Cross-party support as well as the move to create a council to monitor compliance and increase transparency in fiscal matters are among the key drivers that influenced an upgrade in Jamaica’s economic performance announced by international ratings agency Fitch yesterday.
In what is the island’s highest rating in over 1o years, Fitch upgraded Jamaica’s long-term foreign and local currency issuer default ratings to ‘B+’ from ‘B’, and revised the economic outlook from ‘positive’ to ‘stable’. The agency also upgraded the country’s ceiling to ‘BB-‘ from ‘B’.
Reacting to the development, Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica President Howard Mitchell told the Jamaica Observer last night that the lobby group is “encouraged and heartened” by the upgrade and said that it is a further sign that the country’s fiscal reform programme is working.
“We feel that while we keep this momentum going, in order to keep growth and development, we need to pay greater attention — as a country, not just the Government — now to human capital development and social structural reforms that are needed to take us into the fourth Industrial Revolution, and allow us to cope with the technological changes that are happening globally,” he said.
“We think we have set an excellent platform, and we congratulate the successive administrations for their success in fiscal reform, but we think it’s time that we now deal with social reforms,” Mitchell added.
In explaining the reasons behind the upgrades, Fitch — which ranks with Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s as the “big three” credit agencies — noted that there is “cross-party support for the country’s economic reforms that began with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) six years ago”.
Fitch said it assumed that the co-operation will be maintained when the current stand-by arrangement with the fund ends in November this year.
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