Opposition spokesman on finance Julian Robinson on Thursday again hammered the Government over its economic policies that, he insisted, have trapped Jamaica in a “pattern of chronically low economic growth for years”.

Making his contribution to the 2026/27 Budget Debate in the House of Representatives, Robinson said it’s time for the country to break the low wage growth cycle so more Jamaicans can enjoy a higher standard of living.

He said the pattern of chronically low economic growth has significant consequences for how Jamaicans live.

“It shows up in wages that do not go far enough, in public services that are perpetually under-resourced, in young people who cannot find work that reflects their abilities, and in the frustration of a population that knows this country has more to offer than what it is currently delivering,” said Robinson.

He said that what makes this particularly troubling is that the Government’s own fiscal policy paper projects that after a brief recovery period following Hurricane Melissa, which struck sections of the island last October, with uptick reaching around three per cent growth by 2029, “The economy will settle back to a steady growth rate of one per cent. That number is right there in their own documents.”

“And at one per cent growth living standards do not improve in any meaningful way. The gap between what Jamaica could be and what it actually becomes widens with every year we accept that rate. We should all be alarmed by that projection,” he argued.

In terms of the path ahead, Robinson posited that “the Government’s budget must be accompanied by a clear sense of direction”.

“The immediate priority has to be restoring Jamaica’s productive capacity to at least the level it was at before Hurricane Melissa struck. That must be the floor, not the ceiling,” he said.

But he noted that recovery is the starting point, not the destination, “and any Government that presents recovery as an achievement in itself is setting an unacceptably low bar for what this country can and should become”.

The deeper problem, he argued, “is one that pre-dates the hurricane and will outlast it if we do not address it seriously”.

He repeated the suggestion he made during last year’s budget debate for the Government to concentrate on the Four-E strategy in its drive to spur economic growth.

“Last year, I laid out our Four-E strategy in detail, covering energy, efficiency, education, and the emerging sectors. Some of the core arguments I made have not become less relevant since I made them. If anything, the hurricane has made them more urgent,” he said.

In that budget presentation Robinson had argued that, “If all we do is tinker around the edges, which this Government continues to do, our economy will remain stagnant — trapped in a low-value-added, low-income system that simply cannot deliver a better quality of life for the majority of the Jamaican people.”