The Election They Called Early: How Jamaica’s Fourth Year of Growth Collided with the Politics of an Unexpected Vote

Jamaica closed 2015 with GDP growth confirmed at approximately 0.9 per cent — the third consecutive year of expansion since the nadir of 2013 — and its IMF programme on track for a clean fourth-quarter review. Then, in November, Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller did something few had anticipated: she called an election for February 25, 2016, fourteen months before the constitutional deadline, gambling that a recovering economy would deliver a third consecutive mandate for the People’s National Party.

• Jamaica’s GDP growth for 2015 confirmed at approximately 0.9%, the third consecutive year of positive expansion
• IMF EFF quarterly review completed without waiver, maintaining an unbroken compliance record across all twelve quarters
• Prime Minister Simpson Miller called a snap election for February 25, 2016, catching the opposition off balance
• Public debt fell to approximately 124% of GDP, down from a peak exceeding 143% in 2012
• The winter tourism season opened strongly, with advance bookings for the new year pointing to continued record arrivals
• Energy sector reform advanced, with the LNG conversion of the Old Harbour Bay power plant nearing operational status

The announcement came on a Tuesday in November, and it caught even seasoned political observers off guard. Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, addressing the nation from Jamaica House, declared that she was dissolving parliament and calling an election for February 25, 2016 — more than a year before the constitutional deadline. The decision was both politically bold and economically revealing. A government does not call an early election unless it believes the conditions are as favourable as they are likely to get. And in late 2015, the economic conditions were, by the standards of the preceding decade, genuinely favourable.

The Planning Institute of Jamaica confirmed that GDP growth for calendar year 2015 would come in at approximately 0.9 per cent — the third consecutive year of positive growth since the deep contraction that had bottomed in 2013. The number was unspectacular in absolute terms. Jamaica’s neighbours in the Caribbean Community were posting faster growth rates, and the island’s structural challenges — high debt, low productivity, persistent informality in the labour market — had not been resolved. But three consecutive years of expansion, after the worst prolonged economic contraction in living memory, represented a turning point that the governing party was entitled to claim.

The fiscal record was similarly solid. The International Monetary Fund completed its fifth and sixth reviews of the Extended Fund Facility during the latter half of 2015, finding that all quantitative performance criteria had been met and that structural benchmarks were on track. Jamaica’s public debt had, by the end of 2015, fallen to approximately 124 per cent of GDP — down from the peak of over 143 per cent recorded in 2012 and well on its way toward the programme’s medium-term target of below 100 per cent. The Bank of Jamaica continued its monetary easing, reducing the policy rate to levels not seen since before the global financial crisis, as controlled inflation — running at around 3 to 4 per cent — gave the central bank room to support activity without sacrificing exchange rate stability.

The tourism sector closed 2015 in a position of considerable strength. The Jamaica Tourist Board reported that stop-over arrivals for the full year exceeded 2.1 million, a record for the fourth consecutive year, and that advance bookings for the winter 2015-16 high season were pointing to continued growth. The north coast resort corridor, from Negril through Montego Bay to Ocho Rios, was operating at high occupancy, and new hotel capacity commissioned in Trelawny and Westmoreland was absorbing demand that would previously have been lost to competing Caribbean destinations. The tourism dividend — in the form of employment, foreign exchange, and tax revenue — was now a structural element of Jamaica’s fiscal arithmetic, not a cyclical windfall.

The energy sector was also in the midst of a transformation that would, in time, alter the island’s cost structure. Jamaica’s historically high electricity prices — a consequence of near-total dependence on imported petroleum — had been a persistent drag on industrial competitiveness and household budgets. The liquefied natural gas conversion programme, under which the Old Harbour Bay power generation facility was being retooled to burn cheaper LNG rather than fuel oil, was nearing operational readiness by the end of 2015. The Ministry of Finance projected that the transition would produce material reductions in electricity costs for industrial consumers, with downstream effects on manufacturing competitiveness and household disposable income.

Into this environment of cautious but genuine economic progress, the snap election announcement injected a new variable. The Jamaica Labour Party, led by Andrew Holness, had not expected to be fighting a campaign before late 2016 at the earliest. The early call forced an acceleration of campaign preparation and platform development, and it shifted the political conversation from the JLP’s preferred framing — the unequal distribution of the recovery’s benefits — toward the PNP’s stronger ground: macroeconomic stability and programme completion. Holness moved quickly, committing the JLP to maintaining the IMF programme if elected and focusing his message on promises of tax relief and social investment funded within the existing fiscal framework. The contest, unusually, would be fought largely on economic management rather than on the broader social and governance questions that had defined previous Jamaican elections.

The electorate, for its part, was navigating a complicated calculation. The economy was improving, but the improvement had not been evenly felt. Public sector workers whose wages had been frozen for years under the National Debt Exchange and its successor agreements were aware that their real incomes had declined. Communities dependent on government capital expenditure — which had been compressed to maintain the primary surplus — had seen roads deteriorate, schools under-resourced, and hospitals stretched. The macroeconomic recovery and the lived experience of much of the population remained, as they had throughout the programme period, in uncomfortable tension.

What This Means

The decision to call an early election was, in its way, an economic indicator as revealing as any published by the Statistical Institute of Jamaica. Governments that believe conditions are deteriorating do not go to the polls early; they wait, hoping for improvement. The PNP’s calculation was that three years of growth, a falling debt ratio, and an unbroken IMF record were assets that would not improve materially before the constitutional deadline. The early call also served to lock in the programme’s progress as a PNP achievement, insulating that record against the risk that the final months of the term might produce a complication — a storm, a global shock, a fiscal slippage — that would cloud the narrative. The economic management of 2012 to 2015 was, on the available evidence, a genuine accomplishment. Whether it would prove sufficient to win an election was the question Jamaica would answer in February.

The Road Ahead

The election campaign opening in late 2015 takes place against the backdrop of an economy that has demonstrably stabilised, but not yet transformed. Debt at 124 per cent of GDP remains among the highest in the world; growth at 0.9 per cent remains below what the island needs to absorb its labour force and reduce poverty at scale. Whoever wins on February 25 will inherit an IMF programme with more than a year remaining, a fiscal framework that has proven its resilience, and an economy that is growing — slowly — in the right direction. The incoming government will face the same fundamental challenge as the outgoing one: how to maintain the fiscal discipline that has underpinned the recovery while beginning to address the social and infrastructure deficits that four years of tight budgets have deepened. There is no easy answer. But at least, for the first time in many years, the question is being asked from a position of economic stability rather than crisis.

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