Jamaica’s IMF Success Story (Catherine Osborn, Aug. 30th, 2024, Foreign Policy)
For the IMF, Jamaica is a success story—a country that carried out strict pro-market reforms and saw key social indicators improve along the way.
The IMF programs that led to Jamaica’s turnaround date back to 2013; continued buy-in from successive governments helped make them effective. Clarke has been the IMF’s main counterpart in Jamaica since 2016. He “stewarded his country’s economy to a stronger and more sustainable position,” Georgieva said on Monday.
Jamaica’s openness to reform came after a moment that Clarke has described as “rock bottom.” In 2012, the country’s national debt was ballooning as the government struggled to get a bailout. Jamaican economists and officials wracked their brains for possible ways to turn the country around.
They even called in Donald Harris, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’s Jamaican father, an economics professor emeritus of Stanford University, for policy planning help. He recommended steps that included instituting a corporate land registry and reducing taxes on certain businesses, according to the Washington Post. […]
Jamaica agreed to strict targets to reduce its deficit—and it stuck with them. In an unusual step, the country established a committee to monitor and report regularly on its economic performance that included representatives from private businesses and civil society.
That committee “reports publicly to the people, literally on the street corner, [at] the rum shop, on a quarterly basis; also on social media,” economist Marla Dukharan told The LatinNews Podcast. “Nobody else in the Caribbean holds itself to account publicly for what it says it’s going to do.”
In addition to reducing its national debt, Jamaica also gave its central bank more independence, overhauled its pension system, and privatized several government agencies, among other changes.