Senator Coye Says Investment in Belize On the Rise  

Business Senator Kevin Herrera also weighed in on the debate. He questioned if the Briceño Administration has set the bar too high at two hundred and fifty million U.S. dollars. Senator Christopher Coye explained that for the first time in 2022, Belize has surpassed a billion dollars in investments by domestic and foreign investors.

 

Kevin Herrera, Business Senator

“My question is where does these two hundred and fifty million dollars come from? If we develop a policy or we pass a policy such as this today, will it be effective to capture the type of investments we want to capture. Two hundred and fifty million U.S dollars in such a small economy like this seems excessive, especially if you look at it in the context of our annual budget. You could round it off to two billion dollars in terms of spending for a year and so if you look at two hundred and fifty million U.S., you are actually looking at twenty-five percent of the total annual budget. Which is a large amount, so I don’t know where the two hundred and fifty million or five hundred million Belize dollars is coming from, but it seems pretty large. In my mind I am wondering if we will really have investments of this size and if the objective is to provide these incentives so that you could attract investments in these areas, that bar may be a little bit high.”

 

Christopher Coye, Government Senator

“Between 2009 and 2019 the average growth in investment, that is measures by gross fix capital formation on our G.D.P. stats, was on average growth about one point four percent a year. In 2020, because of COVID, it dramatically contracted by twelve percent. But in 2021 we saw a tremendous increase in investment and that investment is not foreign direct investment only. It includes local investment. That increase was upward of thirty-eight percent in 2021 alone. It increased further in 2022 by another twenty percent. In 2023, this is preliminary, but it is roughly twelve percent increase. That is in stark contrast to an average investment growth rate of about one to one and a half percent in the prior dozen years.”