Bartlett proposes tourism bank

Jamaica’s tourism minister, Edmund Bartlett, is pushing for a Caribbean Tourism Bank to finance hotels, workers, and recovery projects across the region. (caribbeannationalweekly.com) Bartlett made the pitch in Washington after meetings with the Inter-American Development Bank’s board, and he asked the bank to help champion a regional lender built for tourism. Caribbean Media Corporation reports he spoke at a luncheon held in his honor earlier that week. (thestkittsnevisobserver.com) He said the Caribbean has operated for years without an investment framework tailored to tourism, even though tourism is one of the region’s main economic engines. His proposal called for financial products designed around the sector’s actual risks, including climate shocks and uneven cash flow. (caribbeannationalweekly.com) The pitch lands as regional lenders and governments keep warning that Caribbean growth still leans heavily on tourism while public debt and disaster risk stay high. The World Bank says natural disasters can erase an entire year’s economic output in the Caribbean, and the Inter-American Development Bank said this month that tourism has been one of the anchors of regional growth. (worldbank.org) (iadb.org) Tourism already accounts for a large share of Caribbean jobs and output, which is why Bartlett is arguing it should be financed more like infrastructure than a seasonal business. A World Bank analysis published in June 2025, citing World Travel and Tourism Council data, said tourism contributed an average 11.4 percent of Caribbean output in 2023 and supported more than 2.75 million jobs, or 15.1 percent of total employment. (worldbank.org) Bartlett has been making a broader case that tourism policy should focus on resilience, not just visitor counts. In June 2025, he used a Caribbean Tourism Organization event to call for a regional resilience fund, and Jamaica’s tourism ministry has repeatedly framed storms and other shocks as financing problems as much as marketing problems. (caribbeannationalweekly.com) (mot.gov.jm) The Inter-American Development Bank has made similar arguments about the region’s vulnerability, especially for small island states that face climate change, economic instability, and crime at the same time. In a recent bank commentary on tourism resilience in the Caribbean, its authors said those overlapping pressures have made “resiliency” a central issue for the sector. (iadb.org) Bartlett’s Washington trip also produced a broader pledge to deepen Jamaica’s collaboration with the Inter-American Development Bank. That leaves the tourism bank idea, for now, as a political proposal looking for an institutional sponsor, a capital structure, and buy-in from other Caribbean governments. (our.today)