groups of islands and they are both service industry economies with a heavy concentration on tourism and international company business. There the similarity ends because Bermuda has a highly successful economy but the Bahamas does not. Indeed, some of Bermuda's success is due to gross mismanagement of the international company business in the Bahamas which caused companies to move to Bermuda.

While Bermuda is in good economic shape and has survived well despite having absolutely no control over the worst recession since the Second World War, the Bahamas is deeply in debt and the economy of the Bahamas has been left in tatters by the PLP government of Sir Lynden Pindling.

Sir Lynden, the former Prime Minister of the Bahamas who is praised by the leaders of Bermuda's Progressive Labour Party and who was invited here to help open the refurbished Alaska Hall headquarters, has left his country in economic disarray. The Bahamas is in such a precarious financial situation that there is a struggle going on to avoid the devaluation of the Bahamian dollar which, like Bermuda's dollar, equals a US dollar.

The Prime Minister of the Bahamas has said that the Bahamian PLP which was voted out of office a year ago has left behind almost $100 million in unpaid bills including a $54-million overdraft at the Royal Bank of Canada which eats up interest payments of $400,000 per quarter which the Bahamas cannot pay.

These figures do not include what Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham called "millions and millions and millions'' of borrowed dollars which are being paid back over time.

Prime Minister Ingraham said that, as a result of PLP spending, his government was having to make "painful decisions on behalf of and for the benefit of all Bahamians, ourselves, our children and our grandchildren''.

The Minister of State in Finance, William Allen, recently told the Bahamian Senate that domestic credit doubled from $1 billion dollars at the end of 1986 to $2 billion at the end of 1992 with the PLP government leading an increase in credit which sent the Bahamas economy "spinning towards disaster''. Mr.

Allen said that the PLP's action reduced government revenue, increased government borrowing and squeezed the more efficient private sector out of the credit market.

He said that the PLP allowed credit to grow at a rate of 12 percent each year while the country's economy was at a standstill. The Minister of State pointed out to the Bahamas Senate the terrible consequences for the poor of the Bahamas and for everyone else in the Bahamas when credit was allowed by the PLP to increase by 12 percent per year at a time when the economy was stagnant.

At the end of 1986 the banking system's net credit to the Bahamas government was $114 million and by the end of 1992 it had grown to $358 million. That was a 36-percent increase each year for six years. If you add public corporation borrowing to the Bahamas government borrowing in the six-year period, the increase was $135 million to $472 million or 42 percent every year for six years.

Prime Minister Ingraham recently told the Bahamas Parliament that his government is fighting to "restore our country to good financial health, to remove it from the valley of death to which it has been plunged by the PLP''.