GOOD NEWS for Haiti came this past weekend from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on cancellation, or “forgiveness”, of an outstanding US$268 million debt.
Further, that CARICOM partner state, still struggling to cope with enormous recovery challenges from the devastation caused by the horrendous January 2010 earthquake, is to benefit from an immediate disbursement of US$74 million from the IMF.
For all its many political and socio-economic problems, Haiti had managed – thanks largely to the flow of foreign financing for post-earthquake development projects – to record last year economic growth of five per cent, with Guyana being the only other CARICOM state to attain that achievement.
The debt cancellation, financed by the Post–Catastrophe Debt Relief Trust Fund and IMF financing, is said to be part of a broad international strategy to support Haiti’s longer-term economic reconstruction plans.
Other CARICOM states are also under scrutiny for new IMF assistance based on required adjustments in social and economic programmes necessitating intense reviews.
Foremost among them is Jamaica which, under the previous Jamaica Labour Party administration, and now the People’s National Party, continues to be engaged in often tense negotiations with the IMF for a new agreement.
A new round of negotiations was scheduled to begin yesterday with the government virtually sandwiched between demands from public sector workers for pay hikes and its efforts to alleviate rising unemployment, estimated at 12 per cent of the official labour force, or directly affecting at least 300 000 Jamaicans.
But making a choice between job cuts and a wage freeze for public sector workers is not the kind of challenge a Finance Minister wants to face, moreso at this time of daunting social and economic challenges in too many CARICOM states.
Among these is Barbados with the administration of Prime Minister Freundel Stuart engaged in defusing criticisms resulting from last week’s unflattering “junk” status as announced by the United States-based Standard & Poor’s rating agency.
The socio-economic challenges facing economies in CARICOM are being assessed by a high-level Caribbean Growth Forum (CGF). But it would be at least another 14 months before the Forum’s findings and recommendations are made available to the region’s governments.
In the meantime, coping with IMF prescriptions for aid flows would remain quite challenging for some governments.