November 11th is almost here again and our elected and appointed Government leaders are about to make their annual speeches, promising cooperation and working together to improve the lives of our combined citizens.
So how about this idea as a topic: Dollarize the entire island. I am not an economist, so this may be too simplistic, but in my opinion as long as the Euro earning residents of the French side (including French welfare recipients) have the option to enjoy more buying power on the Dutch side, they will do most, if not all of their shopping on the South side of the open border notwithstanding the fact that this causes more and more of their own businesses to bite the dust, subsequently causing more people to become jobless and to rely on their cash strapped government to survive. Of course chances of getting France to acknowledge that St. Martin is unique and the only territory in its entire Republic that consists of only 1/2 an island with an open border to another country, are remote, slim and probably almost impossible. But I venture to bet that as long as on the Dutch side we have the guilder that is pegged to the US Dollar and on the French side they have the (consistently stronger) Euro, French St. Martin will continue to deteriorate. Marigot is slowly becoming a ghost town. Mind you, I fully realize that establishments on the Dutch side (including the NAPA stores) stand to lose business should this happen (so in the eyes of my fellow Dutch side business colleagues this is probably a bad idea), but if we don’t "pay now", will we not "pay later"? I wonder if this is food for thought?
MJF