NewsWhore
03-09-2009, 05:30 PM
Former Central Bank governor Bernardo Vega is wary of the government's announcements of new large-scale public works projects. Vega said that instead the government should embark on projects that use a large workforce. He said these so-called mega-projects usually use imported heavy machinery, as reported in El Caribe. He said that what the government should be doing is investing in building homes, rural roads and repairing irrigation canals. The former ambassador in Washington, D.C. said the Dominican government should take pointers from the Costa Rican government and its global crisis programs. When interviewed by Orlando Jorge Mera on his weekly program Lideres, he criticized the fact that the government is becoming larger with the purchase of the Shell-held stock in the Dominican Petroleum Refinery, the construction of the second line of the metro and a train to Santiago and the power distribution companies. Vega said that this just adds to government spending, because it is all subsidized. "This is not the time to make the government bigger," he said. Furthermore, he said that the government's monetary policy is not coherent with its fiscal policy. He said that regardless of a country's size, increasing taxes is not prudent in recessionary times like these. Vega does not expect the recession to clear until 2011.
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