Bartlett: Demand and supply issues hampering COVID recovery
Published:Saturday | June 4, 2022 | 12:05 AMAlbert Ferguson/Gleaner Writer
WESTERN BUREAU:
WHILE JAMAICA’S tourism industry remains buoyant and stable, tourism minister Edmund Bartlett has said the global economic shock from the coronavirus pandemic is proving to be even more painful to the local industry.
He said the pandemic has created a stifling challenge in the global demand and supply of goods and services.
“We are in the recovery and Generation 2000 (G2K), the recovery is threatening to be more disruptive than the pandemic itself. The discovery is now characterised by this demand and supply reality where we now want and can’t get,” Bartlett said.
“We want to grow, but our growth is being hampered by the fact that there is no availability of the inputs for growth which in economic terms is leading to inflation, the greatest enemy to economic stability and growth,” he explained.
The tourism minister and former deputy leader of the Jamaica Labour Party delivered, on Saturday, the keynote address to a meeting of the central executive of Generation 2000, the young professional arm of the JLP, at the Montego Bay Convention Centre in St James.
Inflation more than doubled between March 2021 and March 2022. The annual rate of inflation worldwide, as measured by the consumer price index, accelerated to 9.2 per cent in March 2022, up from 7.5 per cent in February 2022, 6.8 per cent in January 2022 and 6.4 per cent in December 2021.
For Jamaica, the inflation rate increased to 11.30 per cent in March, up from 10.70 per cent in February 2022.
Bartlett noted that the Bank of Jamaica projected that the country would realise a growth of four to six per cent, but disruptions caused by the pandemic affected this.
“We are looking at up to 15 per cent, which would be a 300 per cent increase in terms of where we had projected,” Bartlett argued.
INFLATION RATE
He is, however, assuring the country that the Government is up to the task. To support the Government’s ability to stabilise the inflation rate and stimulate economic growth, Bartlett pointed to the largest period of sustained economic growth in the history of the country, and noted that it recorded five consecutive quarters of economic growth, even in the midst of the pandemic.
“We are leading the way and we are not daunted by the fact that we have had to deal with mega disruptions in the past, so I want G2K and Jamaica to understand, this is not a panic mode, this is not a mode for us to be overly disturbed and distressed,” he assured.
“It is a mode for us to summon our creative will and the resilience that we have built over the years to take Jamaica out of this disruption that has come,” Bartlett added. “We can do it and we will do it because we have a silver lining in the midst of all of this.”