United Nations Development Programme Jamaica

Jamaica has made notable progress in poverty reduction and is ranked as a middle-income country, even as the other countries served by the UNDP Jamaica Multi-Country Office generally have far higher per-capita incomes. Yet more than 1 in 6 Jamaicans – overwhelmingly rural dwellers, and often women – remains poor.

At the same time, the Government of Jamaica is coping with a longstanding fiscal crisis resulting from massive debt incurred during the 1990s following a bailout of the collapsing financial sector. As further borrowing goes on, this debt already stands at roughly 150 percent of Gross Domestic Product. Debt service payments have since 1999 consumed nearly 100 percent of core Government budget revenues (taxes, grants, import duties, proceeds from selling State assets) and more than three-fifths of total expenditures, with clear implications for national development.

UNDP is developing a set of initiatives to address poverty and development by enabling the Government to reduce its high debt service payments and thus open up the “fiscal space” for investments in social sectors such as health and education, infrastructure, and development programmes that can directly improve the lives of the poor. In other words, we work to give Jamaica breathing room so that it can get out of fiscal crisis-management mode.

Our Initiatives to Support Poverty Reduction

• In partnership with the World Bank, we are supporting the Government of Jamaica to analyze various scenarios for debt servicing and their impact on the economy. We also will support the Government to examine whether its debt service can be lowered through negotiations with its creditors, most of whom are domestic financial institutions. This can encourage a vote of confidence in the central market and provide the breathing room that Jamaica needs.
• We will assist in a review of public expenditures, particularly in health and education, to identify both achievements and remaining gaps. This analysis will help to better inform national budget allocations and decision making, so that resources can be shifted to where needs are most acute.
• By supporting vulnerability and poverty mapping at community level, we will be able to assist in creation of a socioeconomic database that covers both income and non-income aspects of poverty, such as employment, social services, environment, gender, and housing. This will result in a deeper understanding of human vulnerability and deprivation for development planning and will provide new insights into trends into the nature of poverty in the country. It also can help to track Jamaica’s further progress toward the global Millennium Development Goals .
• We will support the increased effectiveness of certain means of revenue collection by the Government, such as management of the Port of Kingston.