Caribbean & Central America - November 2013 (ISSN 1741-4458)

*** JAMAICAN BUSINESS CONFIDENCE AT LOW POINT. In recent months we have been relatively upbeat about Jamaica, at least to the extent of opposing the view that Jamaica is on its way to becoming a failed state. The good news last month was that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had successfully completed its first quarterly review of Jamaica’s performance under its 4-year US$944m Extended Fund Facility (EFF) arrangement. The good news from the IMF came on 30 September, and in anticipation of this, on 26 September Standard & Poor’s had raised Jamaica’s long-term foreign and local currency credit ratings to ‘B-‘ and marked the outlook as stable. The news this month, however, is that none of this has much impressed Jamaica’s business sector. On 15 October, the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce Conference Board released its 3^rd Quarter 2013 Business & Consumer Confidence Indices, and this showed business confidence to be at its lowest ebb since 2009. Only twice has business confidence been lower since 2001. Headline expectations included 62% of firms saying that the economy will worsen during the year ahead, which is up from 44% in the 2^nd quarter survey and more negative than at any time since the 3^rd quarter of 2005. Consumer confidence was also down, with the expectations index at a decade low of 87.9.

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