In the summer of 2019, Jamaica’s hotels were full, its beaches were busy, and its tourism industry was delivering what would prove…

Jamaica’s GDP contracted by an estimated 10 percent or more in the second quarter of 2020 as the tourism sector recorded effectively zero stopover arrivals for the first time in the modern statistical record. The property market, frozen in Q1, has not recovered — but neither has it collapsed in the manner feared, sustained by a surge in diaspora remittances and a stubborn refusal among vendors to accept distressed prices.

We are writing this account of Jamaica’s second quarter of 2019 in April 2020, sitting in the ruins of everything that quarter…

Jamaica recorded its first confirmed case of COVID-19 on March 10, 2020 — one day before the World Health Organisation declared a global pandemic. Within a fortnight, borders were closed, the tourism sector had effectively halted, and a property market that had been operating at the highest level of activity in over a decade faced questions it had no framework to answer.

The conventional wisdom in Caribbean political economy has long held that fiscal frameworks unravel when elections approach: the primary surplus shrinks, capital…

With GDP growth positive for an eighth consecutive year, tourism arrivals surpassing 4.5 million, and property values up across every major residential segment, Jamaica ends 2019 in a position no economist dared predict when the debt crisis peaked in 2013. The question entering 2020 is not whether the run can continue — but how much of the gain has become permanent.

There is a number that Jamaican finance ministers had been pursuing through five years of primary surpluses and painful fiscal consolidation, and…

The Portland Eastern by-election of July 2019 returned an additional JLP seat, expanding Holness’s majority to two. The market, which had been carrying a measure of political anxiety since 2016, responded to the reduced constitutional uncertainty with a notable Q3 volume uplift.

The summer of 2018 arrived in Jamaica with a quality that was new — not just the warmth and the visitors and…

No hurricanes, no elections, no IMF drama. Jamaica’s property market in the second quarter of 2019 was defined by what did not happen as much as by what did. The expansion continued, quietly and at pace.