Owen Arthur
Owen Arthur was prime minister of Barbados from 1994 to 2008, fourteen years, the longest of the island's. He was the economist from St Peter who took the Barbados Labour Party in 1993 with nobody else wanting it and won three elections, the last, in 2003, with twenty-three seats of thirty. His years were the good ones. There were the growth of four per cent for a decade, the unemployment down from twenty-five per cent to seven, and the tourism and the offshore sector at their height. There were the free tertiary education, the housing, the highway, the cricket world cup of 2007 for which Kensington Oval was rebuilt, and the island at the top of the developing world's human development index. He was the Caribbean's economist as well as its own. He was the man who drove the Caricom single market and economy, signed at Bridgetown in 2006 with him as its lead head. There was the Caribbean Court of Justice, which Barbados joined at its founding in 2005 while most of the region would not, and the argument against the American shipping of its offshore blacklists at the OECD, which he fought from 2000. The republic was the thing he wanted and did not do. He promised the referendum in 2005, set it for 2008, and lost the election of January 2008 to Thompson by twenty seats to ten before it was held. The queen's removal waited for Mottley thirteen years. He was born in St Peter, the son of a plantation worker. He studied at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill and Mona. He was an economist for the Jamaican government and the Bauxite Institute in the 1970s. He came home in 1981, sat in the Senate, and entered the House in 1984 for St Peter. He was the party's shadow finance man through the Sandiford years. He led the opposition again from 2010 to 2013, lost the election of 2013 by one seat. He gave the leadership to Mottley, whom he had not wanted. He quit the party in 2014 and sat as an independent. He died in July 2020 of a heart condition at seventy. He was given a state funeral by the woman he had opposed, in the republic she made a year later.
- Lived: 1949 CE – 2020 CE
- Nationality: Barbadian
- Roles: prime minister, economist, politician
