A Jamaican miracle
A little over two weeks ago, on Friday, February 10, the editor of the Financial Times (FT) Alphaville blog, Robin Wigglesworth, describing Jamaica’s economic turnaround, said “This is as close to a miracle as you are ever likely to see.”
His comments were based on the press release on the IMF’s recent Article 4 report, the full report of which was released roughly a week later, immediately after our Minister of Finance tabled the first round of our budget documents, “The Estimates of Expenditure” on February 14.
The FT’s Robin Wigglesworth is no stranger to Jamaica, having visited us more than once (and subsequently) during one of Jamaica’s tougher economic periods, between the two debt exchanges of 2010 and 2013, events the international press always consider newsworthy even for a small country due to the interest of the international capital market in debt. His comment was made as a comparison with where we were a decade ago in 2013, “circling the economic drain” as he put it, before managing an “improbable” escape, which he had previously covered in a lengthy, surprisingly accurate, two-part series in 2019 just before COVID but immediately after Jamaica had left the IMF.
Of course, it was not really a miracle, but the result of a more than a decade-long consensus on the need for shared sacrifice by the main actors in our society – unions, private sector, financial sector, media and, of course, successive governments over the period – on the critical importance of balanced budgets, fiscal discipline and reducing the level of debt to one that is sustainable for a small, open, energy-dependent country that is highly vulnerable to global shocks.
Now read on...
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