Editorial | Bev Brown meets Richard Byles, PIOJ

Perhaps it is time to reprise the Bev Brown family planning ad of the 1980s, but this time not with the complaint that she has too many children, but suggest that she fulfils the promise she showed as ‘the maths brain’ at primary school. And having done so, perhaps armed with a university degree, Ms Brown might show how she can work and make it in Jamaica.

Here is where Richard Byles, the governor of the Bank of the Jamaica, and the technocrats of the Planning Institute of Jamaica (PIOJ) come into play. She may well complain, as Mr Byles did recently, that the Jamaican economy isn’t producing sufficient good-paying jobs to meet people’s expectations and needs. They are the “same kind of low value-added jobs” as two decades ago.

We are inspired to the Bev Brown metaphor by last week’s deposition to Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) by two PIOJ officials, Peisha Bryan-Lee and Easton Williams, of Jamaica’s zero population growth of the last two years and, should it continue, its potential negative implications in the next decade, and beyond.

For, by 2030, the year that Jamaica had hoped to mark its serious transition to being a developed country, the decline in the demographic bonus the country now enjoys by having a large working-age population – 69.7 per cent in 2018 – will begin to tell.

“… We will have to find ways of getting people to work in the country,” said Mr Williams, who is in charge of population issues at the PIOJ.

Jamaica hit zero population growth in 2017, thirteen years ahead of projection. The trend in population decline was confirmed last year when the island’s mean population was estimated at 2,727,500, which was 1,100 or 0.04 per cent fewer than the previous year.

A contributing factor to this demographic shift is the significant decline in Jamaica’s fertility rate since the days of the Bev Brown ad, when the country was worried that its population was rapidly heading to three million, without the wherewithal to manage it. Women like Bev Brown were advised that “two is better than too many”. The message caught on.

SEVERAL SIGNIFICANT FACTORS

Last year, there were 33,100 live births against 18,900 deaths, which would translate to a crude population again of 14,200, until the net migration number of 15,900 is factored in. The result: a net population loss of 1,700. More broadly, there were 43.7 live births per 1,000 women of reproductive age, or 1.5 births fewer per 1,000 women than in 2018. In essence, Jamaica is falling below the 2.1 births per woman that is required to ensure replacement population.

The island’s large young population – the median age is 31 – means that a serious population crisis won’t kick in for some time. Stalled population growth, however, has to be considered against several significant factors, not least being the increasing number of grey Jamaicans. The number of elderly, for instance, jumped to 13.2 per cent from 12.4 per cent in 2017, and the ratio will continue to rise in the coming decades.

The problem, as Bryan-Lee and Williams implied, will be, after 2030, to have a population young enough to work, earn incomes and pay sufficient taxes to fund the services that will be required to maintain not only themselves, but a larger cohort of old people.

That is unlikely to happen in an economy with chronically low growth, per capita income of under US$6,000 and producing, as Mr Byles noted, mostly low value-added jobs. Such concerns are exacerbated by the fact that 70 per cent of the workforce is untrained, or not trained for the job it does, and that 80 per cent of university graduates emigrate.

Jamaica, in the last seven years, has significantly reduced its debt as a proportion of national output. It has achieved macroeconomic stability. Robust growth, though, to the admitted miscalculation of this newspaper, continues to elude us. At the current rate of growth, it will take half a century to double the size of the economy. The circumstances clearly insist that the conversation now shift to policies to accelerate growth.