The first quarter of 2023 delivered something that Jamaica’s tourism industry had been chasing for four years: a definitive confirmation that the…

Jamaica closes 2023 as a year of transition rather than transformation: the BOJ’s easing cycle has begun, the property market has responded with improved volumes and the first price upticks since the 2021 peak, and the tourism sector has again delivered above expectations. The question entering 2024 is not whether recovery is underway — it is — but at what pace and in whose favour it will run.

When Jamaica closed the books on 2022, the numbers told a story that few had believed possible when the year had opened…

The Bank of Jamaica delivered the rate cut that the property market had been waiting for since early 2023, initiating what observers expect to be a multi-quarter easing cycle. The response was immediate and visible: buyer inquiries accelerated, pre-qualification requests increased at commercial banks, and the sentiment that had been suppressed by two years of monetary tightening began to shift toward re-engagement.

By the summer of 2022, Jamaica was running two parallel economic narratives simultaneously. In the hotel lobbies of Montego Bay and Ocho…

The 1980s subjected Jamaica to an extraordinary sequence of shocks: Cold War realignment, IMF austerity, currency collapse, and the most destructive hurricane in the island’s recorded history. This edition of The Jamaica Decades Project examines how those forces remade the housing market, gutted public services, rewired construction standards, and drove a quarter-million Jamaicans abroad.

Jamaica’s property market at the midpoint of 2023 presents the portrait of a sector that has settled into a high-price, moderate-volume equilibrium that serves neither the buyer seeking value nor the vendor seeking speed. Prices remain near their 2021 peak levels, transaction volumes are below their 2021 peak but stable, and a BOJ that has not yet cut rates keeps the qualifying pool for new buyers narrower than the latent demand would suggest.

Through April, May and June of 2022, Jamaica found itself doing something that economists rarely see: growing at a healthy clip while…

Jamaica’s agreement with the IMF on a Resilience and Sustainability Facility arrangement in early 2023, providing access to approximately US$764 million in climate-linked financing, has reinforced the sovereign credibility framework that has underwritten property market confidence since 2013. But credibility, however robust, cannot on its own solve the affordability crisis that elevated prices and sustained high borrowing costs have created in the KMA’s entry-level residential segment.

Jamaica entered 2022 on the crest of its strongest winter tourist wave since before the pandemic — hotels full, flights packed, and…