Above: Jamaica’s Finance Minister Dr Peter Phillips (FP)

By the Caribbean Journal staff

Jamaica has to do much to restore its credibility with multilateral organizations like the IMF and World Bank and in the marketplace, according to Jamaican Finance Minister Dr Peter Phillips.

The Minister was speaking ahead of next week’s talks with the IMF, which will visit Jamaica from March 7 to March 20 for an Article Four review, as Jamaica the country seeks to negotiate a new agreement with the fund.

“I am not trying to blame [the previous administration],” he said. “I am just simply stating a matter of fact. I am saying that Jamaica has to do much to restore its credibility with the multilaterals and generally in the marketplace in relation to the agreements entered into and not concluded.”

Phillips was referring to a number of previous multilateral agreements that had not been completed.

“There were six reviews to be done, the others were not successfully completed and by the end of the programme there had been no discussions surrounding the programme for close to eight months,” he said.

The IMF’s March vista will serve as the start of formal negations between the IMF and Jamaica, according to Finance Minister Dr Peter Phillips, who recently visited Washington and New York last month for talks with the IMF.

Phillips said that while the government recognized that “difficult” fiscal adjustments would need to be made, it was “absolutely committed to the preservation of those social programmes necessary for the protection of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged groups in the society.”

He said the previous government had “gone off track disastrously” during the second half of 2011 and would need a strong effort to bring the IMF programme back on track.

The Minister said he would the government was committed to seeing Jamaica’s debt-to-GDP ratio fall from 130 percent in March to 100 percent in the medium term.

“We agreed that the initiatives to enable the economy to grow, to create jobs and to improve competitiveness are crucial imperatives as the medium term objectives cannot be met by fiscal efforts alone,” he said.