What this country needs right now is the new runway being opened and receiving flights from Europe. Both the Euro and Sterling are much stronger against the US$ than they used to be, and with a sensible way to get here we should see a big influx of relatively wealthy Europeans, just in time to counter the fall off in American spending.

I see almost no advantage to Belize to de-pegging the dollah from the dollar.

Belize has a large trade annual trade deficit (it imports much more than it exports) and a large external debt. Its economy is tiny, and it has few exportable natural resources except a little bit of oil.

Devaluations (in effect that's what depegging likely would mean) generally only benefit countries that have the potential to be big exporters.

Large purchases such as real estate and most hotel rates are already denominated in U.S. dollars.

The impact of a depegging likely would be a major increase in inflation due to the immediately higher cost of importing food and most consumer items. As mentioned, this would cause a lot of political problems in Belize.

This all assumes that the Belize dollar would fall in value against harder currencies such as the U.S. dollar and against regional currrencies such as the Mexican peso.

There's a small chance that it wouldn't -- for example the U.S. dollar is so weak now that even the Costa Rican colon has recently risen against it, as have almost all South American currencies except those pegged to the dollar.

But, barring a dramatic change in Belize's economic fortunes, that's unlikely to happen. And if it did, the impact on U.S. tourism to Belize of course would be negative. It would raise the cost of visiting Belize for U.S. visitors, who currently make up about 70% of its tourism source market.

So, it is a lose-lose situation to depeg the Belize dollar.

As noted, a better option probably would be to do what Ecuador and El Salvador and many small Caribbean nations have done, which is to replace the local currency with the U.S. dollar. That would save Belize a lot in the high cost of its Central Bank offices and bureaucracy.

--Lan Sluder

For the record, I was not advocating the switch... just pointing out that it wouldn't necessarily affect property values as it was suggested.

The Central Bank may have a problem with Belize land and products being valued in a foreign currency.

It already is.

Agreed.