Pe­ter Christo­pher

Se­nior mul­ti­me­dia re­porter

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

In Wash­ing­ton DC

The Caribbean is lead­ing by ex­am­ple, ac­cord­ing to the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund IMF man­ag­ing di­rec­tor Kristali­na Georgie­va.

Dur­ing the man­ag­ing di­rec­tor’s press con­fer­ence and Glob­al Agen­da brief­ing at the IMF an­nu­al meet­ing yes­ter­day, Georgie­va hailed the progress made by Ja­maica and Bar­ba­dos in par­tic­u­lar de­spite a chal­leng­ing eco­nom­ic land­scape, when asked about the slow growth pro­ject­ed for the Latin Amer­i­ca re­gion.

“It (Latin Amer­i­ca) faces a dis­ap­point­ing growth, but growth is mod­er­at­ing, and that means that Latin Amer­i­ca needs to con­cen­trate on how that growth tra­jec­to­ry can be lift­ed. We have been dis­cussing the key re­forms, growth-en­hanc­ing re­forms that can be un­der­tak­en by coun­tries. I al­so want to recog­nise that Latin Amer­i­ca is not a uni­fied place, be­cause if you look at the Caribbean or Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, they’re ac­tu­al­ly do­ing bet­ter than the glob­al av­er­age,” she said.

The IMF boss said if the rea­son cer­tain coun­tries are do­ing bet­ter, the rea­son is be­cause they have tak­en se­ri­ous­ly the need to trim their debt.

“You take coun­tries like Bar­ba­dos or Ja­maica. Re­forms are bring­ing re­sults, and be­cause they have tak­en to heart the sig­nif­i­cance of gov­er­nance and en­gag­ing the pub­lic to pur­sue a re­form.”

She en­cour­aged larg­er economies in the re­gion to fol­low the ex­am­ples of those Caribbean coun­tries.

“So when I think of the big economies in Latin Amer­i­ca, it is time to do the same thing, and the am­bi­tion to re­form in a pro growth di­rec­tion. And what is en­cour­ag­ing is that I hear that coun­tries recog­nise that.”

Georgie­va al­so used Ja­maica as an ex­am­ple for coun­tries that have con­sis­tent­ly strug­gled with debt and low growth as a pos­si­ble mod­el to move from a low or mid­dle in­come coun­try to an up­per lev­el.

“Learn from oth­ers, en­gage with oth­ers. And I think this is where coun­tries need to go. We have learned a lot about growth, en­hanc­ing re­forms. We ac­tu­al­ly know, we have stud­ied how they suc­ceed. I think the re­forms can lift the growth tra­jec­to­ry sig­nif­i­cant­ly,” said Georgie­va.

“I al­ways like to give the ex­am­ple of Ja­maica, be­cause Ja­maica was a coun­try 10 to 12 years ago, was a coun­try with very high debt, a lot of crime. Peo­ple were kind of des­per­ate for their fu­ture. Well, they brought that down by half, and they moved the coun­try in a very pos­i­tive growth tra­jec­to­ry by that holis­tic ap­proach to de­vel­op­ment,” she con­tin­ued.

She al­so point­ed out that com­pared to the rest of the Latin Amer­i­can re­gion, the Caribbean stood out al­though it had been boost­ed by the size­able growth in Guyana.

“You look at the Caribbean re­gion on­ly, and you have growth at 7.5 per cent in 2023 and 11.9 per cent in 2024. These are very big num­bers of growth per­for­mance. Guyana there is the ex­cep­tion­al source, but over­all, they’re do­ing very well.

“When you look at the Latin Amer­i­can and Caribbean as a whole, much low­er we have in 2023 2.6 per cent growth and in 2024 2.6 per cent growth. This is not enough to lift up the per­for­mance of the Latin Amer­i­can economies, and this is why this is­sue of pro-growth re­forms is so im­por­tant,” she said in her clos­ing state­ment at the press brief­ing.