Ja­ma­cia Min­is­ter of Fi­nance and Plan­ning, Dr Pe­ter Phillips, has said the coun­try can­not per­sist with spend­ing 80 per cent of the bud­get on wages and debt pay­ments. "This is what we mean when we say the debt sti­fles the coun­try's po­ten­tial for de­vel­op­ment, be­cause it is the 20 cents that re­main out of each dol­lar that is left for the pro­grammes and the cap­i­tal in­vest­ments," Dr Phillips said.

The min­is­ter, who was speak­ing in an in­ter­view with JIS News, fur­ther not­ed that due to the high debt pay­ment, there isn't enough mon­ey to fix roads and health cen­tres across the is­land. "It means that we (Ja­maica) has to make some choic­es that say we will make the ad­just­ments in the next few years, so that we can get back on to an ef­fec­tive de­vel­op­ment path for the fu­ture. That is our oblig­a­tion, not on­ly to our­selves, but al­so to fu­ture gen­er­a­tions," Phillips said.

The Fi­nance Min­is­ter said be­tween 1973 and 2012, the av­er­age growth of the Ja­maican econ­o­my has been less than one per cent per an­num, while not­ing that for the same pe­ri­od, the coun­try's debt has "mul­ti­plied sev­en times."

Ja­maica In­for­ma­tion Ser­vice