Bauxite Industry Jamaica

On 25 September 2011, Bruce Golding announced he would not seek re-election as Jamaica Labour Party leader and would leave…

Jamaica’s second consecutive budget under IMF supervision held the fiscal line while revealing the growing social tensions that prolonged austerity…

After two consecutive years of GDP contraction, the Jamaican economy began its long-awaited turn in 2011 — delivering positive growth…

As 2010 drew to a close, Jamaica’s external accounts told a story the domestic economy could not yet match: reserves…

In a summer of careful balance sheets and persistent economic pain, Jamaica’s fiscal managers delivered results that surprised even the…

In a summer of careful balance sheets and persistent economic pain, Jamaica’s fiscal managers delivered results that surprised even the…

In a summer of careful balance sheets and persistent economic pain, Jamaica’s fiscal managers delivered results that surprised even the…

The 2010/11 budget, presented to Parliament on April 8, 2010, was not a document about ambition. It was a document about arithmetic. Every number in it had been negotiated with the IMF, checked against primary surplus targets, and reviewed for compliance with a Stand-By Arrangement that Jamaica’s creditors and multilateral partners were watching with unusual attention. The government had secured its programme. Now it had to deliver one.

When the Jamaica Debt Exchange closed at the end of January 2010, the government had expected broad participation. What it got was something closer to a national act of faith. Ninety-nine point two percent of eligible domestic bondholders had voluntarily surrendered their existing securities for new bonds with lower interest rates and longer maturities — a participation rate that would be cited internationally as one of the most successful debt exchanges in the developing world. The IMF Board’s formal approval followed twelve days later. Jamaica had, against considerable odds, bought itself a chance.

In the fourth quarter of 2009, Jamaica needed three things simultaneously: a new Bank of Jamaica governor, a deal with the IMF, and some evidence that the economy might eventually stop contracting. It got all three. The governor arrived in December, the IMF agreement was initialled days later, and the GDP figures, when finally tabulated, confirmed that 2009 had produced a 3.4 percent contraction — the worst in a generation. Whether the deal would deliver recovery was another question entirely.

By July 2009, Audley Shaw’s monthly revenue figures had become impossible to explain away. The bauxite refineries were dark. Remittances were declining for their thirteenth consecutive month. And the government that had tabled Vision 2030 just weeks earlier — a twenty-one-year plan for national transformation — was running a monthly deficit of J$2.5 billion. By the end of that summer, there was one decision left to make.

Three of Jamaica’s four alumina refineries suspended operations within months of each other. Remittances tumbled. Tourism faltered. A government carrying debt worth more than its entire national economy faced a reckoning it could no longer defer. And in Kingston offices, the people charged with imagining Jamaica’s future were putting the final touches on a plan that, if it worked, might change everything.

The fourth quarter of 2008 was Jamaica’s reckoning: tourism arrivals declined for the first time since 9/11, remittances fell, and the Golding government began formal conversations with the IMF. Barack Obama was elected President on November 4, carrying with him the hopes of a diaspora that Jamaica depended upon to survive the coming year.

Usain Bolt ran 9.69 in Beijing on August 16. Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on September 15. Jamaica lived both events in the same quarter — its greatest sporting triumph and its most dangerous economic moment arriving within twenty-nine days of each other.

Audley Shaw delivered his first budget in spring 2008 as oil raced toward $130 and US consumer confidence collapsed. Meanwhile, a 21-year-old from Trelawny ran 100 metres in 9.72 seconds in New York — handing Jamaica a story worth more in global attention than any marketing campaign the island could have bought.