As the country heads into an election campaign, questions are again being asked about the sustainability of Jamaica's debt, comparing our situation to that of Greece, and the performance of the Government, particularly with respect to our agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and overall macroeconomic stability.

There are, certainly, similarities with Greece. When former Prime Minister George Papandreou came to power in 2009, he discovered that Greece's true fiscal deficit was almost four times higher than what the outgoing Government had projected. When former Prime Minister Bruce Golding came to power in September 2007, he discovered, even before taking office, that the true fiscal deficit was almost double the 4.5 per cent projected by the previous administration, as a result of some standard recurrent expenditures such as part of the wage bill and programme expenditure being unaccountably left out of the budget.

He would also have faced an official debt of $970 billion up to July of that year, which would neither have included the yet unaccounted for fiscal overrun of about $15 billion, nor the losses of public bodies such as the Sugar Corporation of Jamaica, Air Jamaica, and the Jamaica Urban Transit Company, the combination of which would have meant that the true debt was at or very close to one trillion Jamaican dollars. In any case, as former minister of finance Dr Omar Davies correctly used to remind us, it is not the nominal but relative figure, debt to GDP, that counts.

According to that year's Government of Jamaica debt management strategy, at the end of March 2007, total public debt stood at $923 billion, or 130 per cent of GDP, exactly the same as it is now. This ratio is, in any case, slightly understated using the true higher debt figure. Moreover, although it is true that Jamaica's nominal debt has now risen to about $1.6 trillion, or an increase of about 60 per cent, this is at the lower end of some of the increases in sovereign debt that we have seen in other countries during the financial crisis.

No longer does the cost of Jamaica's own home-grown financial crisis, at around 40 per cent of GDP, put us amongst the medal winners in terms of the most costly financial crises.

More important than the actual debt to GDP number is our ability to service the debt. Interest payments as a percentage of government revenue, at about 40 per cent, are currently at the lower end of a range that has approached 70 per cent in both the crisis years of 2003 and 2009. Interest rates are the lowest in decades, the dollar has been stable for over a year, and net international (particularly gross international) reserves are healthy.

The difficult remaining reforms — tax, public sector, and pension — required as part of our IMF agreement, reflect problems that, like the debt, have been decades in the making, and in all cases should have been addressed long ago. These will indeed require tough decisions, reflecting either a societal consensus, or a strong mandate.

Nevertheless, unlike Greece, Jamaica runs a substantial primary surplus before interest costs, has the ability to print its own currency, with a well-regulated financial sector, and a current account deficit that is a fraction of the nearly 20 per cent of GDP reached in 2008. The main risk is another major external economic shock, or politically induced loss of confidence, the latter being well within our control.

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