Barbados 2005

Yearbook 2005

Barbados. As part of its quest to make Barbados a republic, Prime Minister Owen Arthur announced in February that a referendum was planned on the issue before the end of the year. However, by the end of the year, no date for the referendum had been set. In the present proposal for a transition to a republic, a president is to assume the ceremonial duties of the current Governor-General while the government retains executive power. According to countryaah, Bridgetown is the capital and one of the major cities within the country of Barbados. Barbados became independent from the colonial power of Britain in 1966, but has retained the British monarch as head of state. This is represented on the island by a general governor.

• Also see abbreviationfinder.org for how the acronym BB stands for the country of Barbados and other meanings of this two-letter abbreviation.

Economy

Barbados Island, the easternmost of the Lesser Antilles, in the Caribbean Sea; since 1966 it has been an independent state within the Commonwealth. The climate is not very hot, relative to latitude, and the rains are not excessive (around 1500 mm per year). The territory, partly flat and partly hilly (336 m), is mostly made up of madreporic limestones. The capital, a supply port for ocean navigation and export of the main products, remains a small town of modest demographic size. The dense population is made up of more than 87.1% of blacks and the rest of mestizos (6%) and whites (5.5%). The Anglican religion is followed by a large community of Protestants, the smaller the Catholic presence.

The economy, once based exclusively on the production of sugar cane, is mainly based on service activities, which contribute almost four fifths to the formation of the GDP and employ 79.4% of the active population (2004). In particular, as in all Caribbean countries, during the 1990s tourism, largely made up of Americans and English (552,000 admissions in 2004), underwent a notable development. Since the 1980s, financial activity has established itself, practiced in an offshore regime, a sector that the government tends to encourage through the granting of tax benefits. Of some importance the fishing and manufacturing industry (electronic components and the sugar sector). The island is among the countries in the area with the highest per capita income.

Discovered in the early 16th century. by the Spaniards, who caused the total disappearance of the indigenous population, Barbados was occupied in the 17th century. from Great Britain. It remained a colony until 1966, when, after the gradual introduction of political reforms in the 1950s, it gained independence within the Commonwealth. From the beginning the political system di Barbados was based on the alternation in government between the Barbados Labor Party (BLP) and the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), the former more oriented towards a policy of alignment with the United States, the latter tending instead to a foreign policy based on greater autonomy. In power continuously since 1993, the BLP was defeated by the DLP in the 2008 elections, which was also established in the 2013 elections, in which however it lost its solid majority in Parliament; the political elections held in May 2018 sanctioned the clear defeat of the DLP, which after a decade in government obtained only 22.6% of the votes, losing all representation in Parliament, while the BLP won 74.5% of the votes. suffrages, and its leader M. Mottley, the first woman in the history of the country, she took over from the outgoing premier F. Stuart. In September 2020, the Antillean state announced its intention to break the formal bond that constitutionally binds it to the English monarchy, becoming a Republic by November 2021.

In March, the country’s only prison was burned and severely vandalized during a prison riot. The prison then had to be evacuated.