Jamaica must sustain reform, central bank governor says

Jamaica has achieved significant economic progress over the last three years but needs to sustain reform efforts for much longer, the governor of the Bank of Jamaica told an International Monetary Fund (IMF) seminar in Peru today (October 7). Reform efforts since 2012 had led to "significant gains", Brian Wynter said, adding they needed to be sustained for "five times longer".

Economic growth had "passed Jamaica by" for an extended period, Wynter said, before the country suffered a "massive hit" in the global financial crisis. Jamaica's circumstances after the crisis were "extremely dire", he said, with serious consequences for human capital. The country was "vulnerable" to external shocks, Wynter said.

Jamaica had benefitted from "tremendous help" from the IMF and other institutions, the governor said, during the seminar on capacity development in the Caribbean and Latin America, held at the IMF's annual meeting. The IMF's Caribbean technical assistance centre (Cartac) had been especially important for Jamaican reform, Wynter added. Cartac is one of eight IMF regional technical assistance centres and started operations in November 2001.

Acknowledging he was currently chair of Cartac's steering committee, Wynter said he nonetheless wanted to make a "strong pitch" for increasing the centre's role. The importance of Cartac's role in "sponsoring often obscure technical groups" was "something I can't over-emphasise", Wynter said. Cartac also needed to look at measures such as offering internships to younger graduates and increasing its provision of peer-to-peer training, he said.

Caribbean and Latin American economies faced a chronic "brain drain" problem, several panellists agreed. A country like Jamaica could best solve this by improving capacity, Wynter said, as institutional development would give the best-qualified better incentives to stay. People did not "just decide to leave their homes", he said, but were usually "pushed out in some way".

Responding to a question on climate change from the seminar's chairman, Ian Goldin of Oxford University's economics department, Wynter said it was important that "new priorities" did not distract Jamaica from what he called "basics" like fiscal reform and inflation targeting.