Last Wednesday, the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) published the first quarter growth projections (0.8 per cent), short-term growth projections for the April to June 2025 quarter (0.5 per cent to 1.5 per cent), and the outlook for the current fiscal year (1 per cent to 2 per cent).

However, the most interesting data released was the 2023 poverty numbers, computed from the Jamaica Survey of Living Conditions (JSLC) collected by the Statistical Institute of Jamaica (Statin).

The PIOJ revealed that poverty has fallen from 16.7 per cent in 2021 to 8.2 per cent in 2023 — the lowest figure ever recorded since poverty rates were first measured in 1989. The agency also noted that no poverty estimate for 2022 is available as the JSLC was not conducted that year due to the national census.

Now seems an appropriate time to review our poverty performance.

In 2015, the poverty rate was 21.2 per cent. By 2019 it had halved to 11 per cent, but then shot back up due to the COVID-19 pandemic shock. The PIOJ argues that by 2023 the country had officially recovered from the shock (real value-added passed 2019 levels), and had entered a new growth phase, while noting that prior to COVID, Jamaica had recorded consecutive years of economic growth up to 2019. Growth of 2.6 per cent was broad-based.

The PIOJ observes that employment reached a historic high in October 2023 with 1.32 million Jamaicans employed — an increase of more than 85,000 since October 2021 — reducing the then unemployment rate to 4.2 per cent. The unemployment rate has since fallen further to 3.7 per cent, down 1.7 per cent relative to January 2024, according to the PIOJ, while the number of people employed increased by 13,800 to 1,419,500. In short, the 3.7 per cent rate is a 73 per cent reduction from the 13.5 per cent unemployment rate in 2015.

In analysing the reduction in poverty, the PIOJ observes that, in addition to the improvement in the labour market, in June 2023 the national weekly minimum wage increased by 44 per cent from $9,000 to $13,000, which followed an earlier increase in 2022, and together with the previous increase marked an 85.7 per cent increase in the minimum wage over two years to that point. If we look back a decade, and convert to US dollars, the new minimum wage today would be approximately double the roughly US$50 in 2015, an improvement even allowing for US inflation over the time.

It is not an accident that this turnaround coincides with Jamaica’s macroeconomic stabilisation. In 2015 the country’s debt-to-gross domestic product (GDP) was roughly 130 per cent. That has now been cut in half to 65 per cent. Net International Reserves of US$2.4 billion in 2015 has increased 140 per cent to US$5.9 billion currently.

Add to all this the long-awaited fall in the murder rate from 44 per 100,000 in 2015 to 24 per 100,000 so far this year — made possible by large and strategic investments in all aspects of the police force over the past decade — and you get the feeling that Jamaica is finally turning the curve to a better life for citizens.

It is worth noting that, without macroeconomic stability, neither these investments nor the reduction in extreme poverty would have been possible.

Kudos, therefore, to the stewards of our economy.