limiting ourselves in terms of our possibilities. And that is our problem, not anybody else’s problem,” the Prime Minister lamented.
She made a formal appeal to those businesses who were refusing to comply to do so going forward.