Reduction of Ministry of Defence Presence

After thorough analysis, the Chief Minister revealed that two sectors which were central to Gibraltar’s economy were rapidly shrinking. The first was the Government Sector itself and the second being the MOD.

“Two elements in the National Income Accounts which are most easy to predict and most reliable, have a decreasing importance in the total and the private sector accounts.”

In fact, the loss of MOD business represented the loss of Gibraltar’s largest export industry.

“We have never really consciously understood, as a people, that we were exporting the product of our labours to the UK. But of course, instead of making things and shipping them to the UK, the UK was sending people to Gibraltar, the armed forces, who were buying our labour output from us. So they were our export industry and that is effectively what we have been losing for three years now and we are going to be losing even more dramatically for the next three years.”

In 1992 the Chief Minister announced the creation of the ‘Gibraltar European Investment Trust’ in order to facilitate investment abroad and attract new business to Gibraltar.