Executive Director of the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CaPRI), Dr Damien King, says that the improved fiscal management being exercised by the government has increased tax revenue by some $100 billion.
“The ability to use resources to provide the services which government is supposed to (provide) is that better fiscal management increases compliance, and increases the amount of tax revenue. Tax revenue is gone up by over $100 billion, and this is on inflation adjusted turf,” Dr King noted.
“Thus is in purchasing power terms: tax revenues have been rising impressively,” he told CaPRI’s recent Annual Budget Review and Public Forum at The Knutsford Court Hotel in New Kingston.
“In the context of a balanced budget, this is a responsible budget,” Dr King also noted.
He pointed out that the government by “steadily reducing” debt from 150 per cent to less than 100 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), suggests that it resulted from the discovery of the importance of and the capacity for fiscal management.
“Expressed as a percentage of GDP, which used to be nearly 150 per cent, that is one and a half times the value of our total annual production. It has steadily declined to the point where, at the end of this fiscal year (2018/19) the debt is now, for the first time, less than 100 per cent of GDP and programmed to continue going down,” he noted.
“It is hard not to overemphasise the scale of this achievement,” said King, who is also the head of Department of Economics at the Mona campus of The University of the West Indies.
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