Taino Heritage

So I've actually been thinking about my own reaction to the news of the Jamaican government reentering a borrowing relationship with IMF and just haven't had the time to put it together. Then I read this Gleaner Op-Ed piece by Joseph Matalon saying pretty much most of what I wanted to say... and saying it much better than I probably could.

Its deserving of extensive quotion:

It has become trite commentary to say that Jamaica's economy is at a crossroads. The truth is that we have passed through a series of crossroads along the road to our current circumstances, each of which has presented certain choices in terms of policy direction; choices that we, as a people, have made.

We made a choice to perpetuate the underlying disequilibrium in our current account balances, to the extent that building foreign-exchange earnings and promoting export led growth became unfashionable notions; facilitated by the growth in remittances and foreign-direct investment

that served only to mask our chronic underlying underperformance;

During the unprecedented international credit boom, in which the current global financial crisis has its roots, we made the choice to avoid those hard policy decisions necessary to curb our chronic fiscal deficits, facilitated by easy access to the international capital markets;

We made the choice to eschew comprehensive tax reform in favour of ad-hoc policy tinkering and uneven enforcement practices;

We have repeatedly made the choice to prefer cheap, very often heavily subsidised, imported food stuffs to the more difficult course of preserving and building upon our agricultural and manufacturing bases by pursuing economic policies designed to enhance the productivity and competitiveness of our local productive sectors.

The consequences of these choices, exacerbated by the effects of the current global economic downturn, now stand in stark relief for us all to see. But, make no mistake; long before the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, the cumulative effect of these past policy choices have been propelling us inexorably towards our very own home-grown economic crisis.

If you want to read any of these articles I've highlighted about the IMF and Jamaica, let this be the one.