Jamaica history

Jamaica’s GDP contracted by approximately 10 percent in 2020, the worst annual performance since independence. Yet the KMA residential property market closed the year with prices marginally higher than they began it, remittances set a new annual record above US$2.7 billion, and a post-election transaction surge had absorbed the inventory that lockdown had held in suspension since March.

Jamaica is a country deeply intertwined with faith, and Christianity, particularly the belief in Jesus Christ, has played a significant…

On September 3rd, 2020, Jamaicans went to the polls in an election held against the backdrop of a pandemic, conducted…

The Jamaica Labour Party’s September 3 general election victory by 49 seats to 14 — the largest parliamentary majority in post-independence history — provided the political clarity the property market had been waiting for since March. Within weeks of the result, conveyancing activity accelerated, developer pre-sales reopened, and diaspora buyers who had been holding inquiries in reserve began converting to transactions.

Unemployment falls to 7.7% — a record low in Jamaica’s modern economic history, below the double-digit rates that persisted through…

The second quarter of 2020 will enter Jamaica’s economic records as the quarter of the near-complete disappearance of tourism —…

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.

Hotel occupancy collapsed to near zero by April 2020. Diaspora buyers drove an unexpected residential property surge. Remote work enabled…

The first quarter of 2020 will be remembered in Jamaica as the moment when the most sustained period of economic…

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.

In 1999, Jamaica confronted the compound weight of debt, dispossession, and civic fury. Gas riots killed nine, FINSAC’s aftermath stripped thousands of homes, and 62 per cent of the national budget vanished into debt service. Yet from the burning streets emerged Jamaicans for Justice, a diaspora lifeline of USD 600 million in remittances, and the first crack in a telecoms monopoly that had held the island hostage. Edition 2 of Marcus Garvey & The Making of Modern Jamaica.

As Jamaica closes out 2019, the nation stands at a milestone that would have seemed improbable a decade ago: the…

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.

The third quarter of 2019 delivered a familiar Caribbean combination: a strong summer tourism season and a hurricane that tested…

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.