PIOJ

The Planning Institute of Jamaica is the government agency responsible for economic and social planning, publishing growth estimates, the Economic and Social Survey Jamaica and oversight of Vision 2030. Jamaica Homes News reports on PIOJ data and forecasts, including construction and real estate activity, and what they reveal about the economy and housing.

Analysis

The Budget That Had to Work: Jamaica’s First IMF-Disciplined Spending Plan and the Politics of Adjustment

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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.

Analysis

When Jamaica’s Creditors Said Yes: The Debt Exchange That Changed the Country’s Fiscal Trajectory

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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.

Analysis

Three Point Four Per Cent: The Year Jamaica’s Economy Hit Rock Bottom and Struck a Deal

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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.

Analysis

Two and a Half Billion Short: The Quarter Jamaica Decided It Needed the IMF

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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.

Analysis

A Broken Economy, an Unbroken Ambition: The Day Jamaica Committed to Vision 2030

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Standing before Parliament at the worst economic moment in a generation, Prime Minister Bruce Golding did something that surprised almost everyone who thought they understood Jamaica’s politics. He presented a plan for 2030. Not a rescue plan. Not a recovery plan. A transformational blueprint for an entirely different kind of country — one that would take twenty-one years to build, outlast at least four governments, and require a quality of national discipline that Jamaica had never previously sustained.

Analysis

When the Refineries Went Silent: How Economic Catastrophe Became Jamaica’s Crucible

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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.

Analysis

The Winter of All Winters: Jamaica’s Fourth Quarter of 2008 Brought Barack Obama’s Election, the Deepest Tourism Contraction in Five Years, and a Government Walking Reluctantly Toward the IMF as the Global Financial Crisis Made the Island’s Debt an Emergency It Could No Longer Manage Alone

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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.