The Gap Between January and April

On 16 April 2026, ahead of the IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings, Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva told reporters that “even our most hopeful scenario involves a growth downgrade.” The next day, the Fund’s World Economic Outlook confirmed the shape. For Barbados, the new projection is 2.1 per cent growth in 2026, down from 2.7 per cent in 2025. In January, Governor Kevin Greenidge of the Central Bank had forecast 2.5 to 3.0 per cent for the same year.

The gap between those two forecasts is roughly half a percentage point. It is not a quarrel between forecasters. It is the Middle East War’s footprint, landing on Barbados’s growth projection three months after Greenidge’s outlook. Georgieva, speaking from the Fund’s Washington headquarters, named the mechanisms plainly: significant infrastructure damage, supply disruptions, losses of confidence. She also flagged a five-week gap in tanker traffic from the Gulf, the sort of shipping-lane statistic that ends up inside diesel invoices, freight insurance, and the price of a tin of Spam on a supermarket shelf in Bridgetown. For an economy that imports virtually all of its fuel, the transmission is not complicated. What January’s outlook assumed as global conditions “broadly supportive” has been revised. The 3.3 per cent global growth projection from the IMF’s January 2026 World Economic Outlook is now, by the Fund’s own words, an upper bound on what 2026 can deliver, subject to whether the ceasefire holds and how long oil and gas prices stay elevated.

Barbados is doing the fiscal work. BERT 2026, tabled on 17 March, commits to a primary surplus of 4.4 per cent of GDP through FY2027/28, tapering to 3.5 per cent thereafter, with public debt falling towards 60 per cent of GDP by FY2035/36. Debt has already dipped below 105 per cent. The IMF’s June 2025 fifth review under the Extended Fund Facility endorsed the path. None of this changes because a growth forecast slides four-tenths of a point. It does mean the denominators underneath every ratio are smaller than January assumed. Caribbean service-exporting economies face the same calculation. The CDB’s Caribbean Economic Review and Outlook 2025-2026 projects regional growth of 1.1 per cent in 2026 excluding Guyana, with tourism and construction doing most of the pulling. If imported energy prices stay higher for longer, the pulling gets harder. Remittances cushion some households; fuel pass-through hits everyone. The fiscal anchor can hold, but the surface of the water is changing.

A cut of 0.4 percentage points does not announce itself at the fuel pump. It arrives the way gradual revisions always do, through small adjustments in shipping costs, in the price of imported inputs, in the rate at which visitors decide to book or not book. The forecast gap between January and April is not a disagreement. It is the war, arriving in the outlook.