EDITORIAL - The poverty of transparency

Hiding, or attempting to hide bad news, economic or otherwise, is usually a poor political communication strategy, as Prime Minister Bruce Golding and his ministers should have learned by now.

It is better to confront the truth, explain to people the reason for the untoward circumstances and a clear strategy to make things better and then work like hell to ensure that it happens.

This is not to suggest that the administration had set out deliberately to hide the latest surveys of living conditions in the country, produced by the Planning Institute of Jamaica, although it certainly seems that way. Those for 2008 and 2009 have not yet been published and Prime Minister Golding only released basic data from them in Parliament last week on being questioned by the opposition's spokesman on finance, Dr Omar Davies.

These surveys largely measure consumption in Jamaica, which is used as a proxy for measuring poverty in the country, which rose to 12.3 per cent in 2008, the first full year of the Golding administration, from 9.9 per cent the previous year. In 2009, poverty rose to 16.5 per cent when 445,000 Jamaicans were estimated to be living below the poverty line. It is possible that things might have worsened this year.

Poverty should have been expected

The rise in poverty in Jamaica ought to have been expected, given the onset of the global recession that began in late 2007 and gained pace in 2008, with devastating effect on the Jamaican economy. In a year to April 2009, the Jamaican economy, despite the attempted obfuscation and spin of the labour minister, Pearnel Charles, shed nearly 90,000 jobs.

During the period, there was the near collapse of bauxite mining and alumina production, tourism went soft, construction slowed to a crawl, private consumption retreated and the Government went into compression mode to deal with a yawning fiscal deficit. There are, of course, credible criticisms of the Government's misreading of the onset of the global crisis - or, perhaps worse, its seeming naivety of its likely impact - and, therefore, its slow response to the oncoming problems.

These notwithstanding, Jamaica is not unique in feeling the ravages of the recession. In our primary market, the United States, even after the billions of stimulus dollars put out by the federal government, economic recovery is slow and unemployment remains stubbornly above nine per cent. Moreover, poverty was recently reported at 14.3 per cent, America's highest since 1994. Recent data show that real and nominal wages for the middle class and poor have fallen in the past decade.

This provides a broad context for serious discussion and debate about the increased poverty in Jamaica and the kind of economic policies needed to reverse this without compromising macroeconomic stability and chance at sustained economic growth.

In that regard, it would be unfortunate, if that was in fact the case, if the administration deliberately attempted to keep the data in the dark rather than make them available to help inform the national policy discourse. That's not the best way to shape credible strategy and neither does it change the reality.

By the same token, nor is it enough for the Opposition to take cheap political shots with the poverty data without acknowledging the global circumstances and/or offering credible alternatives to existing policies.

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