According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the region’s tourism industry will indeed experience a slow recovery. To prevent the spread of the virus, many countries in the Caribbean region closed their borders and instituted quarantine guidelines and social distancing regulations. The economic effects of these dramatic measures were felt immediately in the region where tourism accounts for up to 50-90% of GDP and employment. While some islands have successfully impeded the virus and their economies are slowly reopening, the IMF projects that the tourism industry may take up to three years to return to pre-pandemic levels. In a region already severely impacted by the financial aftershocks of recent natural disasters – declining credit ratings, limited commercial borrowing capacity, decreased revenue and constrained ability to mobilize resources – there is heightened concern that the financial impacts of the coronavirus pandemic may plunge the region into a deep recession. International organizations including the IMF, World Bank, ECLAC, and other regional partners are mobilizing to address debt relief proposals and increasing access to concessional funding in order to assist the vulnerable economies of the region in steering through the unstable waters ahead.
Former DOD and U.S. Virgin Islands official Pamela Berkowsky ran the territory’s interagency H1N1 Task Force in 2009. The current president of Blue Sapphire Strategies, a public affairs and business advisory consulting firm, Pamela Berkowsky has also managed a state-of-the-art medical practice in the Virgin Islands. Recently, she was interviewed regarding the impact of coronavirus in the Caribbean for an article which appeared in Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninashapiro/2020/04/13/covid-19-coronavirus-in-paradise-how-the-caribbean-is-being-hit/#60f545092296). In it, she noted that while island “communities plan year-round for natural disasters, it is unclear whether the infrastructure can handle this (the pandemic), especially in such fragile economies dependent largely on tourism.” Additionally, according to Berkowsky, the islands will be “months behind the economic recovery curve,” and “when other [economies] are back, Caribbean recovery will lag.”
According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the region’s tourism industry will indeed experience a slow recovery. To prevent the spread of the virus, many countries in the Caribbean region closed their borders and instituted quarantine guidelines and social distancing regulations. The economic effects of these dramatic measures were felt immediately in the region where tourism accounts for up to 50-90% of GDP and employment. While some islands have successfully impeded the virus and their economies are slowly reopening, the IMF projects that the tourism industry may take up to three years to return to pre-pandemic levels. In a region already severely impacted by the financial aftershocks of recent natural disasters – declining credit ratings, limited commercial borrowing capacity, decreased revenue and constrained ability to mobilize resources – there is heightened concern that the financial impacts of the coronavirus pandemic may plunge the region into a deep recession. International organizations including the IMF, World Bank, ECLAC, and other regional partners are mobilizing to address debt relief proposals and increasing access to concessional funding in order to assist the vulnerable economies of the region in steering through the unstable waters ahead.
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AuthorA resident of the U.S. Virgin Islands since 2002, Pamela B. Berkowsky took her most recent governmental management role in 2007, becoming Deputy Chief of Staff to Gov. John de Jongh Jr. Thriving in this position, in which she managed daily Government House and Cabinet operations and policy development and implementation, she was promoted to Chief of Staff in 2011. Archives
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