KINGSTON–Ja­maica's op­po­si­tion is call­ing on the Por­tia Simp­son-Miller ad­min­is­tra­tion to im­me­di­ate­ly start di­a­logue with crit­i­cal stake­hold­ers in the cur­ren­cy mar­ket and fix the ex­change rate close to the cur­rent lev­el.Op­po­si­tion spokesman on fi­nance, Au­d­ley Shaw, this week called for firm ac­tion to halt the "con­tin­u­ing pre­cip­i­tous" slide in the ex­change rate, which has now passed the J$100 US$1 thresh­old.Shaw said the fact that the slide has con­tin­ued even though the dust has set­tled since the new agree­ment with the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF), and the new round of de­val­u­a­tion now tak­ing place in­di­cates that con­fi­dence in the Gov­ern­ment's man­age­ment of the econ­o­my has not re­turned among the crit­i­cal stake­hold­ers in the for­eign ex­change mar­ket.He said de­spite the in­jec­tion of over US$200 mil­lion at the Bank of Ja­maica and US$90 mil­lion in di­rect bud­getary sup­port from the IMF, the dol­lar con­tin­ues to slide al­though "we are not even in a peak sea­son of de­mand for for­eign cur­ren­cy"."Equal­ly, the Net In­ter­na­tion­al Re­serves still re­mains well be­low the US$1 bil­lion lev­el, which is al­so a crit­i­cal bench­mark fig­ure," Shaw stat­ed.

He al­so not­ed that de­spite pledges made by oth­er mul­ti­lat­er­al in­sti­tu­tions, there are no signs that can lead to an ex­pec­ta­tion of any sig­nif­i­cant ear­ly draw­down from these in­sti­tu­tions, as these dis­burse­ments de­pend, large­ly, on the in­sti­tu­tion­al ca­pac­i­ty of the fi­nance min­istry to ful­fill the re­quire­ments for qual­i­fi­ca­tion for these funds.Shaw said gov­ern­ment must now stop "fid­dling while Rome burns" and take firm, de­ci­sive steps that can build in­vestor and stake­hold­er con­fi­dence, halt the slide in the ex­change rate and its neg­a­tive con­se­quences for in­creased cost of liv­ing, and pro­gramme a sus­tained pe­ri­od of sta­bil­i­ty and pre­dictabil­i­ty that will lead to eco­nom­ic growth, rev­enue growth and job cre­ation.In April the IMF an­nounced that debt-swamped Ja­maica could re­ceive up to $958 mil­lion in a four-year loan pack­age to sta­bilise its limp­ing econ­o­my.

The IMF said Ja­maica had suc­cess­ful­ly met all man­dat­ed pri­or ac­tions and the suc­cess of a new pro­gramme de­pends on strength­en­ing of pub­lic fi­nances, ap­prov­ing a set of re­forms, and debt sus­tain­abil­i­ty, among oth­er mea­sures."Recog­nis­ing the sac­ri­fice in­volved for the Ja­maican peo­ple, the strat­e­gy al­so aims to min­imise the im­pact on the poor­est and most vul­ner­a­ble," the IMF said.Ja­maica's debt load is more than 140 per cent of gross do­mes­tic prod­uct. Rough­ly 55 per cent of gov­ern­ment spend­ing goes to whit­tling it down. With 20 per cent go­ing to wages, that leaves just 20 per cent for ed­u­ca­tion, health, se­cu­ri­ty and oth­er gov­ern­ment func­tions.Short­ly af­ter the IMF's an­nounce­ment about reach­ing a pend­ing agree­ment with Ja­maica, the World Bank and the In­ter-Amer­i­can De­vel­op­ment Bank said they have each pre­lim­i­nar­i­ly al­lo­cat­ed $510 mil­lion in fi­nanc­ing over the next four years for the is­land, sup­ple­ment­ing the sup­port pro­vid­ed by the IMF.Since the glob­al fi­nan­cial cri­sis start­ed in 2008, the World Bank and its pri­vate sec­tor arm have pro­vid­ed rough­ly $800 mil­lion to Ja­maica. The IDB has ap­proved $1.6 bil­lion in loans in that time.