Dear Editor,

Dear Editor,

In a just-published paper, ‘Neoliberalism — oversold?’, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has admitted that its austerity policies have indeed been counterproductive, impeding growth directly and also through increasing inequality. This, in turn, severely limited the possibility of reducing debt levels.

In any case, according to the paper, high debt levels are not necessarily, in and of themselves, an immediate problem. The real agenda of neoliberalism becomes ever more evident — an ideology to benefit the few at the expense of the vast majority. The wealthiest one per cent in the world now has as much wealth as the rest of the planet’s population combined. As the servant of neoliberalism, the IMF is dragging more countries into debt slavery and keeping them there.

Will the Jamaica Labour Party Administration in Jamaica take note and either next year, when the current IMF agreement runs out, or preferably sooner, reduce the primary surplus to zero and allow growth to take care of reducing our debt ratio, and at the same time reducing hardship and promoting prosperity?

The IMF paper argues that “…there are aspects of the neoliberal agenda that have not delivered as expected… [including] fiscal consolidation, sometimes called austerity… An assessment… reaches three disquieting conclusions:

• The benefits in terms of increased growth seem fairly difficult to establish when looking at a broad group of countries.

• The costs in terms of increased inequality are prominent. Such costs epitomise the trade-off between the growth and equity effects of some aspects of the neoliberal agenda.

• Increased inequality in turn hurts the level and sustainability of growth. Even if growth is the sole or main purpose of the neoliberal agenda, advocates of that agenda still need to pay attention to the distributional effects.”

Paul WardKingston 7pgward72@gmail.com

Paul Ward

Kingston 7

pgward72@gmail.com