Surplus and Arrears, in the Same Year

The IMF Executive Board concluded the 2026 Article IV consultation with Antigua and Barbuda on 7 May 2026. The headline reads as a textbook success. Real GDP grew 3 per cent in 2025. Inflation moderated from above 6 per cent in 2024 to 1.4 per cent in 2025. Public debt fell from 101 per cent of GDP in 2020 to an estimated 68 per cent in 2025. The 2025 primary balance is estimated at close to 5 per cent of GDP. By Caribbean standards those are strong numbers, and Antigua deserves to be read as a country that has steadied itself after a hard decade.

The same press release, on the same page, names "significant" arrears to Paris Club creditors and domestic suppliers, "elevated" gross financing needs, and a lack of a credible strategy to retire the arrears stock. Directors urged a plan to address all arrears, broaden financing options, and make space for resilience-building investments. The Board also noted that the domestic arrears figure is uncertain in size and that the authorities are still validating individual claims. That is not the language the Board uses about a country paying its bills. The primary surplus is real. The unpaid invoices are real. The size of the unpaid invoices is still being counted. All three belong on the page.

The instrument that holds the two together is the Citizenship-by-Investment programme. CIP inflows underwrote the 2025 revenue lift in Antigua, and CIP inflows are a one-period receipt from a global market the Caribbean does not control. Saint Kitts and Nevis tells the same story from the other end of the cycle. Its 2026 Article IV, also concluded by the IMF Board on 7 May 2026, reported that CBI revenue declined further in 2025, the overall fiscal deficit widened to 11.7 per cent of GDP, public debt edged up toward the 60 per cent ECCU benchmark, and government deposits fell. The Board welcomed the Sovereign Wealth and Resilience Fund Act, passed by the Saint Kitts National Assembly on 31 March 2026, which makes Saint Kitts the first Caribbean CBI country to legislate a statutory mechanism for capturing CBI inflows in a multi-purpose fund covering intergenerational savings, disaster recovery, and counter-cyclical fiscal support. The Board also called for fiscal rules anchored on the regional debt benchmark, which Saint Kitts still lacks. Same instrument. Different point in its cycle. One country looks like adjustment. The other has just built the institutional plumbing that the cycle requires, while the deficit was widening.

A primary surplus that coexists with arrears is not adjustment. A primary surplus that depends on a single revenue stream you cannot forecast is not a trend. The Caribbean has been told its fiscal story through both lenses for the last decade, often with the same number on the cover, and the regional debt-reduction trajectory shows it. The Tracker on this site separates the headline from the mechanism. Antigua’s row shows the 2025 primary balance and the arrears note in the same row. Saint Kitts’s row shows the 2025 deficit and the CBI cycle that drives it. The honest fiscal anchor is the trajectory, not the print of any one year.