The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has praised the Government’s commitment to sustain fiscal and monetary policy discipline, after Jamaica’s 36-month US$1.65-million precautionary Stand-By Arrangement (SBA) concludes on November 10. Deputy Managing Director, Tao Zhang, says this is evident in the Administration’s decision to maintain the Economic Programme Oversight Committee (EPOC), to continue monitoring macroeconomic targets and reform commitments. In a...

Finance and the Public Service Minister, Dr. the Hon. Nigel Clarke, says Jamaica’s 15th housing and population census will officially get under way on April 5, 2021. Dr. Clarke said the exercise, to be conducted by the Statistical Institute of Jamaica (STATIN), for which he has portfolio responsibility, is expected to be completed within three months. STATIN’s pre-census preparations have...

The Government continues to put robust measures in place to safeguard the country’s financial system against money laundering schemes and the financing of terrorism. This assurance comes from Leader of Government Business in the Upper House, Senator the Hon. Kamina Johnson Smith, who said these strategies include strengthening the legislative framework dealing with these matters. “Getting to the root of...

The micro, small and medium-sized enterprise (MSME) sector has received a boost with the passage of two Resolutions in the House of Representatives that seek to provide an opportunity for local suppliers to bid on government contracts, based on the percentage of local raw material being used. The resolutions are the Public Procurement (Domestic Margin of Preference) Order, 2019, and...

The Transformation Implementation Unit (TIU) within the Ministry of Finance and the Public Service is looking at the Unit’s ‘efficiency projects’ to see how they can improve areas that will impact citizens directly. “Based on the findings of [recent] research commissioned by the Unit, I think that we need to recalibrate areas of the project that deal with the efficient...

Prime Minister, the Most Hon. Andrew Holness, says public-sector service delivery is being reshaped to that of an enabler in the provision of goods and services to the private sector. “The role of the public sector is not what it was 20 to 40 years ago. The role of the public sector now is to serve the private sector… while...

As part of the Transformation of the Public Sector, many public servants will be trained and ‘upskilled’. “We have trained and certified 80 change managers [so far], and in this month, we will be doing another 60 change managers,” Executive Director of the Transformation Implementation Unit (TIU), Maria Thompson Walters, said at a JIS ‘Think Tank’ on October 2. She...